‘(1) Privatisation and limiting the scope and forms of public intervention. (2) The loss of functions by central and local government departments to alternative service delivery systems (such as agencies). (3) The loss of functions by British government to European Union institutions. (4) Limiting the discretion of public servants through the new public management, with its emphasis on managerial accountability, and clearer political control through a sharper distinction between politics and administration.’ (Rhodes 1994: 138-9). Rhodes argued that the result was not simply a reduction in the size of the state, but also a fragmentation of both operational service delivery and responsibility; but for our purposes, the key outcome was a reduction in political manageability and parliamentary accountability.

The fiercest public debates on the issues listed by Rhodes have focused on his first and third trends (privatisation and Europeanisation), while the fourth (new public management) has generated a less well-known but vigorous discussion mainly among accountants and anthropologists (Power 1997, Strathern 2000). The second issue, the transfer of functions from government departments to ostensibly independent agencies, has been taken up under the rubric of ‘depoliticisation’. Kettell (2008: 631) identifies a “ ... depoliticised form of governance, in which state managers directly relinquish policy control over particular issues, delegating their day-to-day management to ostensibly non-political institutions or rule-based frameworks”. Examples of this in relation to UK macroeconomic policy would include the transfer of monetary policy management from the Treasury to the Bank of England in 1997, and the establishment of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility to take over fiscal forecasting, also from the Treasury, in 2010. Within the Eurozone, the Fiscal Pact entails a transfer of ultimate control over member states’ fiscal performance to the European Court of Justice, rather than national parliaments (or indeed the European parliament); another more ambiguous example is the assumption of troika control over economic policies in the Eurozone periphery.

Mainstream political scholarship interprets depoliticisation within the framework of an ontological antinomy between market and state as modes of distribution. In democratic forms of capitalism, this translates into electoral choices between alternative economic policy programmes, based on different balances between the two, which over time and given path- dependence, consolidate into distinctive varieties of capitalism - variation which can be observed in principle both across countries, and between time periods. In this framework, depoliticisation is the empirical outcome of shifts taking place in the state/market balance, at a variety of locations in the institutions of governance.

The difficulty for political scientists lies in identifying the source of these tendencies. In the varieties of capitalism literature, including its historical antecedents (end of ideology, convergence, technostructure, etc), the source is to be found in a range of factors - ideas, technological change, the rise and fall of non-capitalist states and societies - that are essentially exogenous to the existing political and social order. In methodological terms, this can be traced back to the enduring influence of structural-functionalism in social theory (Radcliffe-Brown, Parsons, etc.), under which the structural elements in any relatively stable order are seen as supporting each other’s continued existence, so that change can therefore only arise from an external shock. In this approach, the primary issue for politics is how to adapt efficiently to such shocks, and it is usually assumed (explicitly or implicitly) that there are still underlying and shared political values and goals.

Over fifty years before Rhodes published his paper (and in the same journal), Kalecki (1943) had anticipated the consequences for macroeconomic management in a real world in which political values and goals are in fact contested. Although the paper is mostly remembered