The core executive is a central focus for the study of policy change especially in Westminster‐style parliamentary democracies such as the UK. This venue is recognised as the locus of power and where attention should be given for identifying and assessing the process of policy change. It is surprising, then, that studies on women's substantive representation – showing whether and how women can make a difference to politics and policy – have not examined this institution, focusing instead on parliament or women's policy agencies. We plug this gap in scholarship in suggesting that the core executive should be the key venue for examining substantive representation of women. At the same time we present the case that the core executive is a gendered institution in terms of recruitment, resource allocation, relationships and rules. We argue that this gendered disposition shapes the opportunities and constraints available to feminist actors intent on altering the gender emphasis of public policy and illustrate this empirically through a case study of the actions and successes of two feminist ministers – Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt. As such this article makes a contribution to mainstream core executive research, gender and politics scholarship as well as the new and feminist institutionalist literatures.

This paper uses the concept of path dependency to examine the changes to the political management structures of English local government. We note how the possible experience of decreasing returns among some local authority actors combined with the powerful intervention of politicians within New Labour at the national level led to a significant break from past policy and the imposition of measures to establish a separate executive that was claimed as a radical step forward for local democracy. Using survey data from the Evaluating Local Governance research team (http://www.elgnce.org.uk), we explore the establishment of a separate political executive in all major local authorities and map out the style of decision‐making that is emerging. We find that some established institutional patterns reasserted themselves in the process of implementation, but that increasing returns are not as great as some theorists of path dependency would suggest and they may be a force for system change as well as for stability.

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H ow is institutional formation gendered, and does it make a difference? Inspired by new institutionalism's generic claim that "the organisation of political life makes a difference" (March and Olsen 1984), we ask, how does the gendered organization of political life make a difference? The purpose of this article is to build a conceptual framework for understanding the gendered character (and effects) of institutional formation. We test the framework through a case study of Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales (which were introduced in 2012) and consider its potential for further development The authors would like to thank Rosalynd Southern for research assistance and the 'Understanding Institutional Change' programme (funded by the European Research Council) for financial assistance.

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