Study title

The dataset is a record of the structure of UK government departments as organizational phases in the period 1st January 1980 to 31st December 2013. Each row in the dataset constitutes a single organizational phase, distinguished by a unique ID, delimited by a start and end date, linked to other phases through lists of successors and predecessors, and characterized by many time-invariant factors that describe organization attributes. Organizational phases describe the life history of organizational units for the sampling period by breaking that history into multiple, non-overlapping durations.The research asks why some administrative organizations are created then reorganized, merged, or terminated, whereas others are seemingly 'immortal' and even can become more powerful than the elected politicians that created and control them? This question has become pertinent, especially in the past three decades, within European parliamentary democracies. By the end of the 1970s, when the golden era of welfare state expansion and state growth came to an end, a new generation of political leaders such as President Ronald Reagan of the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom initiated a series of administrative reform trajectories - privatization, deregulation, agencification, liberalization, decentralization, and New Public Management - with the aim to fundamentally alter the scope and scale of central government and sparked off several reform trajectories across the developed and developing economies. However, Western politicians who embarked on these trajectories soon found out that changing the structure and organization of their central governments was a hard nut to crack. When successful, the consequences of succeeding in reforms were often increasing fragmentation and rising coordination costs. The difficulties encountered by politicians when embarking on the road of administrative change mean that taming and changing the structure and...