Abstract
The purpose of this article is to assess the state of the discipline of British politics. The article takes as its starting point the historic emergence of the first coalition government since the end of Second World War and the impact of its politics of retrenchment. From here the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition's controversial higher education reforms in England are evaluated and the focus is unsurprisingly on the significant increase of tuition fees from September 2012, but also on the wider implications of the Browne Report. The article then analyses the changes in the discipline in the recent past, which reflect the tumultuous global events of the 1990s and the internationalisation of political science. The article then surveys the current obstacles and pressures that face scholars working in British politics such as the Research Excellence Framework and the emerging culture of the necessity for research income and its effects on scholarship. The article concludes with an argument for the efficacy of British politics as a discipline within political science.
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Notes
The English institutions that have publicly stated from September 2012 that their fees will be £9000 per year for full-time undergraduate courses are: Aston, Bath, Bath Spa, Bedfordshire, Birmingham, Bradford, Brighton, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, City University London, De Montfort, Durham, Edgehill, Essex, Exeter, Falmouth, Goldsmiths University of London, Harper Adams, Hull, Imperial College London, Keele, Kent, King's College London, Lancaster, Leeds, Leicester, Lincoln, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores, Loughborough, Manchester, Middlesex, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Oxford Brookes, Plymouth, Queen Mary University of London, Reading, Royal Agricultural College, Royal Holloway, Royal Veterinary College, School of Oriental and African Studies, Sheffield, Southampton, St. George's London, Surrey, Sussex, University of the Arts, University College London, University of Central Lancashire, University of East Anglia, University of East London, University of the West of England, Warwick, Westminster and York (BBC, 2011).
Centre for British Politics, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Hull, http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/politics/research/research-centres/centre-for-british-politics.aspx.
Centre for British Politics, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cbp/index.aspx.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Arthur Aughey, Kevin Hickson and Philip Norton for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this article. Any errors are of course my own.
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Beech, M. State of the discipline: British politics in a cold climate. Br Polit 7, 4–16 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2011.31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2011.31