Introduction To Works
Keith Dowding is unusual in that he has influentially written in both political philosophy and mainstream empirical political science. Dowding is best known for his work on 'power', applying insights from formal analysis to central debates on the nature of power and structure of power in society. Expanding on Brian Barry's concept of 'luck' (getting what you want without trying) he argues that some groups of people are 'systematically lucky' in that they are advantaged because of the way society is structured. Such people are not powerful in the sense they have resources that they could use that other groups do not (though they might have this power 'as well') but rather systematically lucky in that they tend to get what they want without having to do anything. Alternatively, other groups are systematically unlucky. This argument has caused great controversy with critics including Brian Barry, Steven Lukes, Peter Morriss and more recently Andrew Hindmoor.
Dowding has also worked extensively on the Tiebout model of individuals moving location to get the local services they require, showing that such moving does occur in the UK though only to a small extent, and that people tend to move 'to' areas for service reasons, but do not decide to leave 'from' areas for those reasons. He has extended this work into examining Albert Hirschman's 'Exit, Voice and Loyalty' model and has a forthcoming Cambridge University Press book Exits, Voices and Social Investment co-authored with long-time collaborator Peter John extending and applying Hirschman's model to citizen satisfaction with government services.
More recently his work has examined why UK cabinet ministers resign based on a large dataset of all UK ministerial resignations and non-resignations, and compiled another on Australia. Following his lead similar datasets are being compiled by scholars all round the world for intensive comparative analysis.
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