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Statecraft theory, originally developed by Jim Bulpitt, has traditionally been considered to be outside the mainstream of British, let alone comparative, political science. However, the approach is now gaining critical acclaim. Bulpitt's article in Political Studies (1986a) was recently amongst the 12 'top voted' articles published in the journal between 1953 and 2010. David Marsh (2012: 48-9) has recently argued that the statecraft approach is a key alternative organizing perspective to understanding British governance. Moreover, the approach has been applied to new problems and has been developed by a second wave of scholarship. Yet many, especially outside the study of British politics, remain unfamiliar with the statecraft approach, and its contribution to key contemporary debates in political science has not been assessed.
This article considers the 'added value' that statecraft theory may have for contemporary theories of institutional change. Explaining institutional change remains a central puzzle for new institutionalists. Since March and Olsen's (1984) claim that institutions matter, a huge variety of institutionalisms have proliferated (Hall and Taylor 1996; Lowndes 1996; Lowndes and Roberts 2013; Peters 1999). However, explaining both continuity and change remains a central challenge (Hall 2010: 204). Bulpitt's earlier work on territorial relations has been framed as a historical institutionalist approach (Bradbury 2006, 2010), but there has been no similar analysis of the statecraft approach, which crystallized much of his thinking about politics or the way in which the statecraft approach has evolved by recent scholarship. It is noteworthy that in Lowndes and Roberts' recent book Why Institutions Matter (2013), Bulpitt and statecraft receive no mention.
This article distils a neo-statecraft framework based on the more recent scholarship and argues that it makes three distinctive contributions to the existing literature on institutional change. First, it offers an agent-led form of historical institutionalism which overcomes the common criticism that historical institutionalists underplay the creative role of actors. Second, the approach brings back into focus the imperatives of electoral politics as a source of institutional change which is commonly missing from historical institutionalist work. Third, it provides a macro theory of change. Neo-statecraft theory can therefore identify previously unnoticed sources of stability and change, especially in states with strong executives and top-down political cultures.
The article begins by sketching out the neo-statecraft approach...