Depoliticisation: Principles, Tactics and Tools

Depoliticizing space: The politics of governing global finance

“…The first strand has analyzed a variety of deregulatory or technocratic policies, with emphasis usually placed on how depoliticization can appear to reconcile the contradictory governing imperatives of ensuring effective policy-making and maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of the electorate. This insight has been developed with great clarity by Flinders and Buller (2006), who identified three types of depoliticization: institutional, whereby politicians delegate governance to ostensibly non-political institutions; rules-based, whereby decisionmaking discretion is curtailed by explicit rules; and preference-shaping, whereby rhetorical strategies are employed that portray specific social issues as outside of the stateÕs jurisdiction.…”

Depoliticisation and the politics of imperialism

“…Examples of depoliticisation have been noted throughout the 20 th century and the process has found itself categorised by a number of scholars. Flinders and Buller (2006) offer a helpful means of categorizing different iterations of depoliticisation. Their account offers three distinct forms of the strategy: institutional, rule-, and discourse-based depoliticisation.…”

“…It is also essentially political. In the parlance of political economists, economic historians and public policy researchers, it can be considered a form of international economic policy (Schenk 1994;Krozewski 2001;Hinds 2001;Strange;Burnham 2000;2006;Sutton 2015). This international economic policy is formulated in the exact same nexus as all other policy and as much for domestic reasons as internationalwhatever that distinction may mean (Burnham 1998, 191;Kettell & Sutton 2013).…”

“…Authors have looked at historical moments of depoliticisation, from the return to the Gold Standard (Kettell 2004) to IMF conditionality in 1976 (Rogers 2012) up to the present day, including the ERM (Kettell 2009), the operational independence of the Bank of England (Burnham 2001), the discourse of globalization (Hay & Watson 1999) and even the gendered discourse surrounding the Governor of the Bank of England (Clarke & Roberts 2014). i The impetus that drives a depoliticized form of state management has focused on changes in international finance (Burnham 2001) as well as the perceptions of both state managers and their audience (Flinders & Buller 2006). Generally speaking, this audience has been the electorate of the state in question, and their perception of the national interest (Burnham 2001, 128;Kettell 2008, 631).…”

“…This has generally been placed in terms of the contradictory nexus within which state management exists: between accumulation and legitimation. Moreover, it has been further categorised into institutional, rules-based and discourse depoliticisations (Flinders & Buller 2006). Authors have looked at historical moments of depoliticisation, from the return to the Gold Standard (Kettell 2004) to IMF conditionality in 1976 (Rogers 2012) up to the present day, including the ERM (Kettell 2009), the operational independence of the Bank of England (Burnham 2001), the discourse of globalization (Hay & Watson 1999) and even the gendered discourse surrounding the Governor of the Bank of England (Clarke & Roberts 2014).…”