Description
Responding to current debates about the trajectory of political science in the UK, this paper argues for greater conceptual and analytical attention to the disciplining of political science. In particular, I document a peculiar tendency in British political science, in which politics itself - conceived as the domain of power and conflictuality - is subject to a range of techniques of marginalisation, disciplining and displacement. I do this via an analysis of the hegemony of the much discussed “Westminster Model” in British political science. The paper’s overall argument is that the Westminster Model should be understood as a sensibility that shapes not just the scope of political scientists’ object of study, but also the normative and affective relations that shape political scientists’ scholarly practices. The first half of the paper offers a mapping of the contours of the Westminster Model’s hegemony, highlighting its affective and normative (as well as analytic) dimensions. The second part of the paper offers an analysis of the performative and disciplining effects of the Westminster Model by tracing the discipline’s varying responses to forms of politics that fall outside the contours of the Westminster Model. In so doing, I identify three “strategies of containment” that serve to limit the disruptive potential of forms of politics that diverge from the Westminster Model: invisibilisation, domestication and demonisation. I conclude by suggesting that these strategies serve to displace and obscure the very object of study that political science ostensibly seeks to analyse, i.e. politics.
