TERRITORY AND POWER, ITS CRITICS AND ITS DEFENDERS

Bulpitt's Territory and Power sought to clarify the key components of the system of governance, to understand the nature of institutional political culture and to explore the key assumptions guiding the exercise of authority and power across the entirety of a nation-state. From this basis he sought to develop the study of governmental decision-making as it affected a broad range of subjects, including economic policy, foreign affairs and sub-national politics. His approach stemmed from a vigorous critique of contemporary political science. These criticisms were: first, of constitutional approaches that emphasized the importance of ideas and legal rules in politics; second, of public administration studies that assumed the importance of interorganizational relations to governmental actions; and third, of Michael Hechter's internal colonialism thesis, which emphasized the class basis to relations between a territorial centre and exploited peripheries. Bulpitt believed that these approaches used concepts very ambiguously. Federalism, for example, had come to mean all things to all people. All of the approaches overstretched the potential for their analytical frameworks to underpin a broader analysis of politics. The public administration study of centre–local relations, for example, left a lot of politics out. Such approaches, while competing over how to study politics, also accepted the greatest myth in the study of UK politics: that of the over-mighty and coercive centre. This was most starkly exhibited in Hechter's account of the capitalist class concentrated in London and the south-east of England. Finally, UK political science was preoccupied and blinded by normative preoccupations about the proper shape of government and its decision-making rules; whether it was in favour of constitutional federalism, governmental decentralization or the re-empowerment of exploited proletarian peripheries.Footnote ²

Bulpitt wanted to develop a framework for analysis that was both manageable and plausible yet also offered an account of the nature of governing across the whole polity. This project depended on refining a number of linked concepts. First, he conceptualized territorial politics. He defined this as ‘that arena of political activity concerned with the relations between the central political institutions in the capital city and those interests, communities, political organisation and governmental bodies outside the central institutional complex, but within the accepted boundaries of the state, which possess, or are commonly perceived to possess, a significant geographical or local/regional character’.Footnote ³ Second, in studying territorial politics, Bulpitt drew on an idea from the study of English history – that territorial politics could be understood as a division between a centre court and the country beyond it. Using the updated concepts of centre and periphery, where the centre was ‘the locus of actual political power’ in the central governing complex and the periphery was everywhere else, he defined centre–periphery relations as the ‘primary cleavage in society between a “central value system”, its institutions and elite supporters, and subordinate peripheral value systems and their non-elite supporters’.Footnote ⁴ Third, Bulpitt advocated an explicitly centre approach to analysis examining the centre's approach to territorial management as it responded to tensions in court–country relationships.

In analysing the centre's approaches to territorial management Bulpitt then drew up a typology of territorial governing codes, which guided the centre's strategic approach to governing. These codes were defined by their extent of centre intervention into peripheral affairs. First there was simple central penetration for such purposes as law and order and raising taxes. Second, there was an attempt at local elite assimilation, organizing indirect rule through local collaborators. Third, there was a move to central control, entailing imposing limitations and/or demands on peripheral governors. Fourth, the centre established its own organizations in the periphery to help it govern. Fifth, and finally, the centre sought to encourage support from people in the periphery. Bulpitt also explored the strategies that the centre might wish to pursue and how these interacted with territorial management codes. Laissez-faire strategies were most consistent with relatively less-interventionist codes, while promotional ones demanded more interest in control and mobilization. He also explored the kinds of political resources that the centre might develop to support the successful prosecution of strategies and codes. These comprised political culture, constitutional rules, the power and role of the bureaucracy, the nature of the party system and economic resources. Finally, Bulpitt insisted on the importance of the link between centre–periphery relations and external affairs in how territorial management was developed. He introduced the concept of the external support system, where the centre would seek to use foreign policy to support domestic policies.Footnote ⁵

The concepts Bulpitt employed were not in themselves original as he mined a broad scholarship in comparative politics and British history, but he combined them into a conceptual framework for analysis that was innovative. He demanded that the study of politics should have a historical perspective, and – true to his word –Territory and Power delivers an account of the development of territorial politics in the British Isles from the eleventh century onwards. He argued that there was a relatively low level of centre intervention into peripheral affairs in the UK. Chapters 3 to 7 interpret the English centre and – after the Union of England with Scotland, Wales and Ireland – the British centre as employing a territorial code based on the precepts of local elite assimilation. This was associated with territorial management strategies that – even into the twentieth century – could generally be characterized as detached. The centre sought to use up as few of its precious political resources over territorial affairs as possible. In its development of an external support complex, the centre generally sought an approach that would ‘attempt to minimize the impact of external forces on domestic politics, or ensure that these forces are favourable to the maintenance of domestic tranquillity’.Footnote ⁶

Bulpitt invoked a distinction between high and low politics concerns determined by whatever the centre considered to be central strategic priorities and what were considered troublesome nuisances. In the main, high politics was focused on the economy, defence, global prestige and the management of the external support complex. Low politics referred to a wide range of social and individual concerns that centre governors sought to get reliable peripheral elites to adopt. Generally, the English – and subsequently the UK – centre aim in pursuing a code of local elite assimilation was to gain centre ‘autonomy from peripheral forces to concentrate on what it regards as “high politics” ’.Footnote ⁷ Bulpitt traced this approach to governing back into pre-modern times, but his analysis is perhaps best known for its interpretation of the period between the 1920s and the 1960s when – even amid the growth of government – the centre's desire to separate high and low politics concerns can be discerned. They pursued this strategy so successfully that Bulpitt dubs this period the dual polity.Footnote ⁸

This interpretation of UK territorial politics was far from celebratory. It was grittily realistic about the underlying difficulties of governing an island state composed of different national groupings and a resentful English core, and of maintaining the perception of state success from the late nineteenth century onwards. Territory and Power emphasized the modernization challenges around the start of the twentieth century – and then again from the 1960s onwards – that threatened to overwhelm historical patterns of centre–periphery relations. In seeking to withstand these challenges, the approach to managing the UK had strong parallels with how the centre sought to continue to govern the empire as it struggled under the weight of its many varied responsibilities, ceding some power to local elite collaborators to keep the show on the road. In many ways the centre-autonomy approach to governing was the only approach that was realistic. To be more interventionist domestically would have inflamed peripheral dissent and unravelled the implicit understandings that held the territorial state together. It would also have immersed centre politicians in extensive domestic entanglements that would have made the assertion of external interests very difficult. However, just as Bulpitt assessed the centre's problems in managing the decline of the empire, so too did he see that the domestic approach to governing was ultimately vulnerable to challenge by elites and publics in the periphery.

Bulpitt argued that the UK's traditional approach to governing withstood the pressures for modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the challenges from the 1960s onwards presented a much stiffer test. The dual polity declined and governments from those of Harold Macmillan onwards went in search of a new approach to territorial management. There was an intensification of the pressures on UK government in the 1970s, both from increasingly assertive elites in the periphery and from the centre's weakness in dealing with crises. The decade saw the political defeat of the biggest territorial challenge, that of nationalism in Scotland and Wales. Devolution referenda in 1979 failed to gain either a majority (Wales) or foundered on legislative obstacles (Scotland). Then in 1979 the British people elected a Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher, that was highly committed to withdrawing from reform agendas that entertained territorial fragmentation on the one hand or a permanently more interventionist central state on the other. Even so, as Bulpitt signed off in 1983, he observed that Thatcherism was a composite code in which long-term aspirations to return to a more sustainable centre-autonomy approach to governing coexisted with short-term measures of greater central intervention to sort out the UK's political and economic problems. His political astrology confirmed both his perception of the continued influence of centre approaches to governing that focused on achieving autonomy from peripheral affairs as well as his pithy analysis of the vulnerabilities and challenges of governing the UK that made the future uncertain.

Criticisms of Territory and Power come in a variety of forms.Footnote ⁹ First, it is criticized for the relatively high level of abstraction of the conceptual framework. Concepts of the centre and periphery are thought to be too vague; and notions of high and low politics are too problematic if they have no fixed meaning. Second, its methodology is found fault with for privileging an elite-centred and top-down approach to the study of politics, which omits too much that is important, especially in territorial politics. Third, it is an enclosed approach to analysis, explaining politics as part of a system of relationships rather than in terms of concepts and methods employed from the rest of political science. Just as much as in Marxism, this self-referential type of analysis can lend itself to functionalist explanation and a circularity of argument. If one makes certain ‘as if’ assumptions, then certain arguments can be pursued that endorse the original ‘as if’ assumptions, without any recourse to a proper methodology for testing either the assumptions or the resulting arguments.

Fourth, the centre approach is criticized for the inherent problems involved in researching a territorial management code. Indeed, Territory and Power put forward relatively little empirical evidence regarding the centre's motivations and actions and its role in centre–periphery relations. Implicitly Bulpitt stands accused of developing a perspective, not a set of testable hypotheses or an explanatory theory. Fifth, in applying his interpretation historically, Bulpitt's analysis is in sharp contrast with a large historically based literature that emphasizes the rise of centralization in UK politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Generally he is attacked for exaggerating the extent of the centre's lack of interest in peripheral affairs. Sixth, Bulpitt's approach is thought to have become ever more inapplicable. Globalization and Europeanization have rendered a state-focused approach to politics and an attention to territorial management increasingly marginal to current political trends and their causes. Following this, it becomes questionable as to whether Bulpitt's thesis has much relevance to the study of contemporary politics. Finally, Bulpitt is labelled a Tory, developing a historical account of the UK that over-stresses the importance of continuity and tradition. In viewing politics from the perspectives of centre elites, Territory and Power is over-sympathetic to the problems of those who govern and gives little or no voice to those who are outside the circles of power.

The latter part of the twentieth century saw a transformation of comparative political science, involving considerable refinement of both the research traditions that Bulpitt critiqued, as well as the development of new ones. Despite the many criticisms, UK political scientists did not ignore Territory and Power. Notably, Rhodes engaged with it as part of his reconstruction of how to develop the study of governance out of traditional public administration and centre–local relations approaches. Describing the dual polity theory in Territory and Power as ‘the most stimulating contribution to the analysis of centre–periphery relations in the UK’, Rhodes accepts that public administration writers had previously drawn their methodological focus too narrowly.Footnote ¹⁰ Rhodes seeks to include political as well as governmental organizations in the study of how the UK was territorially governed. This leads him to an account of the multiplicity of policy networks in UK territorial politics, and to an analysis of the UK as an increasingly differentiated polity. Referencing Territory and Power for its discussion of the UK as a dual polity was widespread in the 1980s research literature on UK centre–local relations.Footnote ¹¹ Within the literature on devolution from the late 1990s, Territory and Power continues to be cited for its definition of the broader field of territorial politics.Footnote ¹² Recently, Bevir and Rhodes in their development of an interpretivist approach to studying governance acknowledge Territory and Power for its invitation to ‘explore the operational code, or rules of statecraft, of central political elites’ and ‘the historical analysis of the beliefs and actions of elite actors’.Footnote ¹³

Even so, recent work feels the need to defend Territory and Power against criticisms within UK political science. Bradbury, in his discussion of the utility of Territory and Power for scholarship on devolution, emphasizes that constitutional, governance and neo-Marxist approaches still face the problems of ambiguous and/or overstretched conceptual frameworks for understanding the politics of devolution. The literature now abounds with rich periphery-focused analyses, but this has contributed to a fragmented understanding of the significance of devolution to the UK state as a whole. The conceptual framework of Territory and Power remains attractive precisely because it does focus on the big picture and assesses the significance of devolution for the whole polity, rather than individual parts of it. Bradbury also stresses that Bulpitt conceded the self-referential character of his conceptual framework and admitted the paucity of his empirics. Readers, however, do not observe Bulpitt's modesty in the claims he made for his book. Essential to its provocative intellectual project, Territory and Power drew on a large scholarship and assumed a great deal of knowledge in the reader. However, it made limited empirical claims and focused on interpretation. Bulpitt's theoretical purpose was to shake up questionable and complacent conventional wisdoms.Footnote ¹⁴ He directly stated that it was for future scholars to explore the empirical validity of his claims, to test, refute and revise them as they saw fit.Footnote ¹⁵

At the same time Bradbury defends the focus on centre codes of territorial management. Bulpitt's approach recognized the relevance of unobservable political factors that inform the actions of government on a day-to-day basis. The assumptions that guide governors are not written down in a tidy constitutional document. Equally, Bradbury agrees with Bulpitt's approach to centre–periphery relations, which stresses the importance of domestic politics. It is questionable whether globalization and/or Europeanization have fully transformed conceptual approaches to the study of comparative politics.Footnote ¹⁶ For example, both Bulmer and Burch, and Marsh et al. in their studies of the implications of European integration for UK government emphasize the autonomy of UK central departments in managing the changing external context to its decision-making processes and policies.Footnote ¹⁷ Bradbury also characterizes Bulpitt as an historical institutionalist – before such an approach and its terminology became fashionable. Bulpitt dealt with the governing code of the UK as if it were perpetuated by path-dependent processes, only breached by occasional critical junctures, such as challenges of modernization. Bradbury suggests that even the Blair governments were influenced by the old centre-autonomy governing code in their management of territorial politics, in spite of devolution having changed many of the rules of the game.Footnote ¹⁸

In his introduction to the reissue in the ECPR Classics series, John echoes many of these points, suggesting that Territory and Power is an important work because it ‘provides a set of concepts and a subtle account of the exercise of power that can apply to any governing system’, and ‘because its terms and concepts have subsequently entered conventional thinking in academic circles’.Footnote ¹⁹ The nature of the assumptions and the operations of centre governors are important research topics, which often inexplicably are neglected, but even then they are only pursued by Bulpitt as part of the project to understand centre–periphery relations more broadly. Bradbury reminds us that Bulpitt's overall aim ‘was actually more selfless than has often been recognised. He was trying to create a coherent academic community, by paying some attention to the conception of a common language of analysis to bring disparate literatures together.’Footnote ²⁰ John concludes that ‘many of the common criticisms set out above are not entirely valid or suggest further lines of enquiry and a need to deepen the research rather than a rejection of the book's central themes.’Footnote ²¹

Territory and Power made a powerful statement about how to study territorial politics. In so doing, it has influenced the academy and inspired criticism in somewhat equal measure. It is generally the case that any valid intellectual project has its critics: the more important the contribution the more it tends to attract. The fact that Territory and Power can generate debate on the big issues in comparative politics suggests that it should be reassessed further. In bringing together a collection of articles written both in sympathy and critique, there is an opportunity to deepen understanding of the research agenda that the book raises, and to pursue lines of inquiry that enrich debate more generally about the study of comparative and UK politics.

TERRITORY AND POWER AND REASSESSMENTS OF UK AND COMPARATIVE POLITICS

In exploring Territory and Power, this special issue readdresses the themes raised by the book, as well as the critical perspectives and debate that have followed. The overall objective is to reconsider the significance of the book for contemporary scholarship. Articles focus on how to understand the place of the work in the canon of academic research, its relevance to the study of particular topics in comparative and UK research, and the research agenda it suggests for contemporary scholarship.

Bradbury addresses the fact that – for all its virtues –Territory and Power has continued to be peripheral to the main intellectual conversations about how to study comparative and UK politics. He builds on previous work by arguing that a key way to overcome this problem is to locate it more fully as a distinct contribution to two major schools of comparative politics research that address the broader general issue of state political development. First, Territory and Power should be understood as part of the intellectual turn to bring the state back into political analysis. Its methodological concerns echoed many of those that shaped the work of comparative political scientists in the 1980s. Its distinct contribution was to focus on government rather than governance in providing a realist elite framework for analysing state autonomy. It provided a novel integrated framework for analysing the operation of state government in any particular historical or state context.

Second, Bradbury argues that Territory and Power should be seen as a work of temporal political science concerned with the state's political development. Bulpitt reflected and to some extent prefigured the efforts of historical institutionalists in the 1980s and 1990s to distinguish and assess the role of temporal mechanisms in political development. In so doing he echoed many of the concerns of US political scientists who sought to apply a rigorous approach to how history influences our understanding of contemporary politics. Bulpitt's approach showed how long-term continuities in governing practice in the UK became path dependent, but also how short periods of acute change – critical junctures – were important to challenging these embedded approaches to governing. In the light of this tension, he wanted to understand the ways in which long-term approaches to governing re-emerged or, as he put it, how the centre governing elite sought to return to moderate politics after periods of crisis.

Bradbury suggests that Bulpitt also followed the ambitions of temporal political science in wishing to develop an interpretation of contemporary political development on the basis of a historical appreciation of what defines the contemporary period. Specifically, writing in 1983 he considered contemporary UK politics to be mainly characterized by governing responses to a crisis that had its roots in the early 1960s. It was a period of critical juncture caused by the collapse of the external support system through loss of international power and continued economic decline. The centre's anxieties led to positive action (or modernization) policies and resulting peripheral dissent. Bradbury suggests that in interpreting political development both before and since the early 1980s it remains useful to adopt Bulpitt's basic premise that analysis should focus on government and the challenges of modernization. Implicitly, Territory and Power also suggested how political scientists should use analysis of mechanisms of past political development to formulate predictive prior expectations of contemporary political development. Consequently, analysis should consider government in terms of the continued efforts to resolve the governing dilemmas of rebuilding a durable external support system, achieving successful modernization and resettling politics.

Overall, Bradbury argues that to bring Territory and Power fully into the study of comparative and UK politics one should see it as much more than a work about territorial politics narrowly conceived or as a work designed to provide an alternative view to mainstream political science. It was an original study that should be seen as a major British contribution to state-centric and temporal approaches to the study of political development. Once stated in this way, many students of comparative and UK politics could find Territory and Power much more accessible and could incorporate its insights in their own research.

John addresses Bulpitt's account of the role of the centre in Territory and Power. Even though there are some shortcomings, on balance he finds that Bulpitt's treatment holds up as a description of the exercise of state power, which other political scientists could acknowledge and consider. John develops three broad themes. First, he provides a recapitulation of Bulpitt's account of the centre as a focus for studying the state and its actions. He identifies the importance of a cohesive elite to the formation of a centre interest and the limitations this elite faced when it came to implementing policy. He discusses Bulpitt's account of the ideas and values that informed the UK centre, for Bulpitt develops a number of arguments regarding the primarily conservative nature of its elite, and the consequences of this blinkered view for the conduct of centre–periphery relations.

Second, John discusses scholarship that might support or question the account that Bulpitt offers. This includes contemporary accounts of Whitehall and policy-making, historical accounts of club government, theoretical reflections on how to study the centre inspired by core executive studies and works on centre–local government relations. He concludes that there remains much that scholars still do not know. Nevertheless, Bulpitt's account of centre politics receives much support from these studies or at least a recognition that it is plausible in the case of the UK.

Finally, John assesses whether the relevance of Bulpitt's account of the role of the centre has been diminished by recent changes in UK politics. There is a sizeable list of issues to consider in terms of the changing external context to UK government, changes within the machinery of government and the way in which government operates in the UK. But there are also indications of a lack of change at the centre, and John highlights studies that emphasize the importance of inherited elite political culture. Overall, therefore, John also wishes to bring Territory and Power more extensively back into political analysis. Aware of the limited knowledge that we have of what is after all a highly secretive and relatively under-studied aspect of politics, the book is a powerful example of a way to understand government and policy-making within states.

Keating moves the focus beyond the centre and assesses Bulpitt's account in Territory and Power of the government of Scotland. Keating has a basic appreciation for the way in which Bulpitt challenges dominant narratives in the research literature. He believes that contemporary writers on Scottish politics can still learn much from his critique. The major strength in Territory and Power is to be found in the sceptical understanding of how the territorial union that underpinned the UK worked before devolution. This suggests that there was never a consistently over-repressive British control of Scotland, nor on the other hand a consistently vital Scotland waiting to emerge if such control was lifted or shown to be deficient. The politics of unionism were much more subtle than that both in London and Scotland, and much of the historical record bears out the insights of Territory and Power in relation to the operations of political elites.

Keating is nevertheless keen to demonstrate that Bulpitt's account of territorial management omits much that was still important for maintaining British unionism in Scotland. In particular, there is a need to consider the importance of the political ideology and political economy of unionism as well as the importance in the twentieth century of the welfare state. Generally, historical research suggests that Bulpitt exaggerated the centre's disinterest in the periphery and underplayed the extent to which the centre was committed to developing the normative underpinnings of unionism in Scotland. There were also both Conservative and Labour versions of unionism that pursued territorial management to maintain it. Indeed, the UK could simply not have worked as well as it did without the combination of normative underpinnings, functional integration and centre territorial statecraft that developed over time. On the whole, it is right to consider the UK as a state that did not undergo the modern development of a unitary political culture, with strong overriding powers for the central state apparatus. In broader terms the role of ideas, institutions and national identities contributed to a balance between state stability and diversity.

In updating the analysis of territorial politics and Scotland, Keating also argues that the Bulpittian approach has largely been overtaken by events. The rise of European integration, the changing contours of Scottish politics and the decline of the underpinnings of the old Union have all transformed the situation. A neo-Bulpittian analysis, which posits the English as still ruling in Scotland informally through trusted intermediaries, is no longer tenable. Yet Keating still takes a cue from Bulpitt's sceptical reflections on the historic weaknesses both in the periphery's capacity to assert its interests and the centre's capacity to control in UK centre–periphery relations. With this lack of political will, much remains indeterminate in post-devolution Scotland. There is still no coherent relationship between Scottish political debate and European integration, nor is there a new hegemonic Scottish project that unites Scotland on a post-Union basis. Equally, attempts to reconstruct Britishness have miserably failed, largely because they have been misconceived as rooted in unitary ideas of Britain. A strategic failure by both Labour and Conservative unionist elites to develop a coherent approach to unionism after devolution underpins the current crisis of Britishness. As a result there still exists – in Keating's terms – an informal union, in which neo-nationalism and neo-unionism are both current but neither is compelling.

Overall, Keating exposes the limitations of Bulpitt's explicitly centre approach. Bulpitt leaves out much about the periphery that proves to be important to territorial development over the long term. This is even truer for the post-Territory and Power period. In reflecting on the indeterminacy of the end of unionism and the emergence of post-devolution Scottish politics, Keating's scepticism is implicitly Bulpittian. There is still no consistently over-repressive British control, nor has a clear vital Scotland emerged in the backwash of constitutional change. Keating ends by arguing that the UK centre would probably be reluctant over the long term to invest in a neo-unionism built on a unitary notion of Britishness as it would erode the autonomy of the centre too deeply. If informal union did not maintain territorial stability then separation may still arise. But this would derive less from the success of a coherent assertion of Scottishness than from neglect from the centre.

Thompson's contribution explores Bulpitt's approach to the link between domestic and external politics. It starts with a basic endorsement of Bulpitt's methodological concern with this issue as governments do not deal with issues in a compartmentalized way. Equally, given that temporal circumstances are international as well as domestic, they both have to be dealt with at the same time by centre government agents. Thompson suggests that the link between domestic and external politics strongly informs Bulpitt's account of UK state development. A very good example of this is his account of the manner in which the English, and then British centre, instigated three territorial Unions, with Wales, Scotland and Ireland. These all resulted from the way in which domestic and external conditions interacted at particular times.

Thompson's article then focuses on the role of the external support system as a distinct conceptual device for analysing how centre governors seek to manage the relationship between domestic government and external relations. Indeed, Bulpitt viewed it as an essential part of the English (later the British) centre governing code to create and maintain an external support system that allows effective domestic government. However, given the nature of the predicaments in which the centre generally found itself, creating and maintaining such support complexes were often fraught with problems. Thompson revisits Bulpitt's analysis of the collapse in the nineteenth century external support complex and its role in the domestic governing crisis that lasted from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. She then shows how the construction of a new external support complex became central to the dual polity code between the 1920s and the 1960s, and how in turn its collapse in the 1960s created the conditions for the emergence of a new modernization crisis. It provides a compelling framework for illuminating the link between domestic and external politics.

Thompson is then concerned to explore how one might apply Bulpitt's framework in new contexts. First, she makes a case for how analysis of the centre's development and management of the external support complex, and its relationship to domestic policies, provides fresh insights on governments from Thatcher to Blair. Centre management of the link between domestic and external politics since Thatcher has, in Thompson's view, lacked much serious thought. The continued attachment to dual polity assumptions meant that, even after some economic success had been achieved by the UK centre, it was not converted into a basis for rebinding unionism. In these circumstances the Blair government had to accept the pressures from within the Labour Party in Scotland and Wales for political devolution. The consequences of this are potentially enormous as the Union with Scotland may yet unravel. Second, Thompson argues that Bulpitt's approach to the link between the external world and domestic politics has implications for comparative study. She takes the case of how the German centre approached the potentially secessionist politics of Bavaria during the Weimar Republic. Her analysis explores how varying phases of failure and success in centre attempts at domestic territorial management can be explained in terms of the relative thought put into developing some sort of external support system to the centre's strategies.

Overall, Thompson concludes that a Bulpittian approach takes analysis beyond historical narrative. Bulpitt employed precise concepts for how to study the exercise of power and authority when politicians actually have to act. In assessing how they finessed the business of government between external and domestic concerns Bulpitt studied the key issue of political judgement. He focused on how things appeared to politicians. Such an approach is extremely useful to contemporary researchers as it departs from the common problematic practice of treating the external world as an abstraction to which roles of causation are attributed that cannot in any detailed way be properly investigated. This is frequently a problem in the study of government and globalization. Instead Territory and Power focused on how politicians acted on their perceptions of the external world, and how this informed the political judgements they made in dealing with domestic government. This is borne out as much in analysing German state management as in analysing the UK.

Savitch and Osgood pick up the potential for employing Bulpitt's account of the centre in a more sustained non-UK application, namely the USA. They begin by providing a broad endorsement for the potential applicability of Bulpitt's framework for analysis to the US case. They emphasize interpenetration and proliferating autonomy as the twin pillars of centre–periphery relations. Centre territorial management to achieve its goals also occurs in the context of a highly diverse polity. But they emphasize a key difference with the UK. With each presidential term there is a turnover of partisan appointees, and Republican and Democrat administrations have accordingly followed different governing codes and approaches to making a distinction between high and low politics. They also have been clearly focused in their territorial policies on favouring partisan interests in state politics. To explore their analysis of US political development Savitch and Osgood take the case of presidential approaches towards urban policy, a policy with key territorial implications. The timeframe taken is from the 1960s to the present. This echoes Pierson and Skocpol's definition of the contemporary era of activist government in US politics, and also parallels Bulpitt's definition of the contemporary era of decline and modernization since the late 1950s/early 1960s in the UK.Footnote ²²

The focus on the presidency as the centre is constitutionally problematic, yet – as Savitch and Osgood put it –‘there are pragmatic and historic realities that put the White House at the centre.’ In the examination of urban policy they see presidential policies as conforming to a yo-yo pattern depending on whether there is a Republican or Democrat president. Nevertheless, in the period since the 1960s there have been three prototypes that have defined distinct approaches. First, Lyndon Johnson made little distinction between issues as high or low politics and pursued relatively high central intervention in urban policy. Second, Richard Nixon adopted a style that separated high from low politics but paid some attention to how low politics would be addressed according to the benefit of richer and more Republican states. Finally, Ronald Reagan virtually abandoned any interest in the many domestic social issues he considered as low politics.

On the evidence of the urban policy case-study, Savitch and Osgood reach tentative conclusions about the North American approach to centre governing. The study indicates variations between types of presidency but all presidential approaches have conformed with one of only two of Bulpitt's ideal types of centre governing. They have generally conformed best to either the ideal type of seeking central authority, albeit often still limited, or alternatively reverting to that of simple central penetration. Conscious efforts to develop local elite assimilation have been rare, and only in certain instances have there been conscious efforts in presidential urban policy to generate popular mobilization. It is in this context that one may see the potential distinctiveness of an Obama presidency.

Overall, Savitch and Osgood see the framework for analysing politics in Territory and Power as ‘both less and more pertinent to American territorial politics’ than the UK. Generally, the nature of the US system means that American central elites have been even more cautious about intervening in local affairs either to arrange state political leadership as they would like or to control that leadership directly. On the other hand, concerns over the problems of urban economy and society have inspired perhaps even greater anxiety at the American centre about what should be done. In this context, presidential government has frequently had to address how best to try and manage a political system built on both the interpenetration of centre and periphery as well as proliferating autonomy to achieve better outcomes.

All of the articles reviewed so far start from a position of at least some sympathy with Territory and Power and thus seek to tease out its theoretical, methodological or empirical insights for modern fields of study. In contrast, Bevir seeks to nail down the grounds upon which the overall theoretical, historical and normative project that Territory and Power offered should be rejected. He offers an analysis of changing approaches to three key conceptual issues in social science inquiry, on which basis he interprets Bulpitt's place in approaches to political science. This underpins a general critique of Bulpitt's theoretical approach in Territory and Power and where it can be located in relation to the wider academy.

First, Bevir traces the development of thinking in Western political science about what should be the central methodological foci in the study of politics. He emphasizes the change from the attention to the state and its institutional structures, which dominated much political science in the nineteenth century, to the focus on behavioural topics that emerged in the early part of the twentieth century. For Bevir, Bulpitt's approach in Territory and Power epitomizes this turn towards behavioural topics rather than the state in studying, for example, territory and power rather than state and sovereignty, the political process of intergovernmental relations rather than constitutional design and formal powers. To Bevir, Bulpitt's methodological concern is entirely defendable in the context of broader intellectual developments.

However, second, Bevir suggests that there has also been a three-stage process to the development of approaches to political knowledge. This moved from a focus on developmental historicism, which relied on broad temporal narratives, to a modernist empiricism, which focused on formal classifications and correlations. This was later superseded by behaviouralism, which was influenced by positivist approaches to the development of theory and testable hypotheses. To Bevir, much contemporary, mid-level political science – while making the move towards the study of behavioural topics rather than the state, and often misleadingly referred to as new institutionalism – has stuck at the usage of modernist empiricist methods rather than embracing a thoroughgoing behavioural approach to understanding them. Bulpitt was fairly typical of such political science: Bevir locates him still as a modernist empiricist, interested in defining categories of analysis and types of territorial politics as a contribution to macro- and mid-level political science and illustrating them in relation to the UK. In so doing, he failed on the one hand to hold true to many of the advantages of a historicist approach. On the other hand he failed to pursue more rigorous behavioural methods of analysis.

Third, Bevir raises the issue of how political scientists conceive their behavioural topic focus and the basis upon which they define classifications. In this respect he finds Bulpitt ‘far more unusual’ for downplaying socio-economic and cultural topics, such as ‘industrialization, class, ideology, and popular cultures and resistance’, for a focus instead on central elites. Equally, Bulpitt was unusual for eschewing conventional ways in which to classify central elite behaviour for a focus on ‘the strategies, decisions, and informal moves by which they promote their interests’. These interests are defined as the fixed ones of securing autonomy over foreign and economic policy, and the ideal type that he presents as most relevant to an understanding of UK territorial politics is one gleaned from a reading of Tory historiography of the eighteenth century. He borrows from historians such as Lewis Namier and Jack Plumb the conceptual language of court and country, high and low politics, and the organizing perspective of politics driven by power-seeking elites. Overall, Bevir argues that Bulpitt stands out from other mid-level political scientists working on behavioural topics with modernist empiricist methods simply for this combination with a commitment to Tory historiography.

Having interpreted Bulpitt in such terms, Bevir then subjects Territory and Power to the objections that he would level at any work of mid-level modernist empiricism, epitomized by institutionalist analysis. It is commonly prone to ‘an unthinking determinism, reification and foundationalism’ in attributing causal significance to ‘institutions’. This is ‘at best vague and at worst confused about the logic of their explanations’. Liberation lies generally in a recommitment to the study of historical contingency to assess at the micro level the importance of individual beliefs and actions. Specifically, Bevir argues for a retained focus on behavioural topics, but also for the need to move beyond modernist empiricism and indeed applied behaviouralism to embrace the analytical techniques of interpretivism, which brings with it a capacity to conceive of its behavioural topics in a fresh way.

The final stage of Bevir's contribution is then to use this critique of Territory and Power as a basis for exploring how interpretivism may engage with the analytical preoccupations that are at the heart of the book; to contribute both to approaches to territorial politics and to applications of interpretivist methodology. At the heart of interpretivism as a method is a desire to decentre concepts and understand politics through a detailed micro-level focus on the social construction of actions through the ability of actors to create and act on meanings. Bevir would specifically suggest re-exploring the terrain covered by Bulpitt as a contingent historical experience with a focus on the beliefs, preferences and actions of individuals. This should be set against the background of the elite traditions, governmentalities and popular resistance that inform them. Overall, Bevir is respectful of Bulpitt for using his combination of behavioural concepts, modernist empirical techniques and Tory historiography to explode myths, notably Whiggish versions of developmental historicism and the Westminster model as applied to an understanding of UK politics. His work has added to an understanding of the UK as a differentiated polity. Bevir clearly sets out his support for a focus on behavioural topics but passionately disagrees with Bulpitt's approach to knowledge and methodology.

CONCLUSIONS

The articles in this collection contain competing opinions about the merits of using Bulpitt's Territory and Power as a starting point for research. One cannot come to a neat conclusion on the rightness of viewpoint – either for or against Bulpitt's arguments. In spite of these differences, the authors of these articles agree that Bulpitt challenges many conventional approaches to studying politics. The Bulpittian framework provides both an original approach and a focus for critical analysis, and in so doing animates the political science of UK politics. This leaves us with the sense that it is both an impetus for future research as well as a useful ‘other’ that many researchers may wish to refute.

Inspired by Territory and Power and from responses to it, the articles in this collection suggest five ways forward for the study of government and politics. First, there is scope for joining Territory and Power to a multi-theoretic political science. Indeed, the integration of fragmented research literatures was something to which Bulpitt had an explicit commitment. The analytical framework in Territory and Power is located within a foundational ontology and a realist epistemology, two starting points that make it potentially compatible with much other academic research in comparative politics. Several contributors have located Territory and Power as a work of neo-statist political science or a form of new institutionalism, stressing its distinctive assumptions and stimulating insights. This interpretation suggests the revisiting of Bulpitt may be potentially highly fruitful for political science research.

Second, and linked to the first point, Territory and Power encourages political scientists to re-engage with historical accounts of state political development, and in particular to understand the strategies and statecraft of the state governing elite as it grapples with big issues over a long time period. This is not to be done simply out of a love for historical re-enaction or to raid individual cases to test hypotheses. Rather it should be done to understand how and why historical development matters to the study of contemporary politics, and how decision-makers are conditioned by choices made by their equivalents in previous decades or even centuries.

Third, Territory and Power reminds scholars of the need to understand what all intuitively know is important in the conduct of politics – the political centre – but which is immensely difficult to study rigorously. Several articles reflect on the value of Territory and Power's scholarship, insight and sceptical reflection in making plausibly visible the hidden world of the centre and its political implications.

Fourth, the book suggests the importance of seeing the politics of governing in the round, embracing territory, economy and foreign affairs in one ensemble. It rings true that central elites will seek to manage and balance out contradictions between domestic and external priorities, but political studies rarely address these issues in such terms.

Finally, and mindful of these points, Territory and Power could inspire new insights in the research of UK and comparative politics. Studies in this collection have suggested how a re-reading of the book can provoke fresh analysis of UK history and contemporary UK politics as well as comparative studies in cases as varied as Germany and the USA. There is a large agenda for research on all of these subjects where there is still much that scholars do not know, and in the study of which the Bulpittian framework for analysis may prove useful. Bevir's critique provides a powerful attack on modernist political science generally, and utilizing the Bulpittian framework – in whatever form and to whatever effect – is not without its perils. Notably, the perspective of the central state and its elites can lead to a blinkered or limited perspective on politics. It may lead the researcher to incorporate hidden assumptions about how government and politics work. It may over-emphasize the particular and the unique national context. Nevertheless, there remain two telling critiques of anti-foundational interpretivism. First, it has often been found guilty of over-simplification in applying a monolithic critique to a huge complexity of work labelled as modernist empiricism. Second, interpretivism itself relied in its interpretation of narratives of political behaviour on understandings of politics created by the very political scientists labelled as modernist empiricists. As in all fields of scholarship, there remains a difference between the insightful and the mechanical. There is no doubt that Bulpitt's Territory and Power complies more with the former than the latter. If scholars are alive to the book's assumptions and limitations, there is every reason why future research agendas in UK and comparative politics should continue to engage with Territory and Power as a stimulating point of departure.