ABSTRACT

Interpreting Governance, High Politics, and Public Policy offers the latest perspectives on the interpretive approach to governance and public policy research.

This book commemorates more than a decade of governance research by Mark Bevir and R.A.W. Rhodes, the leading exponents of interpretive political science in the United Kingdom. It explains how insights from the interpretive perspective may be used to advance the study of governance, high politics, and public policy. Featuring contributions from major scholars in the field, both inside and outside the interpretivist fold, the authors critically reflect upon interpretivism and consider how aspects of the interpretive approach apply to their own research. The authors debate the significance of Bevir and Rhodes’s work and develop future directions for interpretive governance research. The chapters link one of the most innovative contemporary perspectives in political science with the latest empirical studies.

Contributing towards setting the governance research agenda, Interpreting Governance, High Politics and Public Policy is an excellent resource for the study of interpretive policy analysis.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

Interpreting Governance, High Politics, and Public Policy

part |59 pages

Governance and Metagovernance

chapter |20 pages

Re-centring the British Political Tradition

Explaining Contingency in New Labour's and the Coalition's Governance Statecraft

chapter |18 pages

Critical Encounters with Decentred Theory

Tradition, Metagovernance, and Parrhēsia as Storytelling

part |54 pages

High Politics and Political History

chapter |18 pages

Executive Governance

An Interpretive Analysis

chapter |16 pages

The Meanings of Progressive Politics

Interpretivism and its Limits

part |61 pages

Policymaking

chapter |18 pages

Extending Interpretivism

Articulating the Practice Dimension in Bevir and Rhodes's Differentiated Polity Model

chapter |21 pages

The Inadequacy of Interpretivism

Explaining Britain's Failure to ‘Number the People’

part |16 pages

Conclusion