Jim Buller

Statecraft and the Assessment of National Political Leaders: The Case of New Labour and Tony Blair

This article makes the case for employing the statecraft approach (associated with the late Jim Bulpitt) to assess political leadership in Britain. Rather than ‘importing’ methodologies from the US, as some scholars have done, statecraft is preferred in the UK context for two main reasons. First, statecraft is concerned with the motives and behaviour of leadership cliques, and as a result, it is more appropriate for the collective leadership style that is a characteristic of parliamentary systems such as that in Britain. Second, statecraft goes some way towards incorporating a sense of structural context into our evaluation of leadership performance. This need to take into account the broader institutional constraints facing chief executives is something that an increasing number of academics in this area have been calling for. The utility of the approach is illustrated through a case study of the Blair administration.

A Critical Appraisal of the Statecraft Interpretation

This article subjects the Statecraft interpretation to critical assessment. It argues that, while Bulpitt has provided a parsimonious and stimulating contribution to our understanding of British politics, his work needs to be developed. More specifically, although the Statecraft thesis evolved out of Bulpitt’s concerns with the methodology of political science, a neglect of ontological and epistemological questions has led it to propound explanations which are both reductionist and insensitive to empirical criticism. The article concludes by suggesting ways in which the Statecraft interpretation can be developed to take account of these weaknesses.

Contesting Europeanisation: Agents, institutions and narratives in British monetary policy

This article investigates how Europeanisation can sometimes generate controversy at the domestic level by exploring British policy towards ERM in the 1980s and 1990s. It argues that existing approaches which point to the occurrence of ‘misfit’ between domestic and European institutions/policies only go part of the way to explaining the contentious nature of this process. Europeanisation was disputed in this instance because it produced competing narratives as the question of fit/misfit (as well as adaptational pressure) was discursively constructed in different ways by different groups with different normative positions. The article concludes by briefly considering the implications of this case study for future theories of Europeanisation.

Hedging its Bets: The UK and the Politics of European Financial Services Regulation

Some argue that European financial services regulation is witnessing a shift from a ‘market-making’ to a ‘market-shaping’ paradigm after the global financial crisis. This so-called ‘new’ political economy explanation stresses the role of ideas to understand this change. We consider this claim by providing an in-depth examination of recent European hedge fund legislation from the perspective of two key ‘market-making’ coalition members: the UK government and the hedge fund industry. We accept that the legislation represents a set-back for the ‘market-makers’ but question whether it represents a victory for the ‘market-shapers’. Moreover, we cast doubt on the causal role of ideas, calling for a domestic politics approach.

The Dynamics of Depoliticisation: Conclusions and Theoretical Reflections

This conclusion reviews the theoretical and empirical contributions from the chapters in this volume and develops some more general arguments concerning how we might understand the dynamics of depoliticisation. As such, it makes three claims. First, there is widespread agreement among the authors that depoliticisation (however defined) is a contingent phenomenon, which is being contested and in some cases undermined in a variety of locations. Second, it is also widely accepted if we are going to work towards a more general explanation of when, how and why depoliticisation is challenged and reversed, we need to broaden the boundaries of the concept. The analytical focus of research in this area should not just be on governmental elites or state institutions, but on how actors outside government or the state respond to depoliticisation. Finally, many of the contributors to this volume have emphasised the significance of ideational factors, and more particularly, how societal-level groups have successfully deployed discursive strategies to resist governmental depoliticisation techniques. It is this emphasis on the ideational or discursive which looks particularly promising when it comes to accounting for the dynamics of depoliticisation, although we should never forget that actors, with their discursive strategies, always interact within a broader structural context that may shape the scope for agency.

Depoliticisation, Post-politics and the Problem of Change

This chapter reviews the existing literature on depoliticisation and assesses its utility for exploring the contingent nature of this phenomenon. In essence, it makes two claims. First, while a number of contrasting definitions exist in the scholarship on depoliticisation, they can be grouped under two main headings: (a) as a systemic condition that imbues the whole of society; (b) as a more specific governing strategy that originates at the state level but then influences groups at the societal level. Second, while both these approaches have much to commend them, they suffer from limitations when it comes to making sense of the unpredictable and potentially reversible nature of depoliticisation as a process. Systemic accounts are too broad and all-encompassing, appearing to offer very little space for depoliticisation to be resisted. Conversely, a conception of depoliticisation as a governing strategy is too narrow. Focussing as it does on state elites and how they propagate this form of political rule, this definition of depoliticisation neglects the importance of societal actors, who are surely most likely to pose a challenge to such a governing technique. The chapter concludes by listing a range of questions designed to help the contributors to this volume explore theoretically and empirically the dynamics of depoliticisation.