Fragmented Policy Change

This book challenges the conventional narrative that the 1970s were a fundamental watershed between two seamless economic policy paradigms in postwar United Kingdom, Keynesianism and neoliberalism. Drawing on extensive archival research, José Tomás Labarca highlights heterogeneity and discontinuity in postwar economic policymaking rather than consensus. The book argues that there was no seamless Keynesian economic policy epoch, challenging widespread misconceptions about excessive government spending in the 1960s and 1970s to offer a novel interpretation of shrinking policy space in the 1970s. Centering the multidimensional politics of official knowledge, Labarca provides an original analysis of how conflicts between competing government elite coalitions drove fragmented policy change before and after the 1970s. While most research focuses exclusively on the politics of economic ideas, Fragmented Policy Change proves that not only economic but also organizational and bureaucratic ideas, processes, and interests influence the evolution of relatively (in)coherent policy regimes.