Workplace instability has been shown to contribute to low wellbeing across contexts, with job security in particular leading to feelings of powerlessness and heightened anxiety (Russo & Terraneo, 2020). One would expect that being a member of a permanent civil service, like the 500,000 full-time members of the UK Civil Service, would be more stable, and consequently they would enjoy higher wellbeing. However, taking this view would overlook another kind of instability that is particular to working in the civil service: the effects of political change and ministerial churn. In this paper, we consider the impact of ministerial changes—brought about as a result of cabinet reshuffles, changes in government, and resignations—on wellbeing of civil servants serving within these departments. To assess this, we construct a novel dataset which combines the wellbeing data from the annual Civil Service People survey, and data on ministerial appointments and churn, taken from the Institute for Government’s Ministers Database. The resulting panel dataset contains departmental average wellbeing data and a tally of ministerial changes, broken down by department and by year; this enables two-way fixed effects estimation of the effect of ministerial changes on wellbeing, accounting for department-level and year-level fixed effects. To improve robustness, we also include wellbeing data from non-ministerial departments (which are not impacted by ministerial changes) as untreated counterfactuals. To address possible reverse causality, we also implement a series of lagged-effects models as robustness checks (Leszczensky & Wolbring, 2022).

Note: this paper is currently a work in progress, and thus findings are not yet ready to share as of writing this in January 2026. The aim will be to complete the analysis, robustness checks, and any exploratory analysis over the next few months. The proposed presentation will detail the policy context, data sources, methods, and preliminary findings, as well as implications for future research in workplace wellbeing in public service.