This article provides a comparative analysis of the opening sessions of PMQs for the last five Prime Ministers in order to test a general perception that PMQs has become increasingly a focal point for shallow political point scoring rather than serious prime ministerial scrutiny. Our data appears to confirm that PMQs has become both rowdier and increasingly dominated by the main party leaders. It also indicates that: Prime Ministers are increasingly expected to be able to respond to a wider range of questions; female MPs are as likely to ask helpful questions but less likely to ask unanswerable questions than male counterparts; and MPs are less likely to ask helpful questions and more likely to ask unanswerable questions the longer their parliamentary tenure. More surprisingly perhaps, our findings also suggest that, at the beginning of their premierships at least, Thatcher and Brown appear the most accomplished in terms of the fullness of their answers, and Blair and Cameron the least accomplished. The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, complained in 2010 about the 'character, conduct, content and culture' of 'the shop window of the House of Commons': Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs). Bercow argued that PMQs was dominated by questions from the Leader of the Opposition to the exclusion of backbench questions, that Members of Parliament treat the Prime Minister (PM) as though he or she were 'a President in sole control of the entire British Government', and that MPs 'yell and heckle in a thoroughly unbecoming manner' providing 'scrutiny by screech' (Bercow 2010). Similarly, according to Simon Hoggart (2011): 'Prime Minister's Questions is increasingly like an unpleasant football match, in which the game played publicly is accompanied by all sorts of secret grudge matches, settlement of scores and covert fouls committed when the players hope the ref is not looking'. There appears to be a consensus among commentators, bloggers and viewers that PMQs has turned, from a relatively 'civilised' Parliamentary session into something of a rowdy, mud-slinging spectacle catered more towards shallow political point scoring than serious scrutiny of Prime Ministerial activity. 1 Yet, complaints such as these are not new, although perhaps the prominence and force of them are. Thomas reports the view that PMQs are a 'ritual, virtually meaningless, confrontation which contributes much more heat than light to the process of holding the prime minister and his government to account (and so the low point of the week rather than the reverse)' (2006: 13). In the 1990s, journalist Michael White believed that 'little more enlightenment emerges from Prime Minister's Questions than from the average pub fight', Paddy Ashdown, then leader of the Liberal Democrats thought PMQs had 'an air of unreality, somewhere between farce and fantasy' (both

Evolutionary theorising has a long history in social scientists' attempts to interrogate processes of change. However, for many years evolutionary theory has been damaged by its association with teleological and reductionist reasoning. Nevertheless in the past two decades, a new breed of neo-evolutionary perspective has emerged within a variety of social science sub-disciplines. This recent literature has attempted to revise the theory in order to emphasise that change is a contingent process which can take multiple paths and is underpinned by a constant interplay between agents and their environment. Although much of this literature has failed largely to impact upon the work of political scientists, recent years have also seen various attempts to apply an evolutionary conception of change to both the state and political change in general. This review article examines some of the key themes to have emerged from the renewed interest in evolutionary theorising, whilst particular attention is paid to attempts to develop the concept of political evolution.In the last decade, evolutionary thinking has moved from the periphery of social theory to the core (Burns and Dietz 1992, 3) ... anyone who approaches the contributions of the past decade with an open mind is likely to be impressed with the broad promise of the evolutionary approach (Winter 1990, 269) The above quotations may seem surprising to some political scientists, given that evolutionary perspectives on political change have rarely

This article represents an early and, largely speculative, attempt to make sense of Cameronism as a distinctive political project. Herein, we present three separate, but potentially overlapping, narratives that could be employed to locate the significance of Cameronism within broader trends in British and global party politics. In this respect, we view Cameronism as: a continuation of Thatcherism; a development in the unfolding of forms of neo‐liberal governmentality, linked to the process of depoliticisation; and as a movement towards the cartelisation of political parties. We conclude the article by arguing that these three potential interpretations of Cameronism are compatible with one another and, taken in combination, can provide a starting point towards a more holistic understanding of the type of politics characteristic of David Cameron's leadership of the Conservative party.

Premised on the assumption that depoliticisation is a crucial aspect of neo-liberal governmentality, this paper attempts to synergise these two, previously disparate, concepts. Borrowing from Foucault’s theorisation of governmentality and drawing from inclusive definitions of politics/ the political, this paper argues for a reformulation of our understanding of depoliticisation and politicisation. The paper contends that depoliticisation is best understood as a technique of governing which works to legitimise neo-liberalism as the dominant political rationality. As such, we argue that depoliticisation acts as a tool for masking the ‘rolling forward’ of the state and the proliferation of new forms of neo-liberal governmentality.

By way of an introduction to this special issue, our aim here is to bring together and interpret some of the main themes and issues to come out of the selection of papers presented below in order to make sense of the overall fate of David Cameron's attempted modernisation of the Conservative Party. Based on the evidence highlighted by each of the contributors to this issue, we make a number of arguments. Firstly, that Cameron's early attempts to steer the party into the centre ground of British politics can be judged to have been reasonably effective. Secondly, that in 2007-8, in the context of the emergence of economic difficulties leading to the financial crisis, the party found itself at a crossroads, and it chose to exit that crossroads with a turn, across a number of policy areas, back towards a more traditional Thatcherite or neo-liberal agenda. Thirdly, we argue that the financial crisis and the political instability it generated is not enough on its own to explain this turn to the right. Rather, these events should be seen as having acted as a catalyst for the exposure of three main fault-lines in the party's modernisation strategy: i) its lack of ideological coherence; ii) its potential for serious performance deficits due to a lack of consistency in the political leadership displayed by David Cameron; and, iii); its vulnerability to party management issues.