The Westminster system under the Cameron coalition: ‘Promiscuous partisanship’ or institutional resilience?

This article applies Aucoin's paradigm of New Political Governance derived from the comparative literature on Westminster systems to review changes in the UK machinery of government during the Coalition era from 2010 to 2015. The paper examines whether coalition government imposed ‘checks and balances’ that prevented Conservative ministers from enacting a further wave of New Public Management-style reforms of the permanent bureaucracy comparable to New Political Governance. The central argument of the article is that the institutional resilience of Westminster systems, particularly their capacity to safeguard norms of public service impartiality and non-partisanship in the face of the politicisation and externalisation of the policy-making process, has been underestimated. Nevertheless, Aucoin's concerns about the erosion of non-partisan affiliation in the civil service of the Anglophone countries remain apposite