About
Rod Rhodes is Professor of Government (Research) at the Department of Politics and International Relations and Director of the Centre for Political Ethnography.
In January 2022, Rhodes published a book with Patrick Weller and Dennis Grube entitled Comparing Cabinets (Oxford University Press).
For more details go to Rhodes' personal web site : http://www.raw-rhodes.co.uk/
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Public Administration
- Public Policy
- Comparative Politics
- Ethnography
- Governance
Current research
Rhodes, R. A. W. The Prime Ministerial Court: Conservative Statecraft in the Twenty-first Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Court politics is about who in British government did what to whom, when, how, why, and with what consequences. This book has two overarching ambitions and a subsidiary one. First, I want to provide not only an accurate description of the court politics of the Conservative governments of the twenty-first century but also to move beyond metaphor and provide an analysis of the everyday practices. Second, I want to show that court politics matter by identifying the varied consequences that flow from court practices, especially the personal, electoral, and governmental consequences. My subsidiary theme is to show that ‘insider’ accounts of court politics that are normally judged unreliable are, in fact, a valuable source of data that will bear secondary analysis.
The heart of the book is my account of the court politics of David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson. Chapters 3-5 describe their practices. I adopt a common structure. For each court, I describe its personnel; the PM’s craft; storytelling; reshuffles, resignations and leadership challenges; the political games of barons, especially lying; informality; infighting; loyalty, betrayal, leaks and revenge; and rituals, focusing on language, gossip, humour and bullying. Each chapter has a short case study of the court in action; namely, the education wars, the 2018 election, and the Covid-19 crisis. I chose each case to illustrate respectively the personal, electoral, and governmental consequences of court politics. The book concludes with a comparison of the three courts and the dilemmas they confront.
Research projects
Completed projects
Publications
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Teaching
I supervise PhD students in the areas of expertise identified in my Research section.
Biography
Rhodes is the author or editor of 42 books including, most recently: Comparing Cabinets (with D. Grube and P. Weller, Oxford University Press 2021); The Art and Craft of Comparison (With J. Boswell and J. Corbett, Cambridge University Press 2019); Networks, Governance and the Differentiated Polity. Selected Essays. Volume I. (Oxford University Press, 2017), Interpretive Political Science. Selected Essays. Volume II (Oxford University Press, 2017), Narrative Policy Analysis (editor, Palgrave Macmillan 2018) and the Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political Science (edited with Mark Bevir, Routledge 2015). He has also published some 200 articles and chapters in books. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK
Prizes
- International Research Association for Public Management and Routledge Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Public Management Research. (2012)
- International Research Association for Public Management and Routledge Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Public Management Research. (2012)