Three Lenses on Politics: Depoliticisation in Space, Time and Activity

Overview

This is not the first period in recent history in which theorists have identified systematic depoliticisation as a condition of and threat to politics (also, from very different political standpoints, Carl Schmitt in the 1930s and Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s). What is unusual perhaps about present discussions is the intensity of debate in political science on, most notably, depoliticised modes of governance and ‘post-politics’. The former concern has been most apparent in UK-based and -focused research, which has analysed the tangible strategies and effects of depoliticisation on contemporary governance. Its strength is that it has engaged with the complexities of depoliticisation and politicisation dynamics (e.g. Hay, 2007) and the contingency of democratic politics (Kettell, 2008: 632).

Generally, depoliticisation is understood as the denial of political choice, the delegation of decision-making to technocratic experts and growing public disengagement from politics (see Flinders and Wood, 2014). Useful conceptual approaches have been developed to apprehend, for example, the ‘principles, tactics and tools’ (Flinders and Buller, 2006) of depoliticisation, the three – societal, discursive and governmental – ‘faces’ of depoliticisation (Wood and Flinders, 2014) and how depoliticisation varies across levels of governance (Jessop, 2014; Wood, 2015). Up until now, however, the literature has remained relatively narrow in empirical depth and scope (Hay, 2014), its conceptual tools developed largely in relation to British national politics (e.g. Flinders and Buller, 2006; Kerr et al., 2011), while non-state actors and (re)politicisation have often been overlooked (Donmez, 2014). Beyond the still limited empirical research agenda on depoliticisation, there has been a lack of both conceptual debate and clarity on notions of politics thus far utilised in research (Jenkins, 2011). This is in stark contrast to the more theoretical work on depoliticisation. Here, notions such as ‘post-democratic’ (Rancière, 1998; compare Crouch, 2004) and, particularly, the ‘post-political’ (Mouffe, 2005) have been used to capture a democratic condition in which genuine contestation and conflicting claims about the world are perceived to be no longer apparent. Generally, in this literature, the focus is on the political itself as an antagonistic condition and its inherent and increasing precariousness in the face of the rigmarole of institutionalised politics.

These strands of literature are in relative agreement on the foremost sources and effects of contemporary depoliticisation: economic globalisation/global corporate power, the dominance of neoliberal thinking and the rise of consensus-orientated and technocratic governance. Hence, it is straightforward to delineate depoliticisation as a research field, and recent articles provide excellent critical surveys (e.g. in this journal, Wood, 2015).

However, the differences apparent in the treatment of politics and their implications for the understanding of the nature of the contemporary depoliticisation problem have yet to be fully teased out. It is thus to the latter point that this brief review of the literature pays most attention. As shown in Table 1, the intention is to review critically the ontologies of the political and their implications as lenses on politics for depoliticisation research: politics lens 1: statecraft and the institutions of government, politics lens 2: choice and contingency, politics lens 3: politics as the apparatus of order and consensus-building versus ‘political’ moments of antagonism.

Politics Lens 1: Statecraft and the Institutions of Government

This lens on politics is the most narrow and conventional. In fact, often in this strand of literature the links between (de)politicisation and politics and the political are underexplored and/or under-theorised (Jenkins, 2011). In large part, politics is only implicitly and narrowly defined as the institutions of government. From this, depoliticisation is understood as a form of statecraft, whereby governments alter the arena and character of political decision-making (Flinders and Buller, 2006; compare Burnham, 2001). Such narrow definitions do provide clarity and thus some empirical traction (Jenkins, 2011: 158–159). But defining depoliticisation as a governance strategy, as a ‘process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making’ (Burnham, 2001: 128), confines the discussion of depoliticisation both spatially (at its source, if not in its effects, to formal political institutions) and in terms of activity (as a practice of statecraft). It also implicitly confines it in temporal terms, as depoliticisation is seen as emerging from the machinations of the state. Even if its spatial effects span aspects of society and hence provide longevity, depoliticisation is a strategy, one conceived in specific space and time boundaries (e.g. policy processes).

Depoliticisation (of policies, issues and claims) can certainly be viewed as an age-old strategy of statecraft. But politics as practised today is far too multifarious for such a constricted view of depoliticisation – instances of politicisation and depoliticisation can emerge from and span across the social (and not just the political) realm (Hay, 2007). Peter Burnham (2014) may be right to argue for the methodological advantages of a narrow definition, and his own research adopting this lens has provided refined insights on depoliticisation as statecraft. Ultimately, however, utilising this lens eliminates from view much of contemporary political activity, the sources of and realms through which (de) politicisation occurs, that is, the political itself. Hence, it restricts the scope of empirical enquiry into depoliticisation. It also risks reifying a conventional understanding of representative politics despite its intention to normatively critique it.