Political time in public bureaucracies: Explaining variation of structural duration in European governments
研究了1980-2013年德国、法国、荷兰和挪威四国政府中部长级单位结构持续时间的三种变体，发现内阁意识形态更替和极端主义是主要预测因素，而议会两极化和无经验的新首相则产生负面影响。
Abstract Structural duration conveys stability but also resilience in central government and is therefore a key issue in the debate on the structure and organization of government. This paper discusses three core variants of structural duration to study the explanatory relevance of politics. We compare these durations across ministerial units in four European democracies (Germany, France, The Netherlands, and Norway) from 1980 to 2013, totaling over 17,000 units. Our empirical analyses show that cabinets' ideological turnover and extremism are the most significant predictors of all variants of duration, whereas polarization in parliament as well as new prime ministers without office experience yield the predicted significant negative effects for most models. We discuss these findings and avenues for future research that acknowledge the definition and measures for structural change as well as temporal aspects of the empirical phenomenon more explicitly.