Industrial Policy and the Rise of Government Activism: The British Experience After 2016

This book explores the evolving nature of economic and social policy in the United Kingdom over the last decade. The book relies on a computational, text-as-data, analysis of thousands of official documents produced by the British government between 1983 and 2024. The primary focus is on understanding evolutions in the recent, post-2016, period, and in particular on how this period may differ from previous eras. Three key conclusions emerge: First, the rise of a more activist, interventionist, and state-led approach to economic policy; second, the parallel rise of a distinctive form of activism in social policy; and third, the rise of a host of institutions designed to constrain and outsource the authority of the executive, which was already underway before 2016. The take-away point is that the United Kingdom has moved, in the second part of
the 2010s, to a post-neoliberal model that has its own internal logic and is supported by its own distinctive set of institutions.