Jim Bulpitt

James Graham Bulpitt (1937 – 5 April 1999) was a Professor of Politics at the University of Warwick and a political scientist.

Bulpitt was born in Wembley, London to a working-class family. He studied at the University of Exeter and Manchester and then went on to be a Research Fellow at the University of Milan. Bulpitt returned to the UK to be a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde.

He then went to lecture at Warwick in 1965 as a founding member of its Politics Department. He eventually came to be Chairman of the Politics Department. Bulpitt founded Modern British Studies at Warwick. At Warwick there is an annual prize of £100 awarded to a final year student for the best overall performance in the degrees of Politics or Politics with International Studies.

He is particularly famous for the early development of statecraft theory. He initially developed the approach as a useful way of understanding the Thatcher administration. This approach was later applied and redeveloped by Jim Buller to Europeanisation in his book National Statecraft and European Integration 1979-1997 and Toby S. James in Elite Statecraft and Election Administration. This, other work using the approach, led scholar to argue that it offers a useful understanding of continuity and change in politics and policy.