ABSTRACT
Interpretive approaches to political science are often charged with failing to allow for material or institutional reality and with lacking critical power. The preceding study of New Labour is in part an attempt to rebut these two charges. In the first place, because people act upon their beliefs, when interpretive studies reveal meanings, they exhibit the beliefs that explain people’s actions and so the policies, institutions, and material reality generated by these actions. This study of New Labour has sought, then, to move from an elucidation of ideas to an explanation of welfare and economic policies in terms of these ideas. An interpretive approach does not lack an account of institutions; it just rethinks their nature; it disaggregates them, portraying them as products of contingent, and often competing actions that embody beliefs, which themselves arose against the background of particular traditions.
