What Now for British Politics? Reflections on Gonzalez Ginocchio,Hindmoor and Stanley

The data outlined by Gonzalez Ginocchio et al. (2021) present a picture of the status of British Politics in the contemporary discipline that is, on the face of it, mixed but sobering. Since 1998, the data show (a) a decline in the number of scholars in the selected leading departments who identify as studying British Politics; (b) a decline in British Politics papers in a prominent journal within the discipline and; and (c) a strong performance in grant capture for British Politics projects. ¹ Existing analyses of the state of the British Politics sub-discipline in recent years have identified a series of challenges: the requirements of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and how these might deter colleagues from working on single-country case studies (Beech, 2012); the increasing emphasis placed by British universities on grant capture; and a supposed lack of ‘theoretical and empirical’ integration within British Politics scholarship (Kerr and Kettell, 2006). Combined, these writings give a sense of British Politics under pressure to conform to emergent markers of academic prestige that under- or de-value the singular study of the politics of Britain. Building on these, and reflecting on the data so usefully provided in Gonzalez Ginocchio et al. (2021), I offer three brief reflections.

I agree with the authors that we can view the data in light of a process of ‘comparativisation’ that locates case studies of Britain among broader disciplinary concerns, the substance of which are not conditional on taking place within the boundaries of a given geographical area. On this reading, British Politics is doing just fine, hidden in plain sight. Over a decade ago, Charles Lees (2006) wrote that ‘we are all comparativists now’. By this, he meant that those political scientists who continued to work in the single-country case study-based approach were, either by choice or otherwise, internalizing the comparative method. Any ideas of the exceptionalism of the study of British Politics are waning out of necessity: those of us who work on the case of Britain are now accustomed to having to locate our studies in a broader comparative conversation if we want to publish anywhere beyond a small number of more specialized journals that are perhaps less conducive to career success than their larger, international counterparts.

An example of this is the shift of much prominent British Politics scholarship into the more inherently comparative domain of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (EPOP). ² Part of the shift in this particular example is a consequence of method – quantitative studies of political behaviour under the banner of EPOP have arguably been a boon for the study of British Politics, permitting what could be framed as single-country case studies in one light to be part of a cross-national effort to address an underlying question about human activity in another. Take the British Election Study (BES), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. ³ On one hand, the BES is telling us something about British elections and doing so in a way that does not need to generalize beyond either the election or the country in question. On the other hand, the BES provides academics around the world with high-quality panel data that can be used to address underlying questions of interest to scholars of voting behaviour participating in global research communities (e.g. Mellon and Prosser, 2017). For this second group, the fact that the BES studies Britain as opposed to another country with a similar political system is, to an extent, incidental. What matters is the quality of the data and underlying research design. In such cases, it might simply be that what was once termed British Politics now operates under the label of EPOP.

A concern emerging from the data is that British Politics appears to be a bit ‘blokey’, with 86% of British Politics academics in 2018 identified as men. I suspect that there may be an element of self-selection at work here – women potentially opting out of an overly masculinized sub-discipline – but I also suspect that there is a gendered equivalent of the comparativization story I described above. There are many high-profile women scholars who conduct prominent research on the politics of Britain, but who would probably be classified as gender and politics scholars in data such as these (gender and politics itself a sub-discipline largely absent of men). ⁴ If this classification is not disproportionately harming the careers of women academics, we might be inclined to think that this is not a problem. Nonetheless, it is a missed opportunity that British Politics is seemingly yet to offer a home to a broader range of critical approaches of various kinds. I certainly hope we see a greater diversity of approaches to the study of British Politics emerge in the mainstream of the sub-discipline in the next few years, more attuned to unequal patterns of knowledge production and more wary of the assumptions about actors and institutions, unseen but embedded, that have arguably characterized the dominant approach of the sub-discipline in the past 70 years.

Not only male dominated, the sub-discipline also seems to be top heavy (40% of academics identified as British Politics are professors), suggesting a pipeline problem. Of course, this may well just be colleagues, particularly early-career colleagues, rationally adapting to the context in which they find themselves. We may ask, provocatively, whether it will make sense for academics to self-identify as ‘just’ doing British Politics in future? Or, to put it another way, will the label ‘British Politics’ be enough to convince prospective employers, journal editors and grant reviewers that one’s research truly has something to add to the contemporary disciplinary conversation?