Introduction

If the twentieth century witnessed the triumph of democracy, then the first decades of the twenty-first century appear to suggest that something has gone seriously wrong. This is reflected in a raft of post-millennium analyses that focus on the rise of ‘anti-politics’ and the challenges faced by contemporary democratic governance (for example, Rancière, 2006; Rosanvallon, 2008; Keane, 2009). Alongside this tide of rather bleak commentary exist a number of related debates concerning (inter alia) the decline of political participation and the rise of ‘disaffected democrats’ (see Norris, 2011); a shift to technocratic governance and models of decision making (notably in the wake of the global financial crisis) (Davis et al, 2012); and a more subtle set of concerns regarding the essence of democratic politics and the willingness or capacity of politicians to take inevitably unpopular decisions (see Flinders, 2012). These concerns have become crystallised into a set of terms (or clichés) – ‘post-democracy’, ‘the democratic winter’, ‘the end of politics’, ‘the democratic malaise’ – broadly capturing an interpretation of recent developments, but at the same time tending to tell us little about the roots or drivers, the patterns or forms, of these shifts in democratic culture. To an extent, recent literature on ‘depoliticisation’ in the field of governance research has begun to offer a more fine-grained analysis of these tensions and pressures (Burnham, 2001; Flinders and Buller, 2005). It is, however, the argument of this chapter that this literature offers too narrow a conceptual and empirical perspective to fully capture and analyse the complex and nuanced contours of this vast phenomenon that we might term the ‘depoliticised polity’, and that a broader cross-disciplinary framework is required to achieve this goal. Hence, just as Carl Schmitt (2007), whose work is examined in the introductory chapter to this special issue, argued for a broader conception of ‘the political’ going beyond ‘the state’, so we argue in a similar spirit (but in an admittedly very different way) for an expansive approach to studying depoliticisation, going beyond the ‘governmental’ approach predominant in the governance literature.

Although Marsh (2011, 48) highlights ‘depoliticisation’ as one of the most ‘interesting’ emergent concepts for analysing contemporary patterns of governance, scholars have tended to approach the topic through a fairly narrow conceptual lens (for example, Burnham 2001; Flinders and Buller, 2005; 2006; Kettell, 2008; Newman, 2009; James, 2010).