Abstract
This monograph explores the relationship between the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in the 1980s with specific reference to their domestic policy agendas. Previous comparative studies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan have explored the New Right, and the so-called special relationship in foreign affairs. However, there is no comprehensive study of the mutual impact of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations’ domestic policy. This research fills this gap by investigating the transatlantic relationship between the two administrations in this area of policy. Considering the extent of transfer in policy and tactics between the administrations and intellectual transfer to the administrations from individual academics and think tanks, this monograph will assess the Thatcher-Reagan relationship with regard to ‘who influenced whom’. Policy transfer refers to direct policy exchange or influence between the Thatcher and Reagan administrations. Tactical transfer refers to the tactics or behaviour of the administrations and the influence of one administration on the other. Intellectual transfer is the transfer of policies or ideas from outside of government, namely think tanks and academics; intellectual transfer can also be transatlantic. This introduction establishes the foundation of this study by offering an overview of the Thatcher-Reagan ‘special relationship’ in foreign affairs and the historiography of the topic.
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Notes
These events are covered in greater detail in the literature. For examples of the historiography of British economic decline, see: N.F.R Crafts, Britain’s Relative Economic Performance (London: IEA, 2002);
N.F.R. Crafts and N. Woodward (eds), The British Economy Since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991);
and, A. Gamble, Britain in Decline: Economic Policy, Political Strategy and the British State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).
For further explanation of the Carter administration’s economic experience, see: G.A. Haas, Jimmy Carter and the Politics of Frustration (Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland, 1992), 83–97.
For (contemporary) accounts of stagflation see: A. S. Binder, Economic Policy and the Great Stagflation (New York: Academic, 1979),
and M. Bruno and J. Sachs, Economics of Worldwide Stagflation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
R. Coopey and N. Woodward, ‘The British economy in the 1970s: an overview,’ in R. Coopey and N. Woodward (eds), Britain in the 1970s: The Troubled Economy (London: UCL Press, 1996), 1.
See A.W. Coats and D.C. Colander, ‘An introduction to the spread of economic ideas,’ in D. Colander and A.W. Coats (eds), The Spread of Economic Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1–19; A.W. Coats, ‘Economic ideas and economists in government: accomplishments and frustrations,’ in Colander and Coats, Economic Ideas, 109–19; W. J. Barber, ‘The spread of economic ideas between academic and government: a two-way street,’ in Colander and Coats, Economic Ideas, 119–26;
A.W.B. Coats, ‘Introduction,’ in A.W.B. Coats (ed.), The Development of Economics in Western Europe since 1945 (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–19;
R.E. Backhouse, ‘Economics in mid-Atlantic: British economics, 1945–95,’ in Coats (ed.), Development of Economics, 20–41; D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 19–23.
It is beyond the scope of this study to examine the exhaustive historiography on British decline. However, key works include: D.H. Aldcroft, ‘The Entrepreneur and the British Economy, 1870–1914,’ The Economic History Review, 17:1 (1964), 113–35;
D.N. McCloskey, ‘Did Victorian Britain Fail?’, The Economic History Review, 23:3 (1970), 446–60;
B. Elbaum and W. Lazonick, ‘An Institutional Perspective on British Decline’, in B. Elbaum and W. Lazonick (eds), The Decline of the British Economy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 1–17;
A. Gamble, Britain in Decline; N.F.R. Crafts, ‘The golden age of economic growth in Western Europe, 1950–1973’, The Economic History Review, 48:3 (1995), 429–47;
A. Gamble, ‘Theories and Explanation of British Decline,’ in R. English and M. Kenny (eds), Rethinking British Decline (Baingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 1–22;
S. Broadberry and N.F.R. Crafts, ‘UK productivity performance from 1950 to 1979: a restatement of the Broadberry-Crafts view’, The Economic History Review, 56:4 (2003), 718–35; and,
A. Booth, ‘The Broadberry-Crafts view and the evidence: a reply,’ The Economic History Review, 56:4 (2003), 736–42. For the distinction between ‘decline’ and ‘declinism’, as utilised by politicians,
see: I. Budge, ‘Relative Decline as a Political Issue: Ideological Motivations of the Politico-Economic Debate in Post-War Britain,’ Contemporary Record, 7:1 (1993), 1–23;
J. Tomlinson, ‘Inventing “Decline”: The Falling behind of the British Economy in the Postwar Years’, The Economic History Review, 49:4 (1996), 731–57;
B. Supple, ‘Fear of failing: economic history and the decline of Britain,’ in P. Clarke and C. Trebilcock (eds), Understanding Decline: Perceptions and realities of British economic performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9–13; D. Cannadine, ‘Apocalypse when? British politicians and British ‘decline’ in the twentieth century’, in Clarke and Trebilcock (eds), Understanding Decline, 261–84; and,
J. Tomlinson, ‘Thrice Denied: “Declinism” as a Recurrent Theme in British History in the Long Twentieth Century,’ Twentieth Century British History, 20:2 (2009), 227–51.
J. Tomlinson, ‘Not “Decline and Revival”: An Alternative Narrative on British Post-War Productivity’, in R. Coopey and P. Lyth (eds), Business in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 153.
Richard English and Michael Kenny (eds), Rethinking British Decline, 25. See also C. Barnett The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Power (London: Macmillan, 1986); and,
M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
American decline is a relatively new feature in American historiography. See, for instance, P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Fontana, 1989);
and, M.A. Bernstein and D.E. Adler (eds), Understanding American Economic Decline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
T. Hames and R. Feasey, ‘Anglo-American think tanks under Reagan and Thatcher’, in A. Adonis and T. Hames (eds), A Conservative Revolution? The Thatcher-Reagan Decade in Perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 220–23.
G. Smith, Reagan and Thatcher (London: Bodley Head, 1990), 11.
L. Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York and London: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 89.
G. Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents At Home (London: Heinemann, 1988), 277.
M. Thatcher, The Path To Power (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 372.
R. Reagan, An American Life (London: Hutchinson, 1990), 204.
M. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 157.
J. Baylis, Anglo-American Defence Relations 1939–1980: The Special Relationship (London: Macmillan, 1989).
A.P. Dobson, The Politics of the Anglo-American Economic Relationship 1940–1987 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1988), 229.
D. Watt, ‘Introduction: The Anglo-American Relationship’, in W.R. Louis and H. Bull (eds), The Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 1.
R. Ovendale, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 17.
A.P. Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century: Of friendship, conflict and the rise and decline of superpowers (London: Routledge, 1995), 168.
J. Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5.
J. Colman, A ‘Special Relationship’? Harold Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson and Anglo-American relations ‘at the Summit, 1964–68 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 3.
See Smith, Reagan and Thatcher; N. Wapshott, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage (London: Sentinel, 2007);
J. O’Sullivan, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing Inc., 2006);
J. Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (London: Vintage, 2008), 253–301;
E.H.H. Green, Thatcher (London: Hodder Arnold, 2006), 155–67.
C. Emsley (ed.), Essays in Comparative History: Economy, Politics and Society in Britain and America 1850–1920 (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1984), xii.
Ibid. xii–xiii. While traditionally representative of the working class, the Labour Party also had continuing support among an ‘intellectual’ middle class and was formed by a coalition of the Independent Labour Party, trade unions and the Fabians. For more on the development of the Labour Party see, for instance: R. Taylor, ‘Out of the bowels of the Movement: The Trade Unions and the Origins of the Labour Party 1900–18’, in B. Brivati and R. Heffernan (eds), The Labour Party: A Centenary History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 8–49.
A. H. Birch, The British System of Government (London: Routledge, 1998), 8–9.
P. Leyland, The Constitution of the United Kingdom: A Contextual Analysis (Oxford: Hart, 2007), 117–21.
M. Tushnet, The Constitution of the United States of America: A Contextual Analysis (Oxford: Hart, 2009), 43–5.
Ibid. 96–8. For a comparison of government machinery, including the civil service, between American and Britain, see R.E. Neustadt, ‘White House and Whitehall,’ in A. King (ed.), The British Prime Minister (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), 155–74.
A. Wildavsky, ‘The Two Presidencies,’ in A. Wildavsky (ed.), Perspectives on the Presidency (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 448. (Originally from A. Wildavsky, ‘The Two Presidencies’, Trans-Action, 2:4 (1966), 7–14.)
The ‘two presidencies’ theory is further examined in D.A. Peppers, ‘The Two Presidencies: Eight Years later,’ in Wildavsky, Perspectives, 462–71; H.G. Zeidenstein, ‘The Two Presidencies Thesis is Alive and Well and Has Been Living in the U.S. Senate since 1973’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 11:4 (1981), 511–25;
P.E. Peterson, ‘The President’s Dominance in Foreign Policy Making’, Political Science Quarterly, 109:2 (1994), 215–34; and,
B. Canes-Wrone, W.G. Howell, D.E. Lewis, ‘Toward a Broader Understanding of Presidential Power: A Reevaluation of the Two Presidencies Thesis’, The Journal of Politics, 70:1 (2008), 1–16.
For the limitations of presidential power, see, for instance, R.E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press Toronto, 1990).
See, in particular: M. Foley’s The Rise of the British Presidency (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), and The British Presidency (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). For a discussion of the ‘British presidency,’ see: M. Clarke, reviewed work: ‘The Rise of the British Presidency by Michael Foley’, International Affairs, 70:2 (1994), 327–28; and, G.W. Jones, reviewed work: ‘The British Presidency: Tony Blair and the Politics of Public Leadership by Michael Foley,’ The American Political Science Review, 95:4 (2001), 1017–18.
F. Devine, Social Class in America and Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 264.
V. George and I. Howards, Poverty Amidst Affluence: Britain and the United States (Aldershot: Elgar, 1991), 168.
Devine, Social Class, 263. For more on the debate between three centuries of economic growth and inequality and examination of data see, in particular: J.G. Williamson and P.H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (New York and London: Academic Press, 1980); and,
J. Banks, R. Blundell, and J.P. Smith, Wealth Inequality in the United States and Great Britain (London: Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2000).
For a comparison of the development and structure of welfare states in western industrialised democracies, see: P. Flora and A.J. Heidenheimer (eds), The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (London: Transaction, 1981).
Other examples of studies about income inequality include: H. Lydall and J.B. Lansing, ‘A Comparison of the Distribution of Personal Income and Wealth in the United States and Great Britain’, The American Economic Review, 49:1 (1959), 43–67;
R.V. Robinson and J. Kelley, ‘Class as Conceived by Marx and Dahrendorf: Effects on Income Inequality and Politics in the United States and Great Britain’, American Sociological Review, 44:1 (1979), 38–58; and,
C. Juhn, K.M. Murphy and B. Pierce, ‘Wage Inequality and the Rise in Returns to Skill’, The Journal of Political Economy, 101:3 (1993), 410–42.
T. Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: The Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton, NJ and Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1995), 6–7.
B.I. Page and L.R. Jacobs, Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality (London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 95.
J. Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume One: The Grocer’s Daughter (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), xi.
E.H.H. Green, ‘Thatcherism: An Historical Perspective’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, vol. 9 (1999), 17.
For the political science approach see: D. Kavanagh and A. Seldon (eds), The Thatcher Effect: A Decade of Change (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989);
D. Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of Consensus? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and,
S.R. Letwin, The Anatomy of Thatcherism (London: Fontana, 1992). Contributions from political economy are highlighted by A. Gamble, Britain in Decline. This was, of course, the fourth edition of this work and is a significant contribution to the debate about Britain’s relative economic decline; the 1994 edition is able to take into account the impact of Thatcherism to greater depths than previous editions in 1981, 1985 and 1990.
Also from this field was R. Skidelsky (ed.), Thatcherism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
Examples of the ‘higher journalistic’ accounts about Thatcher are P. Riddell, The Thatcher Government (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985);
J. Sergeant, Maggie Her Fatal Legacy (London: Pan Books, 2005); and,
S. Jenkins, Thatcher & Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2006).
An overtly critical account of Thatcherism can be found in G. Brown, Where there is Greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1989), and,
through the use of psychoanalysis, L. Abse, Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice: A Politician’s Psycho-Biography of Margaret Thatcher, (London: Cape, 1989).
In contrast, Thatcher is excessively praised in A. Thomson, Margaret Thatcher: The Woman Within (London: W.H. Allen, 1989),
and, similarly in Lady O. Maitland, Margaret Thatcher: The First Ten Years (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989).
H. Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (London: Macmillan and Pan, 1993), 250–1. (An earlier version was published in 1989, before the end of Thatcher’s premiership.)
J. Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (London: Vintage, 2008), 800.
G.K. Fry, The Politics of the Thatcher Revolution An Interpretation of British Politics, 1979–1990 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
R. Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009).
For examples of ‘higher journalism’, see: Wills, Reagan’s America; L. Cannon, President Reagan; and, H. Johnson, Sleepwalking through History: America in the Reagan Years (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2003).
Political science work includes B.E. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia, MO. and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997), and
J. W. Sloan, The Reagan Effect: Economics and Presidential Leadership (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1999).
The Reagan literature also includes the work of scholars based at think tanks, such as D. Boaz (ed.), Assessing the Reagan Years (Washington D.C.,: Cato Institute, 1988), and
P. Kengor and P. Schweizer (eds), The Reagan Presidency: Assessing the Man and His Legacy (Lanham, Md. and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
G. Troy, ‘Towards a Historiography of Reagan and the 1980s: Why Have We Done Such a Lousy Job?’, in C. Hudson and G. Davies (eds), Ronald Reagan and the 1980s — Perceptions, Policies, Legacies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 230.
M. Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The failure to include Thatcher in his discussion and analysis of the Reagan-Bush era is repeated in Schaller’s later work, namely Right Turn: American Life in the Reagan-Bush Era (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
R. Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999).
J. Ehrman, The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2005).
G. Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).
G.M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997); and,
T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
W.H. Sewell, Jr., ‘Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History’, History and Theory, 6:2 (1967), 209–11.
S. Berger, ‘Comparative history’, in S. Berger, H. Feldner, K. Passmore (eds) Writing History: Theory & Practice (London: Arnold, 2003), 172.
For examples of comparative history combined with the Marxist approach see: R. Hilton, Bondmen Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Routledge, 2003);
P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolute State (London and New York: The Bath Press, 1974);
R. Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe’, Past & Present, 70 (1976), 30–75;
E. Hobsbawn and J.W. Scott, ‘Political Shoemakers’, Past and Present 89 (1980), 103–30.
M. Bloch, ‘A contribution towards a comparative history in European societies’, in M. Bloch, translated by J.E. Anderson, Land and Work in Medieval Europe (London: Routledge, 1967), 45.
For further discussion of the potential revelatory significance of comparative history when looking for the uniqueness of different societies see: W.H. Sewell Jr., ‘Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History’, History and Theory, 6:2 (1967), 208–18.
J. Krieger, Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Decline (Cambridge: Polity, 1986).
J.N. Smithin, Macroeconomics After Thatcher and Reagan: The Conservative Policy Revolution in Retrospect (Aldershot: Elgar, 1990).
K. Hoover and R. Plant, Conservative Capitalism in Britain and the United States: A Critical Appraisal (London: Routledge, 1989).
Hoover’s work on ideological conservative capitalism was first offered in the article: K.R. Hoover, ‘The Rise of Conservative Capitalism: Ideological Tensions within the Reagan and Thatcher Governments’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History: An International Quarterly, 29 (1987), 245–68.
R. Aldous, Reagan & Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship (London: Hutchinson, 2012).
For the relationship between comparative and entangled histories which is closely associated with the transnational approach see: J. Kocka, ‘Comparison and Beyond’, History and Theory, 42:1 (2003), 39–44.
For this histoire croisée approach see also: M. Werner and B. Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory, 45:1 (2006), 30–50.
A. Iriye and P-Y Saunier (eds), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 493.
The meaning and potential impact of the Transnational approach on historiography is discussed by historians in: S. Berger et al. ‘Roundtable Discussion: Transnationalism and Modern British Labour History’, Llafur, 10:1 (2008), 90–119; and,
C. A. Bayly et al. ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,’ American Historical Review, 111: 5 (2006), 1441–64.
For an example of transnational history, see: A. Körner (ed.), 1848: A European Revolution? International Ideas and National Memories of 1848 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
which reassesses the European revolutions of 1848 in a transnational context. Transnational history is further defined and explored by P. Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History, 14:4 (2005), 421–39;
and P. Clavin and J-W. Wessels, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of Its Economic and Financial Organisation’, Contemporary European History, 14:4 (2005), 465–92.
For the debate about transnational history in the context of ‘American Exceptionalism’ see: I. Tyrrell, ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’, The American Historical Review, 96:4 (1991), 1031–55; and
M. McGerr, ‘The Price of the “New Transnational History”’, The American Historical Review, 96:4 (1991), 1056–67.
See also T. Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, Calif. and London: University of California Press, 2002).
J.T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American thought, 1870–1920 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3.
D.T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 1.
Ibid. 5. For further examples of the transnational approach, see: C.J. Finer (ed.), Transnational Social Policy (Oxford, 1999);
J. Leatherman and J.A. Webber (eds), Charting Transnational Democracy: Beyond Global Arrogance (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and,
D.W. Gutzke (ed.), Britain and Transnational Progressivism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
J. Bell, The Liberal State On Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2004), 160–81.
R. Rose, ‘What is lesson drawing?’, Journal of Public Policy, 11 (1991), 3–30.
See: D. Dolowitz, Learning from America: Policy Transfer and the Development of the British Workfare State (Portland, Or.: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), which focuses on policy transfer from America to Britain in welfare-to-work schemes in the Thatcher epoch; and (again in social policy),
D. Dolowitz, Policy Transfer and British Social Policy: Learning from the USA? (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999).
D. Dolowitz, S. Greenwold and D. Marsh, ‘Policy Transfer: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, But Why Red, White And Blue?’, Parliamentary Affairs, 52:4 (1999), 719.
D. Dolowitz and D. Marsh, ‘Who Learns What from Whom: a Review of the Policy Transfer Literature’, Political Studies, 44:2 (1996), 344.
Ibid. (For a discussion of “lesson learning” in order to repeat others’ mistakes, see: K. Mossberger and H. Wolman, ‘Policy Transfer as a Form of Prospective Policy Evaluation: Challenges and Recommendations’, Public Administration Review, 63:4 (2003), 428–40.)
M.D. Harmon, The British Labour Government and the 1976 IMF Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1997).
For a further discussion of the Suez Crisis, see, for instance: J. Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis: Reluctant Gamble (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
D. Robertson and J. Waltman, ‘The politics of policy borrowing’, paper presented to the APSA Annual Meeting, Chicago, 3–6 September (1992), quoted in Dolowtiz and Marsh, ‘Who Learns What from Whom,’ 350.
Also available as D.B. Robertson and J.L. Waltman, ‘The Politics of Policy Borrowing’, in D. Finegold, L. McFarland and W. Richardson (eds), Something Borrowed, Something Blue? A Study of the Thatcher Government’s Appropriation of American Education and Training and Training Policy Part 1 (Wallingford: Triangle, 1992), 49–7.
J.R. Henig, C. Hamnet and H.B. Feigenbaum, ‘The Politics of Privatization: A Comparative Perspective’, Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration, 1:4 (1988), 442–68.
Privatisation is further studied comparatively, rather than in terms of policy transfer, in H. Feigenbaum, J. Henig and C. Hamnett, Shrinking the State: The Political Underpinnings of Privatization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
N. Ashton, Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002);
D. Murray, Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
For a discussion of Harold Macmillan’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, see: L.V. Scott, Macmillan, Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
Ibid. 727. For a discussion of penal policies see: T. Newburn, ‘Atlantic crossings: “Policy transfer” and crime control in the USA and Britain’, Punishment & Society, 4 (2002), 165–94.
Policy transfer in welfare policy is examined in: D.P. Dolowitz, ‘British Employment Policy in the 1980s: Learning from the American Experience’, Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration, 10:1 (1997), 23–42.
Think tanks, along with other non-state actors, and other forms of policy transfer, such as international ‘norms’, are discussed in the political science literature; see: D. Stone, ‘Transfer agents and global networks in the “transnationalization” of policy,’ Journal of European Public Policy, 11:3 (2004), 545–66.
Similarly, the various levels and structures of policy transfer — global, national and transnational — are examined in: M. Evans and J. Davies, ‘Understanding policy transfer: A Multi-level, multi-disciplinary perspective’, Public Administration, 77:2 (1999), 361–85.
There is also vast literature on New Right economic policy; hence it is not possible to provide an exhaustive account in this introduction. For instance, D.G. Green’s The New Right: The Counter-Revolution in Political, Economic and Social Thought (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987), focused on the intellectual history of the New Right and consequent impact of Thatcherism and Reaganism.
In a volume edited by G. Jordan and N. Ashford, Public Policy and Impact of the New Right (London: Pinter, 1993), the intellectual content of the New Right is examined, as is the extent that the New Right influenced the objectives and policies of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations, although there is no account of transatlantic influence.
D. Stone, Capturing the Political Imagination: Think Tanks and the Policy Process (London: Frank Cass, 1996), xiii.
R. Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic CounterRevolution, 1931–1983 (London: HarperCollins, 1994).
A. Denham, Think-Tanks of the New Right (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996).
D. Stone, A. Denham and M. Garnett (eds), Think Tanks Across Nations: A comparative approach (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Denham and Garnett, ‘Think tanks, British politics and the “climate of opinion”’, in Stone, Denham and Garnett (eds), Across Nations, 21–41; and, Donald E. Abelson, ‘Think tanks in the United States’, in Stone, Denham and Garnett (eds), Across Nations, 107–26.
There is vast literature exploring oral history. For instance, see: P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Third Edition) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
D. A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds.), The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 2006); and,
L. A. Dexter, Elite and Specialized Interviewing (Colchester: ECPR, 2006).
An important sub-discipline of which oral historians should be aware is that of the function of memory, see: M. Halbwachs and L. A. Coser (eds), On Collective Memory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and,
G. Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
See: A. Seldon and J. Pappworth, By Word of Mouth: ‘Élite’ oral history (London: Methuen, 1983), 16–36.
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Cooper, J. (2012). Introduction. In: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283665_1
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