Byrne, C, Randall, N and Theakston, K orcid.org/0000-0002-9939-7516 (2021) Theresa May's Disjunctive Premiership: Choice and Constraint in Political Time. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 23 (4). pp. 699-716. ISSN 1369-1481
Abstract
Theresa May’s premiership is widely acknowledged to have been a failure, but political commentators and the scholarly literature have, thus far, tended to focus on May’s misuse of her agency. This article argues that May’s premiership presents a particularly powerful example of the need to disentangle structure and agency when assessing prime ministerial performance. Drawing upon the work of Stephen Skowronek, it sets out a framework of evaluating prime ministerial agency in ‘political time’. This is then used to show how the conditions and circumstances in which May governed limited the feasibility, increased the costs, and compromised the effectiveness of her actions in office. We argue that this confirms that May was a victim of circumstances as much as a victim of her own agency.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | historical institutionalism, leadership evaluation, political time, prime minister(s), structure and agency, Theresa May |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 21 Apr 2021 10:21 |
Last Modified: | 27 Jul 2022 09:18 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/13691481211016931 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:173028 |