Administrating crisis is just a transition: interventions on bureaucratic activity in the United Kingdom, 1987-2022

The process of leaving the European Union set off a disruptive transformation of the UK’s system of government. Central to implementing this process was secondary legislation, called statutory instruments, which received unparalleled levels of attention by the public due to the government’s use of them to untangle UK and EU law. Yet, the legislative crisis caused by Brexit, appeared in many ways just another form of government transition. We propose that understanding how this process affected bureaucratic activity requires a broad theory of regular partisan transitions. Large changes in the ideological goals and demands of the government redirect the priority of policies developed through instruments. To examine this perspective, we analyse the most prominent partisan and political transitions in the UK from 1987 to 2022 using time series intervention analyses. The results indicate that crises and transitions alike led to lasting changes in the bureaucracy’s agenda. Transitions in 2010 and 2015 not only exhibited shifts in the topical focus of secondary legislation, but also dramatic reductions in productivity. This paper’s findings further suggest that partisan effects on issue attention may have more to do with the organisation of government than the broader distribution of issues addressed using public policy.