1st Edition

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

By Mircea Popa Copyright 2026
176 Pages 24 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

176 Pages 24 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

Data availability statement
Acknowledgements
Lists of figures

1. The rise of government activism   

2. Academic debates and policy change        

3. What happened in the post-2016 policy era?        

4. What is different from the neoliberal era?

5. Evolutions in legislation   

6. Evolutions in fiscal policy 

7. The new activism and industrial policy    

8. The new activism and social policy          

9. Institutional change

10. Open questions on the rise of government activism       


References
Index

Biography

Mircea Popa is a senior lecturer in Quantitative Political Research at the University of Bristol. He has published extensively on the relation between economics and politics and its historical evolutions. His recent work has looked at how computational text analysis can be used to make sense of economic policy.