The Prime Minister’s Chief-of-Staff: a Profile from Westminster Countries

Chiefs of Staff to heads of government are influential actors in Westminster countries and elsewhere. Despite their prominent position at the apex of political life, information with respect to their personal and professional backgrounds is scarce. To resolve this gap, we undertake a biographical analysis and present the most complete comparative dataset mapping 53 chiefs of staff to prime ministers in four Westminster family countries from 1990 to 2021: Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. Findings demonstrate that a typical chief of staff will be appointed around the age of 45, almost always male, hold a bachelor’s degree at a top-tier university (and increasingly a post-graduate degree in more recent times), increasingly arriving in the role with prior professional experience in the media and as a political adviser (less so as a career civil servant), and will commonly leave the job when their prime minister leaves office. The findings have implications for theory. Of interest to future research, we build beyond this novel empirical foundation to propose a range of plausible hypotheses to explain how chiefs of staff may affect executive governance.