Month: June 2017

Policy & Politics at the International Conference on Public Policy #ICPP3, Singapore

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Representatives from the Policy & Politics journal team are delighted to be attending the 3rd International Conference on Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore. We are looking forward to celebrating with our authors, reviewers and board members over our recent impact factor rise which has taken us into the top quartile of all the international journals in both public administration and political science.

You can read the top cited articles contributing to our impact factor of 1.939 for FREE until 31 July!

Please look out for our representatives around the conference to discuss any relevant articles you are planning to publish. Continue reading →

Experience is not a dirty word

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jenny_fleming_rod_rhodesBy Professor Jenny Fleming and Professor Rod Rhodes

The following blog post is based on an article recently published in Policy & Politics: ‘Can experience be evidence? Craft knowledge and evidence-based policing‘.

Government policy is to build on evidence of what works. So, we conduct randomised controlled trials, we ‘nudge’ citizens, and we evaluate policies to recover evidence of what does or does not work. No one denies that the more you know the better; but how do you acquire knowledge? More importantly what constitutes knowledge? Continue reading →

2016 Impact Factor: Free collection of highly cited articles

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P&P editors

Sarah Ayres, Steve Martin, Felicity Matthews, Diane Stone – Policy & Politics Editors

We are delighted to announce that Policy & Politics has achieved an impressive result in this year’s Journal Citation Reports with an Impact Factor of 1.939. This places the Journal firmly in the top quartile of international journals in both the public administration and the political science categories.

This fantastic outcome is testimony to the outstanding quality of research produced by our authors, the meticulous scrutiny of our peer reviewers, and the hard work of the Policy & Politics and Policy Press team. We would like to offer our thanks and congratulations to all.

To celebrate this increase we have made the most highly cited articles which contributed to the 2016 Impact Factor free to read until 31 July 2017: Continue reading →

News release: Policy and Politics achieves top international ranking

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We are delighted to announce that Policy & Politics , which has been publishing key works in public and social policy and politics for 45 years, has just achieved an impact factor of 1.939.  It is now ranked 11th in the field of public administration, placing it firmly in the top quartile of international journals.

Policy & Politics, published by Policy Press, has gained a reputation for being more innovative and risk-taking than many of its competitors, partly due to its clear competitive advantage of being owned by the University of Bristol and therefore wholly independent.  Continue reading →

A seismic shift has occurred in British politics

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MFlinders-new-smallBy Matthew Flinders, Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics, University of Sheffield

This post was originally published on The Conversation on 9 June 2017.

The 2017 general election was a once-in-a-generation opportunity that the Tories fumbled and Labour exploited to remarkable effect. The Tories managed to spook older voters and thereby alienate a core constituency; Labour, meanwhile, both connected with younger people and somehow got them to actually vote in large numbers.

All political scholars should beware reaching too quickly for their pens, keyboards or quills; to adapt the old adage, “write in haste, repent at leisure”. Nonetheless, it strikes me that a seismic shift has occurred in British politics. It is now clear that Theresa May’s gamble has been a catastrophic failure. With a hung parliament, the UK’s negotiating position on Brexit looks to be in tatters. Theresa May asked the British public to show its support for a “hard” Brexit, but the public declined. Continue reading →

Opinion Editorial: The Lady is not for Wobbling: Mrs May, social care and spending political capital

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MFlinders-new-smallBy Matt Flinders

A shorter version of this blog post was originally published by Prospect magazine.

When is a wobble not a wobble? This might not seem the most obvious question to be asking in the context of the current General Election campaign but that’s exactly what makes it so important. Could it be that Theresa May’s recent backtracking on the costs of social care was nothing of the kind? Instead part of a more subtle game of preparing the public for tough choices that will inevitably have to be taken? Have we just witnessed the political equivalent of a footballers fake dive? Continue reading →

We still need ‘experts’: evidence translation in practice

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JoIngold_MarkMonaghan2Jo Ingold and Mark Monaghan

This blog post is based on the authors’ article, Evidence translation: an exploration of policy makers’ use of evidence, which won the 2016 prize for the best article in Policy & Politics and is free to access until 15 June 2017.

The role of evidence in policy making, and whether evidence-based policy can ever be a reality, has attracted much debate, both inside and outside academia. In our article on what we refer to as ‘evidence translation’, we try to grapple with these issues. Our academic interest in this area stemmed from research we had conducted separately on similar themes (the role of evidence in policy making), but from different traditions and persuasions. Ingold had focused on ideas relating to ‘policy transfer’ in welfare to work, comparing Denmark with the UK. By contrast, Monaghan had concentrated efforts on understanding the standing of evidence in policy debates often seen, by critics, to be evidence free – in this case the area of UK drug policy. Our substantive areas were not a hindrance to our partnership. Instead, we were very much enthralled by some commentaries in the journal Policy & Politics (and elsewhere) that suggested that both evidence-based policy and policy transfer were fundamentally concerned with the same process, but were literatures that had emerged separately. It was, we felt, a hypothesis worth exploring, but more than that we quickly arrived at the conclusion that there was much to be learned by each literature from the other. Continue reading →