Now you see it, now you don’t: the shifting realities of cabinet government

Cabinet government can appear an unwieldy and inefficient framework for making political decisions, yet the model not only survives, but is thriving across much of the globe. Drawing on a new book, Patrick Weller, Dennis C. Grube and R.A.W. Rhodes explain the resilience of this much criticised tradition of collective decision-making

'Stretched but not snapped' : a response to Russell & Serban on Retiring the 'Westminster Model'

This article engages with Meg Russell and Ruxandra Serban's (2021) argument that the Westminster model is 'a concept stretched beyond repair' that deserves 'to be retired'. We examine the logic, theory and methods that led to such a powerful, potent and provocative argument. We suggest their approach may have inadvertently 'muddied' an already muddled concept. We assess the implications of 'muddying' for their conclusion that the Westminster model is, in essence, a dead concept in need of a decent funeral. We suggest the concept is 'stretched but not snapped' by developing a simple four-perspective broadening of the analytical lens. This approach aids understanding about what the concept covers, how it is operationalized and why it remains useful in comparative research

Post-Foucauldian governmentality: what does it offer critical social policy analysis?

This article considers the theoretical perspective of post-Foucauldian governmentality, especially the insights and challenges it poses for applied researchers within the critical social policy tradition. The article firstly examines the analytical strengths of this approach to understanding power and rule in contemporary society, before moving on to consider its limitations for social policy. It concludes by arguing that these insights can be retained, and some of the weaknesses overcome, by adopting a ‘realist governmentality’ approach (Stenson 2005, 2008). This advocates combining traditional discursive analysis with more ethnographic methods in order to render visible the concrete activity of governing, and unravel the messiness, complexity and unintended consequences involved in the struggles around subjectivity

The future of sovereignty in multilevel governance Europe: a constructivist reading

Multilevel governance presents a depiction of contemporary structures in EU Europe as consisting of overlapping authorities and competing competencies. By focusing on emerging non-anarchical structures in the international system, hence moving beyond the conventional hierarchy/anarchy dichotomy to distinguish domestic and international arenas, this seems a radical transformation of the familiar Westphalian system and to undermine state sovereignty. Paradoxically, however, the principle of sovereignty proves to be resilient despite its alleged empirical decline. This article argues that social constructivism can explain the paradox, by considering sovereign statehood as a process-dependent institutional fact, and by showing that multilevel governance can feed into this process

Epistemic policy networks in the European Union’s CBRN risk mitigation policy

This paper offers insights into an innovative and currently flagship approach of the European Union (EU) to the mitigation of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) risks. Building on its long-time experience in the CBRN field, the EU has incorporated methods familiar to the students of international security governance: it is establishing regional networks of experts and expertise. CBRN Centers of Excellence, as they are officially called, aim to contribute to the security and safety culture in different parts of Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, and South East Europe, in the broadly construed CBRN area. These regional networks represent a modern form of security cooperation, which can be conceptualized as an epistemic policy networks approach. It offers flexibility to the participating states, which have different incentives to get involved. At the same, however, the paper identifies potential limitations and challenges of epistemic policy networks in this form

State of the field: What can political ethnography tell us about anti-politics and democratic disaffection?

This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). We argue that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply side. In doing so, we tackle long-standing stereotypes in political science about the ethnographic method and what it is good for. We highlight how the innovative and varied practices of contemporary ethnography are ideally suited to shedding light into the ‘black box’ of elite politics. We demonstrate the potential pay-off with reference to important examples of elite ethnography from the margins of political science scholarship. The implications from these rich studies, we argue, suggest a reorientation of how we understand the drivers of public disaffection and the role that political elites play in exacerbating cynicism and disappointment. We conclude by pointing to the benefits to the discipline in embracing elite ethnography both to diversify the methodological toolkit in explaining the complex dynamics of disaffection,and to better enable engagement in renewed public debate about the political establishment

Implementation and the Governance Problem: A Pressure Participant Perspective

This article has two aims: to qualify the UK government's ‘problem' of governance in a comparison with Scotland and Wales, and to use implementation studies (the ancestors of the new governance literature) to explore policy developments since devolution in Britain. It presents a puzzling finding from extensive interview research: that while we may expect UK government policy to suffer a bigger ‘implementation gap' based on distinctive governance problems (such as greater service delivery fragmentation and the unintended consequences of top-down policy styles), pressure participants in Scotland and Wales are more likely to report implementation failures. Using a ‘top-down' framework, it explores three main explanations for this finding: that the size of the implementation gap in England is exaggerated by a focus on particular governance problems; that pressure participant dissatisfaction follows unrealistic expectations in the devolved territories; and that the UK government undermines devolved policy implementation, by retaining control of key policy instruments and setting the agenda on measures of implementation success

‘Emptying the cage, changing the birds’: state rescaling, path-dependency and the politics of economic restructuring in post-crisis Guangdong

This paper evaluates how economic restructuring in Guangdong is entwined with the politicization of state rescaling during and after the global financial crisis of 2008. It shows how a key industrial policy known as ‘double relocation’ generated tensions between the Guangdong government, then led by Party Secretary Wang Yang, and the senior echelon of the Communist Party of China in Beijing. The contestations and negotiations that ensued illustrate the dynamic entwinement between state rescaling and institutional path-dependency: the Wang administration launched this industrial policy in spite of potentially destabilizing effects on the prevailing national structure of capital accumulation. This foregrounds, in turn, the constitutive and constraining effects of established, national-level policies on local, territorially-specific restructuring policies