Colin Hay

Sciences Po, Paris & The University of Sheffield · Centre d'etudes europeennes & Department of Politics

With the passing of time and the benefit of hindsight, there is, again, growing interest in Thatcherism—above all in its substantive and enduring legacy. But, to date at least, and largely due to data limitations, little of that work has focussed on tracing the behavioural consequences, at the individual level, of holding Thatcherite values. That o...

In what ways, if at all, do past ideologies shape the values of subsequent generations of citizens? Are public attitudes in one period shaped by the discourses and constructions of an earlier generation of political leaders? Using Thatcherism – one variant of the political New Right of the 1980s – as the object of our enquiries, this article explor...

En dépit des postures, Royaume-Uni et Union européenne cherchent tous deux un accord. Mais la stratégie du bord du gouffre de Londres, et la maî- trise de Bruxelles sur le calendrier et le déroulement des négociations pour- raient ne permettre qu’un « accord faute de mieux ». De style « australien » ou « canadien », un accord commercial de dernier...

In this chapter, we turn to consider the ways in which legacies which started with national-level legislation can be traced in the experiences of families and households. Our case study revolves around the right to but one’s council home, which the Thatcher government promoted in 1980 and reinforced via a series of further Acts of Parliament throug...

The fear of crime has occupied a substantial research agenda in criminology; this extends to include theories of why people fear crime. In this exemplar, we explore how political leadership influences the fear of crime (including perceptions of antisocial behaviour). The ‘age, period and cohort’ (APC) approach we adopt recognises the distinct tempo...

This chapter examines criminal justice policies, specifically, the degree to which these increased levels of punitiveness, levels which still exist today. The topic of ‘law and order’ was one on which Thatcher accumulated much political capital, but did this translate into actual policies? The legacy which we chart herein in is not a straight-forwa...

The concept of the political legacy, despite its importance for institutionalist and historically-minded political analysts more generally, remains both elusive and undeveloped theoretically. This book seeks to address that oversight by building on existing studies which have approached the notion of a legacy to offer a clear definition and operati...

The concept of the political legacy, despite its importance for institutionalist and historically minded political analysts more generally, remains both elusive and undeveloped theoretically. This chapter seeks to address that oversight by exploring the various ways in which political scientists have approached the legacy of Thatcherism and by buil...

In this final chapter we seek to establish and reflect on the complex notion of a political legacy. We also aim to emphasise the potential this work has to launch further research questions and enterprises. We understand a legacy as a long-term project which requires a multi-disciplinary approach alongside a range of research methodologies. Neverth...

Fear of crime occupies a substantial area of research and theorising in criminology. Still, to our knowledge it has not been examined within a longitudinal framework of political socialisation. Using insights from generational modelling we explore how political cohorts influence the fear of crime and perceptions of antisocial behaviour. This ‘age,...

The role of political socialisation in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods. While most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action, we propose a unified theory bas...

To what extent are new generations ‘Thatcherite’? Using British Social Attitudes data for 1985–2012 and applying age-period-cohort analysis and generalized additive models, this article investigates whether Thatcher’s Children hold more right-authoritarian political values compared to other political generations. The study further examines the exte...

In recent years British politics has seemed increasingly unpredictable. The Conservative Party's return to single-party government in 2015 surprised commentators and the electorate alike, and Labour's choice of Jeremy Corbyn as its leader marked a striking change in direction for the party. Cuts to public welfare and spending have led to growing di...

This paper makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics - between crime rates, public opinion and public policy - can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognise and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated in...

This paper makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics - between crime rates, public opinion and public policy - can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognise and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated in...

To what extent are new generations ‘Thatcherite’? Using British Social Attitudes data for 1985-2012 and applying age-period-cohort (APC) analysis and generalized additive models (GAMs) this paper investigates whether Thatcher’s Children hold more right-authoritarian political values compared to other political generations. We further examine the ex...

This paper seeks to recover and establish the distinct (and distinctly) institutionalist social ontology that underpins social constructivism as an approach to political economic analysis. It views social constructivism as a profoundly normative mode of political inquiry which seeks to discern, interrogate and elucidate the contingency of social, p...

However one views it, the changes to housing tenure in the 1980s were pronounced and have had enduring effects in terms of the housing market. In this paper, we throw light on the relationship between housing tenure and the experience of property crime in and around what might be referred to as domestic environments (i.e. people’s homes). In so doi...

However one views it, the changes to housing tenure in the 1980s were pronounced and have had enduring effects in terms of the housing market. In this paper, we throw light on the relationship between housing tenure and the experience of property crime in and around what might be referred to as domestic environments (i.e. people’s homes). In so doi...

Exploring long-term trends in crime and criminal justice is a multifaceted exercise. This article introduces the construction and methodological benefits of a series of new data sets that amalgamate approximately 30 years of public data on crime, victimization, fear of crime, social and political attitudes with national socio-economic indicators in...

Three decades after the events themselves and with full access to the public record, historians and political scientists are now well placed to revisit and re-evaluate the ‘Winter of Discontent’. This article reflects on the first book-length studies of the period published since the opening of the archives. I argue that although neither study prof...

A major programme of research on cognition has been built around the idea that human beings are frequently intuitive thinkers and that human intuition is imperfect. The modern marketing of politics and the time-poor position of many citizens suggests that ‘fast’, intuitive, thinking in many contemporary democracies is ubiquitous. This article explo...

In recent years, criminologists have devoted growing attention to the extent to which ‘punitiveness’ is emerging as a central feature of many criminal justice systems. In gauging punitiveness, these studies typically rely either on attitudinal data derived from surveys which measure individual support for punitive sentences or on the size of the pr...

Le vote est une pratique symbolique. Pourtant, les politistes tendent à se focaliser sur les résultats des élections ou sur les motivations du vote, en oubliant la signification symbolique de la pratique elle-même et celle qu’elle a pour les participants. Dans cet article, nous attirons l’attention sur cette dimension à travers une analyse des ritu...

Margaret Thatcher changed British politics – but did her policies change our political attitudes? In a ground‐breaking new study Emily Gray, Stephen Farrall, Colin Hay, Danny Dorling and Will Jennings find that the ‘Iron Lady’ left a lasting impact on British social attitudes that is still being felt today. Margaret Thatcher changed British politic...

Margaret Thatcher changed British politics – but did her policies change our political attitudes? In a ground-breaking new study Emily Gray, Stephen Farrall, Colin Hay, Danny Dorling and Will Jennings find that the ‘Iron Lady’ left a lasting impact on British social attitudes that is still being felt today.

As we struggle with the legacy of the crisis and with the prospect of accelerating environmental degradation, it is time to ask not what we can do for capitalism but what capitalism can do for us, as citizens of a democratic society. In Civic Capitalism, Colin Hay and Anthony Payne build on their influential analysis of the crisis of the Anglo-libe...

Bold approaches to data collection and large-scale quantitative advances have long been a preoccupation for social science researchers. In this commentary we further debate over the use of large-scale survey data and official statistics with ‘Big Data’ methodologists, and emphasise the ability of these resources to incorporate the essential social...

This article Examines the social construction of the economic imperative of ‘rebalancing’ and the substantive policies to which it has been linked in the UK since the crisis. Shows how the discourse of rebalancing offers a novel presentation of economic policy imperatives, but at the same time circumscribes the sectoral, regional and temporal param...

Exploring long-term trends in crime and criminal justice is a multifaceted exercise. This article introduces the construction and methodological benefits of a series of new data sets that amalgamate approximately 30 years of public data on crime, victimization, fear of crime, social and political attitudes with national socio-economic indicators in...

Since 2007 the question of growth has plagued the British economy. Though, at the time of writing in the early summer of 2014, growth has returned, a pervasive anxiety about the solidity, stability and sustainability of that growth persists, even in the most hallowed of elite political circles. Thus, even the recently appointed Governor of the Bank...

Britain remains mired in the most severe and prolonged economic crisis that it has faced since the 1930s. The financial crash of 2007 brought British growth to a sharp halt, while the subsequent double-dip recession has eaten away at living standards and dampened future prospects. In such a context the question of growth has acquired a renewed urge...

Not only did the global financial crisis transform the prevailing institutions, policies and practices of contemporary capitalism, it also had a profound impact upon the discipline of economics itself. From 2008 a different crisis, one of public legitimacy, engulfed academic economics as critics railed against its failure to predict the onset of un...

In this brief response to Bob Jessop's probing yet sympathetic critique, I clarify further the ‘as if realist’ political ontology of the state. I suggest that critical realism's appeal to the ontological stratification of social reality and to the logic of retroduction are the principal stumbling blocks for ‘as if realists’, that the appeal to stat...

The state is one of series of concepts (capitalism, patriarchy and class being others) which pose a particular kind of ontological difficulty and provoke a particular kind of ontological controversy – for it is far from self-evident that the object or entity to which they refer is in any obvious sense ‘real’. In this paper I make the case for devel...

Voting is a symbolic practice. Yet as political scientists focus increasingly either on the outcomes of elections or on citizens’ motivations to vote in the first place – typically by building models of the former on assumptions made about the later – we tend to forget the symbolic significance of the practice itself and the meaning and impact it h...

This chapter seeks to introduce, in the most general terms, the concept of 'levels' within political economic analysis, reflecting on the stratified ontology of political economy on which it rests. The chapter develops an ontology of political economy, considering whether and to what extent it is accurate and/or useful to refer to political economi...

To what extent do we need a 'second-wave' of writing on depoliticisation to correct the biases of the first and thereby to improve our capacity to gain analytical traction on the dynamic interplay between politicising and depoliticising tendencies in contemporary liberal democracies? In this article I welcome the debate this special issue has opene...

This chapter reflects on the debates surrounding Thatcherism with the benefit of hindsight. Most commentators seem to accept that Thatcherism is now a historic concept—referring, if not exactly to the period 1979–90, then certainly to events now largely concluded. This allows us a degree of historical perspective that was previously unavailable. Cu...

This concluding chapter assesses the legacy of Thatcherism in the light of the preceding analysis. It does so by returning to two influential earlier assessments, written whilst Thatcherism was very much still a work in progress, re-assessing and re-evaluating its enduring significance with the benefit of hindsight. It argues that whilst Thatcheris...

In the Working Paper, we have sought to outline our thinking on a very large and complex undertaking; namely the assessment of the ways in which the Thatcher governments of the 1980s may have had quite unintended consequences on crime via some of the policies which they set about pursuing for quite separate reasons, but which, nevertheless contribu...

This textbook provides a systematic introduction to international political ecomomy. It covers the major approaches to globalization and governance in international political economy, as well as contemporary issues, and key controversies and debates. International Political Economy is divided into three parts. The first part covers the major theore...

In the wake of the deepest and longest recession that the United Kingdom has experienced since the 1930s and the Irish Republic has experienced since the 1980s, this paper examines the origins, sustenance, and puncturing of the growth dynamic both economies have enjoyed since the early 1990s. It identifies, in both cases, elements of an ‘Anglo-libe...

Isabela and Norman Fairclough have written a very important book whose full significance is perhaps in danger of being missed if we view it simply, in their own selfdepiction, as a text for advanced students. Indeed, in what follows I want to argue that their book is much better seen as the occasion for a debate that we desperately need to be havin...

The global financial crisis has generated an intense debate in academic, business, journalistic and political circles alike about what went wrong and how to put it right. In this provocative reassessment of the crisis and its implications, Colin Hay argues that it is only by acknowledging the complicity and culpability of an Anglo-liberal model of...

So, do we need growth and might we learn to live without it? Nearly all of us who write regularly for SPERI Comment have at least nodded in the direction of the need to think beyond growth in some way. But we have typically left it at that, with the question of what 'beyond growth' actually means left unresolved. In fact, most of us (and I include...

It is a considerable pleasure to be invited to comment on such a valuable and timely set of reflectionson the concept of politics itself. Each reminds us in a different way of our responsibility, as politicalanalysts and politicizers of social processes, to our subject matter and to political subjects – theagents of the practices we seek to describ...

It has taken quite a while for a consolidated crisis discourse to emerge in Britain in response to the seismic events of 2007–09. But one is now clearly evident, widely accepted and deeply implicated in government economic policy. It is a ‘crisis of debt’ discourse to which the response is austerity and deficit reduction; it is paradigm‐reinforcing...

Judging solely by the continued prevalence of the term in policy-makers’ discourse, Paul Krugman's now famous warnings as to the ‘dangerous obsession’ of competitiveness have fallen on deaf ears. In this paper I argue that this is, at least in part, because policy-makers (as distinct, perhaps, from business school gurus) never understood competitiv...

British politics has experienced unprecedented change in recent years. The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition that emerged from the 2010 general election represented a marked departure from the single-party majorities Britain is accustomed to. And in the wake of the global economic crisis, the country now faces a new era of austerity. Cuts in...

This article seeks to gauge the nature, distinctiveness and significance of the ‘interpretivist turn’ in public administration and political science more broadly. It considers the various interpretations and, indeed, misinterpretations to which this new hermeneutics of public administration has given rise, its relationship to (genuinely and seeming...

What, if anything, was Thatcherism? This article aims to gauge the extent to which it is credible and useful to speak of Thatcherism in the singular. It does so by developing a series of periodisations of the policy-making process in different policy domains since the late 1970s. This allows us to assess the degree to which a common rationale—such...

This chapter focuses on the ontological, analytical, and methodological distinctiveness of constructivist institutionalism, assessing the challenge it poses to those institutionalisms in whose paths it follows. The chapter proceeds in three sections. The first section discusses how constructivist institutionalism arose in response to problems of ch...

In the wake of the deepest and longest recession the UK has experienced since the 1930s, this article examines the origins, sustenance and puncturing of the growth dynamic the UK economy enjoyed between 1992 and 2007. In so doing it seeks to gauge the interventions made to attempt to shore up the growth model and the prospects for the resumption of...

There is a growing acceptance in the literature of a potentially significant causal role for ideas about globalization in shaping the trajectory of policy and institutional reform in contemporary Europe. Yet we still know remarkably little about policy-makers' understandings of globalization, save those they choose to declare publicly. This paper c...

The year 2010 may well come to be seen as a tipping point in the political and economic history of Britain in the twenty-first century. This article seeks to establish its potential political and economic significance by reflecting on the implications of the global financial crisis and the new politics of private and public austerity to which it ha...

Reflecting on the current state of political science – and the place of European political science within it – this piece considers the capacity of the discipline to respond to the challenges thrown up by real-world events in an era of acknowledged interdependence. It argues that the European tradition of political science is, if anything, better p...

Political economists and economic sociologists remain thoroughly divided on the anticipated impact of the globalization of markets on their institutional form and character. In this paper, I extend and update earlier work on the en primeur market for Bordeaux wines, examining empirically the impact of the demonstrable globalization of the process o...

Thirty years on, and in the context of a new crisis, it is time to return to the Winter of Discontent and to the mythology that it has generated. In this paper, I show that the Winter of Discontent was in many respects a manufactured crisis-lived, experienced and responded to through a very particular construction of the events. And I show that suc...

Despite becoming almost synonymous in the public's imagination with ‘law and order’ and toughness on crime, the Thatcher years (1979-90) would not be characterized by many criminologists as a period of radical reform of the criminal justice system. Thatcherism, it seems, was far less radical in the criminal policy field than it was in housing, the...

The Oxford Handbook of British Politics has been conceived, not just to illustrate both the breadth and depth of scholarship that is to be found within the field, but also to demonstrate the vibrancy and critical self-reflection that has cultivated a much sharper and engaging, and notably less insular, approach to the terrain it seeks to explore an...

In the wake of the deepest and longest recession the UK has experienced since the 1930s, this paper examines the origins, sustenance and puncturing of the growth dynamic the UK economy enjoyed between 1992 and 2007. In so doing it seeks to gauge the character, paradigmatic significance and effectiveness of the interventions made in the attempt to s...

Thirty years on, and in the context of our own crisis, it is perhaps useful to take stock of the last Winter of Discontent. The industrial strife that beset the Callaghan government in the winter of 1978/79 was seen at the time as a key factor in Labour's defeat in the general election of 1979; but its legacy is considerable and its significance en...

In a discipline such as ours, in which all contributions are necessarily preliminary – and should perhaps best be seen as openings to potential conversations rather than definitive statements in their own right – it is always pleasing to have one's work engaged with explicitly and directly. Yet the satisfaction that comes with a new opportunity for...

In this framing paper for the special issue as a whole, the authors review existing attempts to diagnose and respond to the condition of political disaffection and disengagement afflicting our democratic polities. They caution against an overemphasis on measures to address declining turnout - which they see as a symptom of a more general condition....

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This article presents a comparative analysis of the determinants, sustenance and broader macroeconomic consequences of the ultimately unsustainable housing boom in Ireland and the UK in recent years. It examines, in particular, the role played by ostensibly depoliticised monetary policy in both contexts in the development of a house price bubble th...

The story of King Canute (Cnut) is well known. Indeed, in perhaps its most familiar form it exists as an oral historical tradition passed from generation to generation. In this almost legendary account, King Canute is depicted as an arrogant ruler, so confident as to his own omnipotence that he takes on the forces of nature, pitting his own powers...

With Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) the European Union is embarked on a major historic political project of formidable technical complexity. In January 2009 the Euro Area will be ten years old. What does the evidence from the first decade tell us about the significance of the euro for the EU and its member states? This book brings together a ran...

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  Recent years have seen growing interest in the political power of ideas, especially in debates about globalisation and European integration. As is now widely noted, constructions of globalisation and European integration may play a powerful causal role in shaping policy prescriptions across Europe. Yet, while a substantial body of theoretical lit...

The appeal to ideas as causal variables and/or constitutive features of political processes increasingly characterises political analysis. Yet, perhaps because of the pace of this ideational intrusion, too often ideas have simply been grafted onto pre-existing explanatory theories at precisely the point at which they seem to get into difficulties,...

It is our aim to draw attention to and ultimately to transcend this stark dualism of national politics and international economics. If we are to understand the very processes and practices of economic and political globalisation, it is imperative that we refuse to privilege either the economic or the political, just as we refuse to privilege the tr...

Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s the pages of journals such as this were filled with debate – invariably heated – on the nature, extent, significance and reversibility of Thatcherism. Today the echoes of a once deafening clamour have largely subsided. Thatcherism has all but disappeared from the lexicon of British political analysis. My aim...

Whatever its limitations, the academic literature has not been short in supplying adjectives to describe and characterize the political economy of New Labour. Yet until Ben Clift and Jim Tomlinson's provocative and imaginative intervention in the debate published in this journal, ‘Keynesian’ was not one of them. In a way it is odd that New Labour's...

Winner of the 2008 W J M Mackenzie Book Prize Politics was once a term with an array of broadly positive connotations, associated with public scrutiny, deliberation and accountability. Yet today it is an increasingly dirty word, typically synonymous with duplicity, corruption, inefficiency and undue interference in matters both public and private....

[Labour's] new programme accepts the basic parameters of the Thatcher Settlement, in much the same way that the Conservative governments of the fifties accepted the parameters of the Attlee Settlement. It does not seek to extend the public sector or reverse privatization to any significant degree. It does not propose to raise the overall level of t...

The fact that Britain will, at most, be a late signatory to the single European currency means that the strategic deliberations it faces in deciding whether to enter EMU are rather different to those of earlier entrants. However, this crucial point is lost in almost all discussion of the subject. To date, the academic debate has been dominated by w...

The appeal to globalization as a non-negotiable external economic constraint plays an increasingly significant role in the linked politics of expectation suppression and welfare reform in contemporary Europe. Yet, although it threatens to become something of a self- fulfilling prophecy, the thesis that globalization entails welfare retrenchment and...

This article examines the relevance of ontology to political analysis. It explains that as political science became more reflexive and less confident that it was before, ontological concerns have increasingly come to the fore. It stresses the fact that no political analysis has ever been ontologically neutral. It discusses the concept of political...

The future of the welfare state in advanced liberal democracies is increasingly judged in economic terms. For, in an era of economic globalisation and heightened competition between economies, it is invariably suggested that the welfare state must prove its value in an exhaustive competitive audit if it is not to reveal itself an indulgent luxury a...

Stuart McAnulla provides an eloquent defence of a particular variant of critical realism, suggesting that it provides a more appropriate set of ontological foundations for the kind of critical political analysis I espouse than the ontological actualism he attributes to me. In this rejoinder, whilst welcoming McAnulla's important intervention in the...

In recent years there has been growing interest in the role of discourses of globalisation and European integration in shaping political outcomes. As a variety of authors have suggested, these discourses may play a powerful causal role in determining the trajectory of policy change and, as such, should be treated as objects of enquiry in their own...