(De)politicisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates

Abstract

Studies making use of (de)politicisation have flourished as governments have embraced technocratic and delegated forms of governance. Yet this increase in use is not always matched by conceptual or analytical refinement. Nor has scholarship generally travelled into empirical terrain beyond economic and monetary policy, nor assessed whether politicising and depoliticising processes could occur simultaneously. It is within this intellectual context that we make a novel contribution by focusing on the (de)politicising discourses, processes and outcomes within policy surrounding assisted reproductive technologies. We reveal a pattern of partial repoliticisation that raises questions about the relationship between governance, technology, society and state.

Politicisation, Depoliticisation and Anti-Politics: Towards a Multilevel Research Agenda

“…As Foster et al (2014, p. 226) note, 'depoliticisation is emerging as one of the most, if not the most, important devices for understanding contemporary patterns of governance through advanced industrial societies'. Analysts have proposed various approaches to depoliticisation, from those focused on relatively specific, theoretically rich definitions related to contemporary state strategies of neoliberal governance/ governmentality (Burnham, 2001;Foster et al, 2014), to those employing relatively broad, flexible definitions including a set of fluid discursive manoeuvres or 'speech acts' deployed by a range of actors (Bates et al, 2014;Jenkins, 2011). Debate has emerged, however, over whether analysts should prefer the former, 'narrow' definitions, or the latter, 'broad' definitions (see Wood and Flinders, 2014).…”

Depoliticisation, Resilience and the Herceptin Post-Code Lottery Crisis: Holding Back the Tide

“…Empirical analysis has sought to develop heuristic indicators of Hay's forms of (de)politicisation through attempting to map the transition of issues onto and off of public and political agendas (Bates et al. ; Kuzemko ). One key argument of this article is that, in doing so, scholars are operating (implicitly or explicitly) within a tradition of research into state‐society relations with a range of well‐honed approaches that offer important insights.…”

“…This has implications for recent work, which has emphasised the importance of broadening analytical approaches to depoliticisation to involve a range of societal processes and mechanisms that support or reinforce institutional mechanisms deployed by governments, drawing on Hay's (2007) model (Wood and Flinders 2014). Empirical analysis has sought to develop heuristic indicators of Hay's forms of (de)politicisation through attempting to map the transition of issues onto and off of public and political agendas (Bates et al 2014;Kuzemko 2014). One key argument of this article is that, in doing so, scholars are operating (implicitly or explicitly) within a tradition of research into state-society relations with a range of well-honed approaches that offer important insights.…”

“…7). Empirical research has focused on the success of depoliticisation (Kettell 2008;Rogers 2009;Beveridge 2012), how depoliticised policy areas are re-politicised (Kuzemko 2014) and 'the broader relationship between depoliticising and politicising dynamics' (Jenkins 2011, 158;Bates et al 2014).…”

Exploring the role of the state in the depoliticisation of UK transport policy

“…The empirical aim of this article is to understand the processes that have led to infrastructure provision re-emerging as a central tenet of UK transport policy, with the contention that depoliticisation theorising will aid understanding of these processes. Depoliticisation is operationalised at the micro-level (see Wood 2016) through process-tracing; a method used fruitfully in other studies of depoliticisation (Bates et al, 2014;Beveridge and Naumann, 2014). As Collier (2011, 824) explains, process tracing 'is an analytic tool for drawing descriptive and causal inferences from diagnostic pieces of evidence-often understood as part of a temporal sequence of events or phenomena.'…”