Introduction
Making sense of political legacies is an important task in social scientific research. Identifying a legacy is part of the process of correctly attributing causality to a politicianâs or administrationâs ideas and activities. If done effectively it establishes the significance of historical factors in causal accounts which otherwise tend to be pre-occupied with the immediate antecedents of events. Increasingly, social scientists are aware of how previous states and conditions influence subsequent events and processes (Pierson 2004). Akin to the idea of âpath dependencyâ is that of âa legacyââthat is a trace of the past detectable in the present. Individual politicians, it would appear, are also motivated by the desire to leave a legacy and to be seen to have left a legacy, with two-thirds reporting that their legacy was of great importance to them (Fong et al. 2018: 28). In the case of individual politicians, the challenge of disentangling a legacy returns us to perennial issues of structure and agency. Legacies can have a strong hold on both subsequent political decision-making processes and whole regions of the globe (Wittenburg 2015). But yet, as Wittenburg notes, there is little consensus on how best to conceptualise and operationalise the notion of a legacy. Indeed, despite the growing influence of institutionalist theoretical reflections on temporality and path dependence (Pierson 2000), which strongly imply some notion of legacy, the concept remains theoretically unelaborated.
This is perplexing and problematic in equal measure, given both the ubiquity of the term and the conceptual minefield that is immediately opened when one starts to reflect on the notion of a legacy. What does one need to do to establish credibly the claim that a legacy might be said to exist? Before proceeding further, then, it is important that we reflect on the concept and the methodological difficulties that its demonstration might pose. How legacies are operationalised varies from study to study. Fong et al. (2018) note that the idea of political legacies is a relatively recent one in political science, hence perhaps the lack of clear guidance on how to define, operationalise or use this conceptâfar less, a sustained reflection on the methodological challenges it poses. The aim of this chapter is to begin to rectify that absence.
What Is âa Legacyâ?
A legacy is, in effect, a trace in the present or future of the past.1 But it is not just any trace in the present or future of the past. It is the trace of something specific and singular (or, more accurately perhaps, something said to be specific and singular)âan event, a process, the interventions of an actor or actors, an âismâ, to give but a few examples. The claim that such a singularity (an event, an action, an âismâ) has a legacy is, in effect, a causal claimâthat the effect in the present or future to which it has or might reasonably be seen to give rise is credibly caused by the thing itself and would not have happened (at least in the way in which it did) in the absence of that singularity. But, as the dictionary definitions of the term immediately reveal, this is in itself already quite a specific usage of the term. Dictionaries in English typically give a number of definitions of legacy. The first, in practically every case, is a bequestââan amount of money or property left to someone in a willâ in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for instance. The more general sense of a legacy as, again in the words of the OED, âsomething left or handed down by a predecessorâ and, in the terms of the Collins Dictionary, âa direct result of an event or period ⌠which continues to exist after it is overâ is thus revealed to be analogicalâequivalent or similar to the bequest of property, money or other assets between generations. Fong et al. (2018: 5) define a political legacy in the following way:
We conceive of a political legacy as either a concrete policy achievement or a memory, feeling or idea that is associated with a politician and endures after she leaves office.
This definition is immediately suggestive as it identifies two âtypesâ of legacies: policy achievements and other tangible changes which Fong et al. refer to as âhardâ legacies (2018: 2) and âsoftâ legacies (i.e. more abstract outcomes, such as shifts in attitudes). Although a definition is relatively easy to produce, as noted above, Wittenburg (2015) argues that there is little consensus as to how to conceptualise âa legacyâ. Following a review of the literature on post-communist states, he argues that for an outcome to be described as a legacy, a number of components need to be demonstrated to exist. The first is the outcome itself. This needs to be inexplicable (or not fully explicable) given the relevant contemporaneous factors. The second is the antecedent to this outcome. The third component is the causal mechanism. This explains how (and, it might be added, to what extent) the antecedent caused the outcome. It follows therefore that the legacy is the outcome to be explained. The outcome only qualifies as a legacy if it cannot be fully explained without reference to the antecedent (that is causal) factor. Second, argues Wittenburg (p. 369) an outcome only qualifies as a legacy if the antecedent causal factor ceased some time prior to the outcome emerging.
In and of itself this is already helpful. For the further we stretch over time the concept of legacy, the greater the difficulty of establishing causation, and hence the greater the difficulty of establishing the credibility of the claim that a legacy exists. Crucially, it reminds us that the claim to the existence of a legacy is a form of counter-factual. In the absence of the causal effect to which the legacy is attributed, things would have turned out differently; the difference between the way they turned out and the way they would otherwise have turned out is the legacy. However, this, we contend, is no reason to abandon talk of legacies, even if it is a very good reason to reflect rather more systematically on the theoretic, analytic and methodological challenges inherent in establishing credibly claims of such a kind. For when it comes to the positing of what are, in effect, causal claims about the present in terms of the past, often in reference to relatively vaguely specified theoretical constructs, we are clearly entering terrain that is highly interpretively ambiguous. What might credibly be associated with a particular legacy is likely to vary between authors (as we shall see presently).
Our Contribution
This book explores the ways in the idea of a political legacy has been approached, focusing on the operationalisation of the concept. Having distilled lessons from the literature, we present a multi-dimensional approach to conceptualising and operationalising political legacies. We illustrate how some of these types of legacy can be operationalised through an examination of the legacy attributed to Margaret Thatcher and to Thatcherism more generally in this chapter. In the following three chapters, we then explore this issue at three levels of explanation via three exemplars. The first (discussed in Chap. 2) is at the individual level (wherein we explore the ways in which political leadership affects the sorts of crimes people worry about throughout their lives). The second exemplar (Chap. 3) deals with how legislation can affect households and communities and is achieved via a consideration of the role of housings and changes in this from 1980 to 2000, especially as these relate to victimisation rates. The third and final level of explanation we explore relates to national-level criminal justice acts and policies (Chap. 4). All three of our exemplars in some way relate to crime and criminal justice. This is not a coincidence. We focus on one policy area since we are able to show how a legacy may have several different facets which can be identified at various levels of explanation, namely micro, meso and macro levels even within that policy arena. Picking different policy areas would not allow us to make some of the connections about how legacies operate and become interlinked across levels of explanation (and might leave us open to the accusation of picking policy arena and case studies to fit the argument). Our final chapter explores some of the ways in which legacies can be researched by social scientist, political scientists and historians. Thatcher is an ideal leader to choose, since hers is a particularly well-documented period of leadership. Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear what âThatcherismâ actually was (or is) and with what specific set of events, decisions, interventions and (potentially c...