Cabinet is one of the core executive decision-making arenas in parliamentary systems. I’m interested in the processes of cabinet decision-making, representation within cabinet structure, and how prime ministers and party leaders use cabinet to achieve their goals.

Recently, I’ve become especially interested in cabinet committees: groups of cabinet ministers assigned to specific policy or coordination responsibilities. I’ve published an article assessing cabinet committees as strategic tools of prime ministerial leadership, and a recent article in the Canadian Journal Of Political Science examining gender and regional representation and their relationship to influence within cabinet committees.

I’m currently working on several extensions of this focus on cabinet committees.

With Nora Siklodi (Portsmouth and Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Nicholas Allen (Royal Holloway, University of London), we are assessing gender representation on cabinet committees comparatively.

I’m examining the association between cabinet composition (single-party vs. coalition) and cabinet collegiality and collective decision-making, as reflected in cabinet committee structure.

I’m writing a short piece on cabinet committees as an answer to the puzzles of ‘Gamson’s Law’: the empirical observation that cabinet portfolio allocation is proportional to the seat contributions of parties in coalitions.

And I’m looking at cabinet committees at the provincial level in Canada.

If you’re interested in cabinet or cabinet committees, let me know!

The study of political leadership is the study of how and why leaders act the way they do: what shapes leaders’ decision-making, how leaders relate to other political actors and the public, and questions of effective and ineffective action.

My research focus in this area has been on leadership communication and the institutional contexts of leadership. I’m interested in how leaders portray the functions and scope of leadership to the public, and published an article evaluating how Justin Trudeau and Theresa May’s use of Twitter frame their leadership roles.

My work on cabinet and cabinet committees is also driven by a desire to understand the interaction between prime ministers and the institutions around them: how they use these institutions to exercise leadership. My PhD dissertation examined this question with regard to prime ministers’ civil service offices in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United KIngdom. It described and explained institutional change in these offices in the postwar period.

I’m currently engaged in several other areas of active research. For example, I recently presented a paper on ‘mandate letters’: documents provided to cabinet ministers by the prime minister and most premiers in Canada. These letters designate specific tasks and responsibilities for ministers to pursue, and thus serve as a key mechanism for policy implementation, coordination, and accountability. The paper analyzes the content of mandate letters, specifically assessing how they create structures of coordination among ministers.

I’m also interested in examining questions of diversity in the political science discipline, and am working on a project assessing the subfield of Canadian politics in particular.