Interpreting British Governance

Mark Bevir, Rod Rhodes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134407927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How is Britain governed? Have we entered a new era of governance? Can traditional approaches to governance help us to interpret 21st century Britain?This book develops the argument that we can understand political practices only by grasping the beliefs on which people act. It offers a governance narrative as a challenge to the Westminster model of British government and searches for a more accurate and open way of speaking about British government.

1 Introduction

On governance

Interpretation

Interpretive approaches begin from the insight that to understand actions, practices and institutions, we need to grasp the relevant meanings, the beliefs and preferences of the people involved. As John Stuart Mill (1969 [1840]: 119–20) remarked:

By Bentham … men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true? And by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it? The one took his stand outside the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it: the other looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it … Bentham judged a proposition true or false as it accorded or not with the result of his own inquiries … With Coleridge … the very fact that any doctrine had been believed by thoughtful men, and received by whole nations or generations of mankind, was part of the problem to be solved, was one of the phenomena to be accounted for.

In this book we ask, after Coleridge, ‘what is the meaning of it’, where ‘it’ is British governance.

We use an anti-foundational epistemology and an interpretive approach to understand changes in British government, critically assessing the claim that there has been a shift from government of a unitary state to governance in and by networks. We develop the argument that people can engage in a practice only because they hold certain beliefs or concepts. So, political scientists can explore that practice by unpacking the relevant beliefs and explaining why they arose. For example, our electoral practices assume participants have a shared understanding of such notions as voting, candidate and polling. We can explore electoral practices by examining the content of these concepts and their historical roots. When political scientists so interpret practices, they lump beliefs together in discourses, ideologies, or traditions. They abstract from the beliefs of particular individuals to depict aggregates – the patterns of thought that inform a political practice. Alternatively, when individuals vote for the Labour Party, they may do so believing Labour will promote redistributive policies that are socially desirable and from which they will benefit. We can explore their voting behaviour by examining their webs of beliefs and how they came to hold them. When political scientists so interpret beliefs, they provide insights into the behaviour of particular individuals. They describe the particular sets of reasons that led the relevant individual to act.

The distinction between aggregate and individual analysis is artificial. An interpretive approach moves back and forth between aggregate concepts and the beliefs of particular individuals. Whether we focus on aggregates such as traditions or on the beliefs of individuals will depend on the questions we seek to answer. The choice will depend on the topic to be studied. On the one hand, we will argue individuals are not autonomous, so they necessarily come to hold the beliefs they do within a social context that influences them. To explain the beliefs of a particular individual, we have to appeal to an aggregate concept, such as tradition, that evokes this social context. On the other hand, we will argue discourses, ideologies or traditions have no existence apart from in the contingent beliefs of particular individuals. To appeal to a tradition is always explicitly or implicitly to make claims about the beliefs of particular individuals.

In this book, we concentrate on an aggregate analysis of British political traditions. One of the dangers of so working is that we can neglect the differences in the beliefs of the individuals lumped together in a tradition. Recognition of this danger prompts us to decentre aggregate concepts such as tradition. To decentre is to highlight the diversity of an aggregate concept by unpacking the actual and contingent beliefs and actions of those individuals who fall under it (see Chapter 4 pp. 63–7). So, within the British political tradition, we distinguish Tory, Whig, Liberal and Socialist traditions. Within the Tory tradition, we distinguish the One Nation and statecraft strands. We could have gone on to analyse the beliefs of particular individuals. Yet we do not do so. Our aim is to trace the patterns of thought informing British governance, and to do so we provide an aggregate analysis. In Chapter 9, we unpack the beliefs of two senior civil servants about governance. Elsewhere we do not unpack the beliefs that inform the actions of particular individuals but concentrate on the broader traditions informing general changes in the practices of British government.

Our interpretive approach differs sharply from present-day practice in British political science. It may be true that British political science continues to reveal its ‘insular’, Whiggish roots despite ‘homoeopathic doses of American political science’ (Hayward 1991: 104). Even if we can detect a Whiggish historiography behind the Westminster model, the links between the epistemology of present-day political science and its analysis of British government and the nineteenth century have weakened. The attention now given to pressure groups, elections and public policy analysis shows the vast influence of the modernist empiricism and even positivism more usually associated with American political science. The interpretive approach discussed in Chapter 2 relies on an alternative epistemology to both modernist empiricism and positivism. It represents a challenge to this dominant or mainstream tradition.

Our criticisms focus mainly on the modernist empiricism, and even positivism, that informs much political science.¹ Positivism and modernist empiricism – from now on referred to as ‘positivism’ – share a broadly similar epistemology. They postulate given facts divorced from theoretical contexts as the basis of legitimate claims to knowledge. In contrast, as anti-foundationalists, we reject explicitly the idea of given truths whether based on pure reason or pure experience: all perceptions, and so ‘facts’, arise within the context of a prior set of beliefs or theoretical commitments. As a result, we typically look suspiciously on any claim to describe neutrally an external reality. We stress the constructed nature of our claims to knowledge (Rorty 1980). Adherents of a positivist epistemology study political actions and institutions as atomised units, which they examine individually before assembling them into larger sets. They assemble such units into larger sets by comparing and classifying their similarities and differences. In contrast, anti-foundationalists stress interpreting political actions and institutions to reveal how they are constructed by prior webs of belief informed by traditions.

Although we defend an interpretive approach by appealing to an anti-foundational epistemology, there are other reasons for doing so. We are sympathetic to the historical and philosophical approach to British politics found in the work of Beer (1965) and Birch (1964). More generally, constructivist theories of the human sciences also suggest these disciplines contain an ‘irreducible and inexpungeable element of interpretation’ (White 1978: 51 and 82). For example, Collingwood (1939, 1993) argues that historians ask questions and then answer them with stories that make sense out of ‘facts’, which in their raw form make no sense at all. He summarises his position by saying,

history should be (a) … an answering of questions; (b) concerned with human action in the past; (c) pursued by interpretation of evidence; and (d) for the sake of human self-knowledge.

(Collingwood 1993: 10–11)

Again, Collingwood insists knowledge is ‘created, not discovered, because evidence is not evidence until it makes something evident’ (Collingwood 1965: 99, emphasis in original). This does not mean there are no ‘facts’, only that historians in part construct those facts. The human sciences are constructed and shaped by their concepts and theories. The resulting interpretations are always incomplete and always open to challenge. Such a view of the human sciences contrasts markedly with those commonly found in political science where the influence of models drawn from natural science is great.²

Although our interpretive approach resembles those of Beer (1965) and Birch (1964), we deploy it to study governance and thus highlight the growing limitations of the Westminster model, which their studies take for granted. The term ‘governance’ signals that important changes have and are taking place. There are, however, many different accounts of these changes, each of which gives different content to the concept of governance. Governance can refer to a new process of governing, a changed condition of ordered rule, or the new method by which society is governed (cf. Finer 1970: 3–4). One colleague described it as a ‘weasel’ word – slippery and elusive, used to obscure, not to shed light. He has a point, so in Chapter 3 we identify its various meanings to clear the way for our account. This ground-clearing exercise carries the danger that, as authors, we dictate what words mean. We have no wish to wear such a mantle of linguistic omniscience. We do not believe that our account should be privileged because, as political scientists, we have a means of deciding which accounts are true, which are false. Other political scientists are free to use the same words to mean something else. We are simply describing the content we will attach to our terms. That content will both guide and receive support from the rest of our work. Its reasonableness should depend, not on our having access to given facts, but on a comparison with alternative studies of governance.

The content we attach to governance reflects our interpretive approach. So in Chapter 4 we will decentre it. We will open a positivist, institutional account to questions of meaning. We will indicate how governance is created and recreated as a meaningful practice through beliefs informed by traditions and modified in response to dilemmas. There is, however, the danger we will only tear down the positivist account and put nothing in its place. We must show what an interpretive approach can add to existing accounts of governance. We will indicate the distinctive light our decentred account casts on key issues in the literature as well as on the concerns of practitioners. We will offer, first, an account of British governance focused on networks; second, an interpretive critique of the positivist analysis of governance as networks; and, third, a decentred analysis of governance, which focuses on beliefs, traditions and dilemmas. In effect, we take apart the positivist account of governance as networks by contrasting it with an interpretive approach to networks understood through agents and their beliefs.

Our interpretive approach prompts us to explore governance through beliefs, traditions and dilemmas. We explain the rise and development of governance by the beliefs that informed the policies and practices through which networks arose alongside, and even supplanted, hierarchies and markets. We begin in Chapter 5 by contrasting Britain and Denmark to provide a broad picture of the tradition against which British governance arose. Next, in Chapter 6, we decentre the British tradition into various constituent traditions – Tory, Whig, Liberal and Socialist – showing how each of these understands Thatcherism differently. The first wave of reforms in British governance was the programme of neo-liberal reforms associated with Thatcherism. We explore these reforms and their effects by unpacking the diverse beliefs, concepts and traditions through which Tories, Whigs, Liberals and Socialists construct them. The second wave of reforms to British governance was New Labour’s turn to joined-up governance. So we also explore New Labour’s policies, in Chapter 7, by unpacking the beliefs it adopted in response to dilemmas thrown up by Thatcherism.

Our interpretive approach explains the rise of governance in part by reference to the beliefs embedded in the Tory, Whig, Liberal and Socialist traditions. When we describe these beliefs, we retell their theories of governance. Our account thus resembles at times a metanarrative: it describes the different narratives of Thatcherism and governance. Yet this resemblance is only superficial. An interpretive approach provides a distinctive, alternative analysis, rather than an account of the field as a whole. It analyses governance by unpacking its constituent ideas and locating them in traditions and dilemmas. Inevitably, the interpretive nature of our alternative analysis means we must unpack and explain other concepts, theories and beliefs in a way that sometimes makes our approach seem like a metanarrative. This elision of alternative narrative and meta-narrative cannot be avoided because it follows from telling stories about other people’s stories.

To tell stories about other people’s stories, we have to recover their stories and explain them. Although we cannot separate the practices of understanding and explanation in this way, the analytic distinction highlights that we use two modes of inquiry. Understanding needs an ethnographic form of inquiry: we have to read practices, actions, texts, interviews, and speeches to recover other people’s stories. Explanation needs a historical form of inquiry: we have to locate their stories within their wider webs of belief, and these webs of belief against the background of traditions they modify in response to specific dilemmas. In our analysis of governance, we merge these two modes of inquiry, reading a wide range of texts in relation to traditions and dilemmas. When we turn from governance in general to the higher civil service, we make more effort to distinguish between them. So we begin in Chapter 8 by reading texts to construct the historical background to present-day debates on civil service reform. Next, in Chapter 9, we use interviews as a basis for an ethnographic study of the beliefs permanent secretaries hold about the reforms and their impact on the higher civil service.

The ethnographic study of permanent secretaries also allows us to illustrate how our interpretive approach works at a micro-level. In our analysis of governance, we provide mainly an aggregate analysis. We focus on traditions, invoking individuals as exemplars, rather than on the individual agents who compose traditions. The theory informing our interpretive approach includes a powerful emphasis on individual agency, and we want to show this emphasis is compatible with aggregate studies. Interpretation, as we suggested earlier, covers shared understandings that inform a practice as well as the particular beliefs that inform an individual’s actions. While our comparison of Britain and Denmark, and our studies of Thatcherism, New Labour and the roots of civil service reform are examples of the former, our work on permanent secretaries goes some way towards illustrating the latter.

British governance

We use our interpretive approach to explore changes in the British state since 1979. Our story has three parts.

First, we take as our starting point the claim there has been a shift from government by a unitary state to governance by and through networks. In this period the boundary between state and civil society changed. It can be understood as a shift from hierarchies, or the bureaucracies of the welfare state, through the marketisation reforms of the Conservative governments of Thatcher and Major to networks. This emphasis on networks contrasts markedly with accounts of British government rooted in the Westminster model.

Second, we use our anti-foundational approach, with its notions of tradition and dilemma, to decentre this governance story; that is, we identify the several ways in which individuals construct governance. History and ethnography are the best tools for constructing our story of other people’s constructions of what they are doing; that is, thick descriptions of individual beliefs and preferences.

Finally, we will thus argue that governance has arisen out of contingent and contested narratives. We present four narratives of governance: intermediate institutions, networks of communities, reinventing the constitution and joined-up government. The actions of individuals are informed by their beliefs in one or other of these narratives. Contemporary British governance is an unintended effect of these actions and the competing narratives.

The notion of governance signals, therefore, change in British government but, in our account, the stress falls on how these changes arose out of competing webs of belief informed by different traditions. Governance refers to the informal authority of networks as constitutive of, supplementing or supplanting the formal authority of government. The concept of governance thus overlaps with those of the core executive, the hollow state and the differentiated polity, all of which point to a more diverse view of state authority as being located at the boundary of state and civil society.

We recognise that others have also sought to explore this broader notion of governance.³ Harris (1990: 66–7) argues that one of the ‘tacit understandings’ about political community was ‘a belief among politicians of all complexions that the relationship between government and society was essentially a limited one’. Civil society was ‘the highest sphere of human existence’, while the state was ‘an institution of secondary importance’. The corporate life of society ‘was expressed through voluntary associations and the local community’. She argues that these beliefs had ‘enormous tenacity’ (ibid.: 69). Between the wars, they were sustained not just by professional civil servants, who favoured a return to more limited government, but also by the British public who ‘resumed their Victorian habits of voluntary action and self-help’ (ibid.: 77). However, the Second World War led Britain to develop ‘a far more powerful centralised wartime state than any of her more metaphysical-minded, state-exalting continental enemies’ (ibid.: 91). It also fuelled a reformist mood, which led to a ‘profound break with some of the major conventions of the previous hundred years’ (ibid.: 96). ‘Promises, programmes and planning’ became the new norm (ibid.: 97). Harris concludes that by the 1950s, ‘the common constitutional culture based on tacit acceptance of common history and unspoken assumptions about the nature of political behaviour which had been so pervasive earlier in the century had virtually ceased to exist’ (ibid.: 111). We should not write the history of the twentieth century as a battle between collectivism and the free market because they ‘advanced in tandem at the expense of other more traditional social arrangements such as philanthropy, the family and the local community’ (ibid.: 113). ‘The ethos o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: On governance
• PART I. The approach: On interpretation
• PART II. The public sector: On traditions and dilemmas
• PART III. The civil service: On history and ethnography
• Bibliography
• Index