Interpretive Approaches to British Government and Politics

This paper has two aims. First, in contrast to the modernist empiricism of mainstream political science, we provide brief introductions to several interpretive approaches to the study of political science and British government and politics: idealism, social humanism, post-structuralism, and ideational institutionalism. Second, we identify the distinctive research agendas that arise from this family of approaches: namely, critique, decentring governance, ethnographic studies of British politics, and policy analysis as storytelling. © 2006 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.