Professor Roderick Rhodes

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.

Bevir, M. and Rhodes, R. A. W. Rhodes, Genres in Political Science. London: Routledge.

Bevir and Rhodes have developed an interpretive approach to the study of politics and government over the past 15 years. Their latest book rethinks the language and range of political science methods; and offers a new approach to methodology. We move away from the approach most political scientists take to both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. We concentrate instead on exploring a range of genres and topics that reveal the strength and diversity of our interpretive political science. We experiment with diverse approaches. Our anti-naturalist interpretivism is widespread in the humanities. It stresses the recovery of meaning, and it blurs genres. Social science has turned away from general laws towards interpreting idiographic cases. We see the task as recovering the meaning of games, dramas, and texts. We believe the task of blurring genres – of learning from the humanities – is an exciting challenge for political scientists. It takes us out of our comfort zone by asking us what we want to know and providing new ways of finding out. It is not about replacing but adding to the political scientists’ toolkit. It is about opening a conversation with the humanities that enlarges our organizing perspective and broadens our toolkit.

Research projects