Inheritance, choice and change

‘Inheritance before choice’ is a recurring theme in Richard Rose’s work. He begins his article of the same name (Rose 1990, 263) with characteristic pithiness: ‘[p]olicy makers are heirs before they are choosers’. When they enter office, politicians take responsibility for processes of government established by laws, institutions, structures, procedures and arrangements covering vast ranges of economic, social, political and cultural activity. Some were created or established before the Second World War or earlier, and the great majority before the prime minister of the day entered parliament, but all form part of the inheritance of any government. Governments must make choices about what they want to change—introduce new programmes or terminate old ones. Even so, as he wrote in a study of the post-war corpus of primary legislation in the United Kingdom, ‘the stock of [existing] laws has a far greater impact upon government than does the smaller flow of legislation’ (van Mechelen and Rose 1986). The emphasis on the legacy of the past is an observation that underpins many of his insights in a range of different contexts.