The Professor Will See You Now: The Costs Of Governing
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: the costs of governing
In one of the bits of Game of Thrones that I don’t think made it from book to screen, King Robert Baratheon complains that sitting on a throne is “a thousand times harder than winning one”. Laws, he says, “are a tedious business and counting coppers is worse”.
“And the people… There is no end of them. I sit on that damnable iron chair and listen to them complain until my mind is numb and my ass is raw. They all want something…” Whatever can he mean?
Governing is indeed hard. One of the few almost universal laws in political science is what is known as the costs of governing or the costs of ruling. Put simply: as time goes on, governments become increasingly unpopular.
Some become unpopular faster than others, but the same fate awaits them all. The scale of the costs of governing may differ, depending on which countries are being studied (or indeed what the government is doing), but the core finding holds across multiple countries, times, and systems. To misquote Debbie Allen at the beginning of Fame: government costs. And here’s where you start paying – in votes.
In the short-term parties can occasionally buck the trend – as the Conservatives managed to do at every election between 2010 and 2019 – but it never lasts; political gravity wins out eventually, as 2024 demonstrated. The only way is down.
A fascinating research paper published last year showed that there was also a legislative dimension to the costs of governing – with MPs becoming more rebellious the longer their party was in power. Between 1992 and 2015, each month in power increased the likelihood that a British government MP would rebel by 0.3 per cent. This sounds piddling, and not the sort of thing the whips’ office would lose sleep over, but it’s cumulative. Those 0.3s start to add up over a four-year parliament.
The study argues that this is not driven by time alone. It is not, contrary to my expectations, the increased number of ex-ministers, disgruntled backbenchers and such like that causes increased rebellion. But rather it is the effects of the growing government unpopularity that comes with time. The longer it is in office, the more unpopular the government becomes; that makes MPs more likely to rebel to try to differentiate themselves from the government; in turn that makes government harder, and presumably more unpopular, which in turn makes MPs more likely to rebel…
The moment an MP becomes a minister, their speeches become less readable
An intriguing paper, to be published shortly in Comparative Political Studies, demonstrates another dimension to this: what its author calls “the rhetorical costs of governing”.
Based on a study of 1.5m extracts of Danish parliamentarians’ speeches between 1997 and 2022, it finds that being in office stops politicians from being able to craft simple messages. The moment an MP becomes a minister, their speeches become less readable. This isn’t an age or experience effect. Because as soon as they leave office, they start speaking like a human again. Nor is it because they are reading briefs written by civil servants, because the effect holds with non-scripted contributions to debates. It’s solely a consequence of being in government.
You campaign in poetry, govern in prose, as Mario Cuomo put it; this new study shows that even the prose suffers when in office. In another part of the study, the researcher finds that Danish voters prefer politicians who use simple language. Don’t we all?
Further reading: T Bøggild and H H Pedersen, The legislative cost of ruling: Voter punishment of governing parties fuels legislator party dissent, European Journal of Political Research (2024); F Hjorth, Losing Touch: The Rhetorical Costs of Governing, Comparative Political Studies (2025)
