Guo, Y., & Fan, Y. (2026). The politics of the “non-political”: A conceptual review. Political Communication, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2026.2745844
Summary
This conceptual review turns a critical lens on an often-overlooked term in political science and communication scholarship: the “non-political.” Rather than taking the label at face value, Guo and Fan treat it as a boundary object that exposes scholars’ implicit, frequently unexamined assumptions about what politics actually is. Through a boundary analysis of 140 empirical articles, they distinguish two dominant conceptual treatments—categorical (the nonpolitical as an inherent, exclusive feature) and contextual (the nonpolitical as a temporary, transformative state)—and show how intellectual traditions, paradigmatic orientations, methodological standards, and rhetorical norms shape where and how the boundary gets drawn. Adopting a relational rather than substantialist ontology, they argue that the political is constituted through its relations to the supposedly nonpolitical, and that studying “the politics of the non-political” offers an indirect but heuristically rich route to the foundational question of what politics is.
Key Contributions
- Reframes the political/non-political boundary as a relationally constituted boundary object rather than a given distinction.
- Provides a typology of two conceptual treatments (categorical, contextual) and four relational modes (spillover, comparison, politicization, embeddedness) for mapping a fragmented literature.
- Reclaims (de)politicization as a meta-theoretical, power-sensitive relational lens—not merely an outcome—calling for processual accounts of boundary-crossing.
- Offers operational guidance: clearer definitions, gradational rather than binary measures of “politicalness,” and incorporation of public perceptions.
- Encourages researcher self-reflexivity about how and why the political/nonpolitical boundary is constructed in academic knowledge production.
Methods
The authors combine a genealogical review of the nature of politics across political theory (Plato through Schmitt, Wolin, feminist theory, Foucault) with a boundary analysis grounded in a relational ontology. They systematically searched Web of Science using keywords (non-political/nonpolitical, apolitical, non-news), screening 448 English-language SSCI articles in political science and communication journals (2004–2024) down to a final analytical sample of 140 articles (most represented: Political Behavior and Political Communication). Inductive coding captured how scholars define the boundaries of the nonpolitical, the relational modes linking it to the political, and the stated motivations of such studies.
Findings
- About two-thirds of articles adopt a categorical treatment, reducing differences to a binary, either-or operationalization.
- Within categorical treatments, some use a residual approach (nonpolitical = what remains after politics), while others give it substantive meaning (the private, the mundane/entertainment, the neutral, the nonpartisan).
- Categorical studies rely on relational modes of spillover/invasion (including a “backward spillover” from nonpolitical to political) and comparison.
- Contextual treatments frame the nonpolitical as a temporary, hybrid, transformative state, foregrounding (de)politicization and embeddedness (e.g., “third spaces,” intertextuality).
- Some studies pursue pragmatic reconciliation via hedging (“ostensibly,” “seemingly”) or gradational/computational measures of “politicalness.”
- Categorical distinctions dominate quantitative work; contextual fluidity dominates critical/interpretive work—a divide reflecting paradigmatic, methodological, and rhetorical demands rather than deliberate ontological commitments.
- Politicization is largely treated as an outcome rather than a process with specifiable mechanisms, scope conditions, and attention to power.
Connections
This meta-theoretical piece sits at a different level of abstraction than most empirical work in these registers, interrogating the very boundary that studies of entertainment, lifestyle content, and depoliticized spaces presuppose. Its concern with how politics is embedded in ostensibly nonpolitical settings resonates with work on hybrid political content and platform spaces such as Divon2026-wx and Grusauskaite2026-po, and its attention to politicization as a power-laden process offers a conceptual frame that empirical partisanship studies rarely make explicit.
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