When neoliberalism meets technocracy: intra-elite conflict and the realignment of Britain’s macroeconomic regime under Liz Truss
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article offers a new account of Liz Truss’s premiership by analysing the political economy of the 2022 mini-Budget crisis. Engaging with literature on depoliticisation, statecraft, and the City-Bank-Treasury nexus, it reconceptualises the rise and fall of the Truss government as a moment of intra-elite conflict over the governance of macroeconomic policy. It argues that Truss’s radical neoliberal experiment constituted a novel form of elite-led backlash against the depoliticisation of economic management. By challenging the independence of key institutions in the British state and breaching long-established practices of depoliticised governance, her disorderly approach to statecraft catalysed an institutional response. Developing a theory of institutional realignment through crisis, the article shows how a ‘Bank-Treasury-OBR nexus’ coalesced during the crisis around a consensus of monetary dominance, fiscal discipline, and technocratic expertise. Leveraging their institutional authority to signal impending market turmoil, the nexus ultimately played a key role in Truss’s downfall. The article concludes by arguing that Truss’s premiership provides important insight into changing dynamics of contestation surrounding depoliticised governance.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it