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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How Crisis Discourse Shapes UK Asylum Governance: From Framing to Administrative Practice 

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By Nasar Meer and Emma Hill

In their recent article, Nasar Meer and Emma Hill examine how narratives of “crisis” have become embedded within the everyday governance of asylum in the United Kingdom. Bringing Teun A. van Dijk’s concept of the ideological square into conversation with framing and political communication scholarship, the article argues that crisis discourse is not simply rhetorical. Rather, it has become administratively productive, shaping procurement systems, evidentiary practices, and the lived experience of asylum accommodation itself. 

From crisis discourse to crisis ordinariness 

The article begins from a core insight in policy studies: before governments can act on a policy “problem”, they must first frame it as such. In the field of asylum governance, this increasingly occurs through narratives of emergency, invasion, and loss of control. While concepts such as the Overton window help explain shifts in political possibility, Meer and Hill argue that they can understate the communicative power through which migration is continually reproduced as crisis. 

To address this, the article turns to van Dijk’s ideological square, which foregrounds how discourse systematically emphasises “our” virtues and “their” failings, while minimising countervailing evidence. The authors extend this beyond discourse analysis to show how evaluative asymmetries become embedded within the epistemic and administrative architecture of governance. The result is what they term “crisis ordinariness”: a condition in which emergency becomes the routine operating logic of asylum governance. 

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Policy & Politics journal’s most highly cited articles of 2025 

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By Sarah Brown

In celebration of Policy & Politics‘ new 2-year Impact Factor of 3.5 in the 2025 Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and its continued position in the top quartile of journals in both Public Administration and Political Science, we’ve made this collection of highly cited articles free to access until 31 July. Together, these articles celebrate the achievements of our authors while showcasing the breadth of scholarship published in Policy & Politics and its contribution to advancing understanding of policy processes and policymaking.

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Smokefree Public Places Policy in Scotland: Rethinking Policy Work in Multiple Streams and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

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by Katherine E. Smith

In this article, author Katherine E. Smith revisits Scotland’s landmark smokefree public places legislation to ask not only how policy change occurred, but how it was actively made. Drawing on a 2024 witness seminar with ministers, civil servants, advocates and researchers, the article builds a collectively constructed, retrospective account of how this major reform was developed, designed and implemented.  

Existing analyses, particularly those based on Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, are broadly supported. As Smith shows, a policy window opened as problem, policy and political streams aligned, while wider shifts in policy image and venue helped enable a significant punctuation in tobacco policy. However, the article’s central contribution lies in demonstrating that these theories under-specify the policy work through which such conditions are produced and translated into outcomes. 

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Interpretive process tracing themed section article on ‘Interpretive Process Tracing? How Process Tracing Can Become Amenable to Interpretive Research 

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by Hilde van Meegdenburg

In Interpretive Process Tracing? How PT Can Become Amenable to Interpretive Research, Hilde van Meegdenburg advances an analyticist approach to PT and explores how process tracing can be made amenable to interpretive research. In this important research article in our new themed section advancing an interpretive approach to process tracing, the author addresses a key methodological tension: while process tracing is widely used in policy research and foreign policy analysis, it has largely been developed within a regularity-oriented, broadly positivist framework. 

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