How lived experience can become evidence for policymaking 

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By Kati Rantala 


Consulting people directly affected by policy is increasingly seen as an important part of inclusive policymaking. But how can knowledge grounded in individual experience be used to inform policies affecting a much wider population? In our new Policy & Politics article, ‘From Experiential Knowledge to Generalisations in Lawmaking: Consultations with Incarcerated Individuals Navigating the Prison System’, we examine how experiential knowledge can move from individual accounts to broader policy evidence. 

Experiential knowledge is often regarded as highly contextual, subjective and difficult to generalise. Our research explores this challenge through consultations with incarcerated people during the drafting of reforms to Finland’s Imprisonment Act. 

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How expert bureaucrats survive under illiberal governments 

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By Katarina Staronova and Michal Sedlačko


How do expert bureaucrats preserve expertise, autonomy and policy influence when political leaders seek greater control over the bureaucracy? In our new Policy & Politics article, ‘How expert bureaucrats survive illiberal regimes through renegotiating expertise bargains’, we examine how expert bureaucrats in Slovakia responded to growing political pressure following the election of a populist radical right government in 2023. The article forms part of the Policy & Politics special issue forthcoming in 2027, Expertise in Democratic and Autocratic Policymaking: A research agenda, guest edited by Sonja Blum, Ellen Fobé, Valérie Pattyn and Bishoy L. Zaki.   

Existing research has shown how authoritarian populists seek to weaken bureaucratic autonomy, politicise appointments and undermine expertise. Our study shifts the focus to expert bureaucrats themselves. Rather than treating them as simply reacting to political change, we examine how they anticipate threats, develop individual and collective strategies, and renegotiate the conditions under which expertise can survive.

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How think tanks shape policymaking in authoritarian regimes 

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by Vera Axyonova


How does expertise influence policymaking in authoritarian regimes? While research on think tanks and policy advice has expanded rapidly in recent years, it has focused predominantly on liberal democracies. In Managing Policy Expertise through Think Tank-State Relations in Kazakhstan, author Vera Axyonova turns attention to an underexplored political context, examining how expertise is organised, mobilised and constrained under soft authoritarianism. The article forms part of the Policy & Politics special issue forthcoming in 2027, Expertise in Democratic and Autocratic Policymaking: A research agenda, guest edited by Sonja Blum, Ellen Fobé, Valérie Pattyn and Bishoy L. Zaki.  

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2026 Policy & Politics Student Reading List 

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by Allegra Fullerton & Sarah Brown


Updating your student reading lists? Read our essential reading recommendations for public policy and politics courses on expertise and evidence in policymaking, policy process theories, and interpretive approaches to policy research.

As you update reading lists for the coming academic year, we present a curated collection of policy and politics scholarship that will engage students in fresh arguments and support robust classroom discussion. This collection of recent articles offers fresh material for teaching on expertise and evidence in policymaking & politics, policy process theories, and interpretive approaches to policy research. Together, these articles showcase some of the latest developments in public policy and political scholarship, combining conceptual innovation, empirical analysis, and methodological reflection. They provide useful additions to undergraduate and postgraduate modules across public policy, politics, governance, and research methods. 

We hope these suggestions save you time in identifying recent scholarship while ensuring your course materials reflect current debates at the forefront of the discipline – and they are all free to access from July to September, so you can get reading straight away.  

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Advancing policy scholarship: Quarterly highlights from Policy & Politics 

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By Allegra Fullerton & Sarah Brown 


Policy scholarship continues to evolve in response to increasingly complex public challenges. As policy researchers seek to better understand how governments collaborate, use expertise and navigate contested policy processes, they are also refining the theories, concepts and methods that underpin the field itself. This quarterly collection brings together five recent articles from Policy & Politics that each advance policy scholarship in different ways. Together, they demonstrate how theoretical development, methodological innovation and empirical research can deepen our understanding of policy making.  

Our first featured article, A new framework for collaborative climate governance: linking consensus building and collective action, by Cheng Zhou and Clare Richardson-Barlow, addresses one of the central questions in collaborative governance: how does collaboration move from dialogue to meaningful collective action? Drawing on extensive fieldwork and evolutionary game modelling, the authors develop a new framework that conceptualises collaboration as a dynamic process in which consensus building lays the foundations for joint action. By focusing on the behavioural dynamics that shape collaboration, the article offers a more process-oriented understanding of how governance arrangements develop and why collaborative efforts can produce very different outcomes across policy contexts.

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How local councillors shape public policy: new insights into policy agency 

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by Oliver Meza & Ana Cecilia de Alba


Local government, policy agency and policymaking are often associated with mayors, senior officials or policy entrepreneurs. Yet elected councillors also play a vital role in shaping public policy, even when they operate with limited formal authority. In their article, “Power, Politics and Policy Agency: Towards a Functional Theory of Agency,” Oliver Meza and Ana Cecilia de Alba explore how municipal councillors influence the policy process and argue that their contribution has been overlooked in policy process research.  

Policy process scholarship has traditionally focused on institutions, coalitions and systemic dynamics, paying comparatively less attention to the individuals who navigate these environments. Drawing on the recently developed Functional Theory of Agency, the authors instead examine what policy actors actually do. They identify four key policy agency functions—steering, innovation, intermediation and intelligence—and investigate how these are performed by municipal councillors in Mexico.  

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Call for papers on Power and Politics in the Policy Process – A Special Issue of Policy & Politics 

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The co-editors invite abstracts for a special issue on Power and Politics in the Policy Process. 

Abstract submission (500-750 words) deadline: 1 September 2026 

From our perspective as editors of Policy & Politics, there is a clear gap in the literature: politics is either not explicitly addressed or under-integrated in policy process studies. The implication is that if politics is missing, then so is power. Our concern is theoretical, empirical and fundamentally practical: not enough has been done to advance knowledge about how politics influences policy responses to public problems. This is to the field’s detriment, given the increasing tendency toward illiberalism in democratic systems that fractures the pluralist norms that policy process research has long relied on. 

We argue that ideas about politics and political power are embedded in how we theorise about and empirically analyse policy process concepts, such as the ways that actors behave, leverage resources, mobilize, and more. However, these ideas have not always been explicitly connected to politics and the use of political power. 

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Updating your student reading lists? Read our essential reading recommendations for public policy and politics courses on expertise and evidence in policymaking, policy process theories, and interpretive approaches to policy research 

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By Allegra Fullerton & Sarah Brown 

As you update reading lists for the coming academic year, we present a curated collection of policy and politics scholarship that will engage students in fresh arguments and support robust classroom discussion. This collection of recent articles offers fresh material for teaching on expertise and evidence in policymaking & politics, policy process theories, and interpretive approaches to policy research. Together, these articles showcase some of the latest developments in public policy and political scholarship, combining conceptual innovation, empirical analysis, and methodological reflection. They provide useful additions to undergraduate and postgraduate modules across public policy, politics, governance, and research methods. 

We hope these suggestions save you time in identifying recent scholarship while ensuring your course materials reflect current debates at the forefront of the discipline – and they are all free to access from July to September, so you can get reading straight away.  

Read the full Student Reading List collection here.

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Can policy conflict be productive? Insights from a systematic review 

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by Ilana Schröder & Eva E.A. Wolf

In a recent article published in Policy & Politics, Ilana Schröder & Eva Wolf examine a topic that is central to policymaking but often receives less explicit attention than it deserves: policy conflict. While conflicts are an inherent feature of policy processes, the authors argue that research on what policy conflicts are, how they unfold, and what consequences they produce remains fragmented across different research traditions. 

Through a systematic review of 85 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2024, the article brings together insights that are currently dispersed across policy process theories, interpretive policy studies, collaborative governance research, implementation studies, and conflict scholarship. In doing so, it offers a more integrated understanding of how conflicts shape policy processes and produce different kinds of consequences. 

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How policy beliefs shape advocacy coalitions in energy policy  

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by Aerang Nam


In a recent article Extending the Advocacy Coalition Framework: Measuring Within-Coalition Belief Variation in Offshore Wind Policy Conflicts author Aerang Nam advances the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) by developing a more precise account of how belief expression varies within coalitions and how this variation is structured by organisational affiliation. Rather than treating beliefs as latent positions inferred from actor behaviour, the article shifts attention to observable expressions of belief in public discourse and how these expressions differ in both scope and intensity across actors within the same coalition space. 

Reconceptualising constraint in belief expression 

A central theoretical contribution lies in the reconceptualisation of constraint in belief expression. While ACF scholarship has long acknowledged that actors do not express beliefs in fully unconstrained ways, constraint is often treated in general or implicit terms. The article advances this debate by conceptualising constraint as measurable variation in the breadth and intensity of beliefs articulated by actors within coalitions. 

This reframing shifts analysis away from binary assumptions about whether belief expression is constrained and toward a more graded understanding of how it is constrained. In doing so, it strengthens the ACF’s capacity to analyse discourse in a way that is both theoretically consistent and empirically operationalisable. 

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