From Intervention to Disengagement: Domestic Structure, the State, and the British Information Technology Industry, 1979-1990

Abstract

British policy toward the information technology industry in the 1980s illuminates the circumstances in which political leaders can alter the domestic political structure and effect significant policy change. Though preferring to reduce the role of government in the economy, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government adopted a highly interventionist policy toward the information technology industry in early 1983. After the June 1983 election, however, the Prime Minister was able to impose her more strictly neoliberal preferences after altering the structural context of policymaking. The wide margin of electoral victory in 1983 permitted Thatcher to exploit the unusually strong centralizing potential of the British parliamentary system and increase her own role in policy-making. Thus she was able to supplant other Conservative politicians and the civil servant-interest group networks that had promoted a more interventionist policy and impose her own policy preferences.