Alan Finlayson is a British political theorist and political scientist. Currently a reader in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University, he is a leading advocate of rhetorical political analysis and of its importance for the study of British politics.
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Alan Finlayson has published a number of books on both British politics and political theory, including Making Sense of New Labour, Contemporary Political Theory: A Reader and Guide and Democracy and Pluralism. He also writes articles on British politics from a left-wing perspective for The Guardian and Open Democracy.[1][2] He has written widely-read articles on UK Uncut[3] and on the phenomenon of Blue Labour.[4]
Finlayson is a noted advocate of the development of Rhetorical Political Analysis within British Political Studies.[5] He promotes the close study of political speech and argument on the grounds that this is a way of understanding the history and development of political ideologies.[6] He is responsible for the website British Political Speech which archives political speeches and promotes the study of political oratory in the UK.
Finlayson was convenor of the Post-Structuralism and Radical Politics specialist group of the Political Studies Association from 1999-2009. He is currently Treasurer of the Rhetoric and Politics Specialist Group of the PSA and a member of the Rhetoric Society of America's Internationalization Task Force. He is also a member of the management committee of the left-wing pressure group Compass and a Trustee of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust
References
Swansea University Department of Political and Cultural Studies