ISSUE FRAMING AND SECTOR CHARACTER AS CRITICAL PARAMETERS FOR GOVERNMENT CONTRACTING-OUT IN THE UK

What is it about?

How are governments politically able to contract-out public services, or otherwise engage in public-private partnerships? To offer an answer, this articles looks at a simple service in the UK, cleaning government buildings and offices. It shows the somewhat counter-intuitive fact that contracting-out of cleaning services was less pronounced under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major than under the Labour government of Tony Blair. The reason is two-fold. The Conservatives made contracting-out easy to resist by framing it as a reduction in public services, and they faced unions that had a great deal to lose from contracting-out. New Labour made contracting-out hard to resist by framing it as part-and-parcel of modernizing and shoring up the UK welfare state, and it faced unions that had low stakes in contracting-out of government cleaners.

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Why is it important?

This paper challenges key theories of contracting-out, ranging from the dominant economic paradigm, Transaction Cost Economics, to key political science theories that explain new public management reforms like contracting-out as products of partisanship or of national economic institutions. It marshals the powerful notions of issue framing and sector-level interest organization to show that in combination, these factors can explain why public services move from in-house to contracted production.

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