From institutionalism to court politics and all points between: the theoretical context of executive government

This chapter provides a route map to the world of political advisers. It argues that naturalist approaches with their institutional focus are not up to the task of describing the evil trade of political leaders and their advisers. Rather, we should focus on advisers as courtiers in prime ministerial courts. The first section briefly summarises the rational choice, institutional, and elite theory approaches before providing a more extensive summary of interpretivism and court politics. To enter the world of court politics is to explore who did what to whom, when, how, why, and with what consequences, and to explore the webs of significance that people spin for themselves. The chapter uses historical ethnography for this exploration. It reconstructs a socially thick historical setting out of textual material. The specific setting is the rise and fall of Dominic Cummings, the most prominent political adviser in British politics of the past decade. The chapter concludes that the advantages of a court politics approach compared with the other denominations of executive studies is that it reaches parts they do not reach. This focus on the practices and dilemmas of situated agents provides a novel unit of analysis whether comparing countries or courts. Thick descriptions are an essential method in the political scientists’ toolkit and historical ethnography is an integral part of that toolkit. By exploring the webs of dependence of the court, the approach captures the variety of relationships in their ever-changing complexity.