The importance of political rationalities: UBI and food in/security as examples

It has been some time since we paid attention to the difficult concept of “political rationalities” (see Research Hub entry 7 January 2018). I decided that it would be worthwhile to revisit the place of political rationalities in a WPR analysis and to illustrate the usefulness of the concept with examples. Following the pattern in recent entries, I have been inspired to pursue this path due to some new and insightful articles applying WPR. The topics they tackle are: UBI (Universal Basic Income) and food in/security.

Emily Clark (04 Feb 2025): Is the universal basic income a neoliberal trojan horse? Analyzing representations of ‘the poor’ and ‘poverty’ in UK UBI policy discourses, Critical Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2025.2456695

Inza-Bartolomé, A.; Escajedo San-Epifanio, L. (2025). Assistentialism in food aid resources. An analysis of the problematization of food insecurity through the What’s the Problem Represented to Be (WPR) framework. Cuadernos de Trabajo Social 38(1), 149-157. https://dx.doi.org/10.5209/cuts.96795 

Connections in arguments

As a preliminary thought, I draw to your attention how the topics covered in the Research Hub (which I have maintained now for some eight years) are likely to be interconnected. We are, after all, pursuing a specific question about the character and impact of governing practices. Hence, connections are to be expected.

In the previous entry (29 July 2025), Skjold points to the effects of “personalization” in Norway’s activation services. Applying WPR thinking (Question 4 on silences) she (2025, p. 14; emphasis added) notes that

“the current bias toward collaborative forms of personalization has the potential to undermine other legitimate rationales and values that offer long-term unemployed people other options of inclusion (such as in the Norwegian case, proposals for basic minimum income for the unemployed suggested in Paper 33, 2023–2024).”

Serendipitously, the next article to come to my attention (Clark 2025) applies WPR thinking to UBI (Universal Basic Income). We are alerted therefore to the need to keep asking the WPR questions – to assume that the topics we address or issues we raise may themselves require some WPR thinking. I hope you do not find this proposition depressing since it seems to suggest that our thinking is never done, never complete. But that, of course, is the nature of the task at hand – closure is not to be expected. Decisions will need to be made but these decision will be informed by careful interrogation.

Another connection is struck between the article by Clark and the one by Inza-Bartolomé and Escajedo San-Epifanio. Clark (2025, p. 10) points out that, in her analysis of UBI proposals in the UK Parliament, “food banks” are, at times, “pathologized as a ‘symptom’ of absolute poverty”. Unsurprisingly, there are connections here with the analysis by Inza-Bartolomé and Escajedo San-Epifanio of food in/security policies. Conceptions of “poverty” are central to both analyses, as we shall see.

Finally, in the previous Research Hub entry (29 July 2025) I raised questions about the place of proposals in a WPR analysis. The two articles we examine in this entry contribute to this topic.

Political Rationalities: Review

What are political rationalities? Where are we likely to encounter them? Where do they feature in a WPR analysis? Why are they important?

I start reflections on these questions with some brief and necessarily simplified comments on governmentality (see Bacchi 2023 for elaboration). Governmentality provides a way to expand our thinking about what governing entails. Foucault (2007, p. 108) has this goal in mind when he describes the need to critically interrogate the “ensemble” of “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics” through which governing takes place. His argument is that power relations operate in and across this “ensemble”. They are “rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure [for example, ‘the State’]” (Foucault 1982, p. 222). We therefore need modes of analysis that include but go beyond conventional studies of State-based politics.

Foucault’s “ensemble” points the way to the targets for this broader analysis. In the quote above, he mentions “institutions” and “procedures”, alongside “analyses and reflections”. In governmentality theory, the former constitute “technologies of rule”, while the latter form “rationalities”. That is, to study how governing takes place we need to study both the techniques and mechanisms involved in governing practices (“technologies of rule”) and the “thinking” underpinning those techniques (“rationalities” or “rationales” – the reasons given for those techniques). In this way “political rationalities” provide access to the “thought” in government. Dean (1999, p. 24) describes them as “relatively coherent ways of understanding the tasks and objects of rule”. Put simply, to understand how specific practices/mechanisms become possible, we need to understand the forms of thought – the governing logics – that made these practices intelligible and practicable. Rationalities refer to the specific combinations of concepts and reasons guiding rule (Rose 2000, p. 24).

I find it easier to grasp this notion through examples. Doubtless, you will have heard references to “a liberal rationality” or a “neo-liberal rationality” or an “authoritarian rationality” (see next entry). These “short-hands” refer to the clusters of theories, suppositions, and notions that produce a particular understanding of the operations of government. Foucault found the concept of “problematisation” a useful supplement to rationalities. If we want to probe the “thinking” behind certain government practices, an effective way to do this is to ask how “things” are being problematised – hence, the usefulness of the WPR questions which take on this task.

I now use the two selected articles to illustrate how they deploy these conceptual tools.

ARTICLE 1:

Brief summary:

Clark takes up the contentious issue of “universal basic income” (UBI), a reform proposition (proposal) that has found supporters across the political spectrum. Instead of pursuing competing definitions of the reform, she explores the rationality/ies underpinning it in UK Parliamentary debates. Specifically, she asks whether “representations of ‘the poor’ and ‘poverty’ in UK parliamentary UBI proposals signal breaks with, or continuations of, dominant neoliberal governing logics” – i.e., rationalities. She concludes that, despite popular characterizations of UBI as a “progressive” social policy, its “dominant constitution in UK Parliament” reflects neoliberal rationalities (p. 3). Importantly, Clark highlights two “disruptive proposals” for UBI that constitute it as a “right to the commons of the earth”.

Materials and methods:

Clark (p. 7) specifies that her “data corpus” consists of 135 parliamentary texts. In the main these are extracts from Parliamentary debates to do with UBI: “All debates, questions and answers, Early Day Motions, committee discussions, and evidence sessions in UK Parliament referencing ‘basic income’ were examined from this period [September 2016 to July 2024]”. She provides “example statements” from MPs and peers’ speeches that “expose the logics underpinning the formation of UBI”.

Clark adopts an additional “text”. She uses Foucault’s (2008) examination of Friedman’s Negative Income Tax (NIT) policy idea, to tease out the parameters of a neoliberal rationality (see below).

Applying WPR:

Clark specifies that she applies selected WPR questions (questions 1, 2, 4 and 5) to the material. The material (“key discursive constructions”) was “first coded on NVivo with a focus on the constitution of UBI policy problematizations/prescriptions”. Discourses were then analyzed according to the four WPR questions. From this analysis “three dominant codes, or typologies, of the ‘poor’, underpinned by neoliberal nationalities (sic; should be “rationalities”), emerged”, alongside the two disruptive codes.

Basically, Clark looks to characterise the understanding of UBI in UK Parliamentary debates through examining how it is problematised in readily accessible Parliamentary materials (e.g., Hansard debates). She concludes that, with the exception of the two disruptive “codes”, these texts reflect a neoliberal rationality. This rationality (or neoliberal governing logic/s) can be seen to be in operation through the ways in which “poverty” and “the poor” are constituted as 1) the impotent poor; 2) the idle poor; 3) the industrious poor – typologies adopted from Dean’s (1992) examination of the genealogy of poverty.

Theoretical Issues:

Clark’s paper raises a number of theoretical issues.

Referring to the previous Research Hub entry (29 July 2025), I look to see where she “finds” the “proposals” that provide the starting place for a WPR analysis.

I suggest she finds them in two places: first, in Friedman’s proposed Negative Income Tax (see Camporesi 2024), and second, in the “example statements” of politicians.

How does this work?

On the former, it is possible to think of theoretical propositions as proposals, in the WPR sense of the term. Consider, for example, Marx’s theory of historical materialism, or a realist perspective in international relations. Both, in effect, indicate or propose how things ought to be and hence what needs to change. You can recognise here the starting premise in WPR – what we propose as what needs to change indicates what is produced as problematic. This argument means that, in effect, “every piece of published research is in a sense a ‘prescriptive text’” (Backman and Lofstrand (2022, p. 273). Illustrating the usefulness of this approach, it is becoming increasingly popular to use WPR to conduct systematic reviews or scoping reviews (see for example Johansson and Larsson 2023; Byrt et al. 2023; Puukko 2024). On these grounds, Friedman’s NIT constitutes a proposal and Foucault’s critical comments perform a kind of WPR analysis, probing and elaborating a neoliberal rationality.

On the latter source of proposals (the statements of politicians), in an earlier Research Hub entry (30 June 2021), I consider the possibility of using WPR with legislative debates as “practical texts” – which is basically the approach Clark develops. There I distinguish between statements that clearly target the “conduct of conduct” and hence fit within the parameters of a WPR analysis, and other statements that reflect “pervasive cultural logics” (or “dominant cultural imaginaries) (Spivakovsky and Seear 2017, p. 463). For the latter, I suggest the usefulness of Poststructural Interview Analysis (PIA) which focuses on how certain comments are “sayable” (Bacchi and Bonham 2016).

Clark’s “example statements” refer at times to the desirability of shaping certain behaviours and hence to a prescriptive targeting of “conduct”. At the same time, as Clark (p. 10) notes, they are “underpinned by neo-liberal governing logics”. In other words, thinking through PIA, the selected statements are possible or “sayable” due to their coherence with a neoliberal rationality. A challenge here is to keep the focus on the rationality and to resist slippage into an interpretive analysis that targets policy actors and/or politicians and their “concerns”.

ARTICLE 2:

Brief summary:

Inza-Bartolomé and Escajedo San-Epifanio bring a critical perspective to “food charity”. They emphasise several factors, including that “the dominant problematization of food insecurity neglects the right to food and the structural reasons for poverty”. They draw attention to the trend towards “food charity” in a period of “reduced entitlements in social security”. A particular concern is the effects of this trend on recipients who become “dependent on the generosity of strangers and discretionary donations”, with accompanying stigma. The term “assistentialist” (or assistance-oriented) is introduced to describe the underlying charity orientation of this approach.

Materials and methods:

The authors draw upon a wide range of official documents from the European Commission concerning poverty and aid (see references in the article). They incorporate policy documents, legislative texts and academic (theoretical) texts.

Applying WPR:

The authors (p.151; emphasis added) clearly lay out the way to commence a WPR analysis:

“The first question of the WPR methodology, ‘What is the problem represented to be in a particular policy or policies?’ aims to identify a place from which to begin the analysis, to examine the problem representation to see what is being problematized (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016, p. 20). Therefore, it is essential to start with the proposed solutions”.

They follow through this commitment through targeting a specific practice: The Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD). They proceed to probe the proposals associated with FEAD. For example, “food banks” are put forward as a “win-win solution to prevent food waste and reduce food insecurity: it is an economically, environmentally, and socially responsible alternative” (FEBA, 2023a). The authors proceed to apply the WPR questions to these proposals. To do so they emphasise the need to “work backwards” and “revisit and interrogate unexamined ways of thinking to show that they have a history, and insist on questioning their implications (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, p. 16)”.

Theoretical Issues:

As with Clark, a prominent focus for critique is neoliberalism. By contrast with Clark, neoliberalism is described as an “ideological perspective” not a rationality (152), and it is noted that “this process implies an intentionality from a neoliberal ideological perspective”. Despite this contrast, there are overlaps in interpretation. I have already mentioned the shared observation that food banks can be associated with stigma.

We return therefore to the need to specify what we mean when we use the term “political rationality” and the need to distinguish its use from analyses that talk about ideologies. Larner (2000) clarified this distinction some time ago and I highly recommend her article. The concept of “rationality” is meant to keep a focus on fluidity in modes of political analysis and change. “Problematisation” as an analytic strategy has the same goal (see Bacchi 2023). The object of the exercise is to consider how power relations are “rooted deep in the social nexus”, not in the intentions of “bad actors”.

Conclusions:

The implications of adopting a rationality framework are manifold. Here I emphasise what follows from identifying rationalities as reflecting power relations that are “rooted deep in the social nexus”. Basically, such a perspective alerts us to the need to check our own positions and proposals. Brown (1998, p. 44) clarifies this point nicely.

“it [poststructural analysis] aims to make visible why particular positions and visions of the future occur to us, and especially to reveal when and where those positions work in the same register of ‘political rationality’ as that which they purport to criticize”.

It follows that one of the main tasks of WPR is to examine the possible place of specific rationalities in our own proposals/arguments (see Step 7 on “self”-problematisation; Bacchi and Goodwin, p. 20). Inza-Bartolomé and Escajedo San-Epifanio (2025, p. 154) end their piece with a plea to construct a different problematization and to ensure that the “path” of “vulnerable people” who “need the help of the welfare system to achieve food security” is protected by the right to food. We have an instance here where applying WPR and the concept of rationality to terms such as “vulnerable” may prove useful analytically.

References

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FEBA. European Federation of Food Banks (2023 septembere 11) (2023a). 10 facts about food banks and food waste prevention. FEBA. https://www.eurofoodbank.org/publications/10-facts-about-food-banks-and- food-waste-prevention/

Foucault, M. (1982), ‘How is Power Exercised?’, in Dreyfus, H. L. and Rabinow, P. (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 216–226.

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Skjold, S. M. (22 Jan 2025): From ‘user-oriented’ to ‘holistic’: evolving contours of personalization in Norway’s activation policy between 2000 – 2023, Critical Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2025.2456151 Spivakovsky, C. and Seear, K. 2017. Making the abject: problem- solving courts, addiction, mental illness and impairment, Continuum, 31(3): 458-469, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2016.1275152

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