Policy & Politics Journal Blog

By Sarah Brown, Journal Manager

From a prevailing, long-standing debate in the journal on the welfare state, we bring you a collection of our best and most recent articles. To highlight just a couple: Anthony McCashin’s How much change? Pierson and the welfare state revisited provides a structural overview of the impact of globalisation on analyses of the welfare state.

Meanwhile Sharon Wright, through forensic scrutiny, exposes the gulf between the discursive constitution of the welfare subject by policy makers, and the lived experiences of those subjects in her article Conceptualising the active welfare subject: welfare reform in discourse, policy and lived experience.
All of these articles seek to critically evaluate this contentious area of policy and point towards purposeful research agendas for the future. Download them now before 30 November while they’re free to access!

Resistance or resignation to welfare reform? The activist politics for and against social citizenship
Authors:  Edmiston, Daniel; Humpage, Louise

What ever happened to asset-based welfare? Shifting approaches to housing wealth and welfare security
Authors: Ronald, Richard; Lennartz, Christian; Kadi, Justin

Conceptualising the active welfare subject: welfare reform in discourse, policy and lived experience
Authors: Wright, Sharon

How much change? Pierson and the welfare state revisited
Authors: McCashin, Anthony

Reconsidering the fiscal-social policy nexus: the case of social insurance
Authors: Koreh, Michal; Beland, Daniel

 

If you enjoyed this blog, try our other themed virtual issues which are free to download from 1-30 November:
Public Services and Reform

Customer engagement in UK water regulation: towards a collaborative regulatory state?
Authors: Heims, Eva; Lodge, Martin

Keeping expertise in its place: understanding arm’s-length bodies as boundary organisations
Authors: Boswell, John

Changing experiences of responsibilisation and contestation within counter-terrorism policies
Authors: Thomas, Paul

Local governance under austerity: hybrid organisations and hybrid officers
Authors: Pill, Madeleine; Guarneros-Meza, Valeria

The effects of privatisation on the equity of public services: evidence from China
Authors: Wang, Huanming; Mu, Rui; Liu, Shuyan

Working-class discourses of politics, policy and health: ‘I don’t smoke; I don’t drink. The only thing wrong with me is my health’
Authors: Mackenzie, Mhairi; Collins, Chik; Connolly, John; Doyle, Mick; McCartney, Gerry

Who cares? The social care sector and the future of youth employment
Authors: Montgomery, Tom; Mazzei, Micaela; Baglioni, Simone et al

UK employment services: understanding provider strategies in a dynamic strategic action field
Authors: Taylor, Rebecca; Rees, James; Damm, Christopher

Electricity market reform: so what’s new?
Authors: Toke, David; Baker, Keith

Re-evaluating local government amalgamations: utility maximisation meets the principle of double effect (PDE)
Authors: Drew, Joseph; Grant, Bligh; Fisher, Josie

Constructing the need for retrenchment: disability benefits in the United States and Great Britain
Authors: Morris, Zachary

Activating citizens in Dutch care reforms: framing new co-production roles and competences for citizens and professionals
Authors: Nederhand, Jose; Van Meerkerk, Ingmar

Shifting logics: limitations on the journey from ‘state’ to ‘market’ logic in UK higher education
Authors: Alexander, Elizabeth A.; Phillips, Wendy; Kapletia, Dharm

 

Evidence-Based Policy

Evidence translation: an exploration of policy makers’ use of evidence
Authors: Ingold, Jo; Monaghan, Mark

Can experience be evidence? Craft knowledge and evidence-based policing
Authors: Fleming, Jenny; Rhodes, Rod

British educational trajectories from school to university: evaluating quantitative evidence in policy formulation and justification
Authors: Johnston, Ron; Manley, David; Jones, Kelvyn; Hoare, Anthony; Harris, Richard

Studying public deliberation after the systemic turn: the crucial role for interpretive research
Authors: Ercan, Selen A.; Hendriks, Carolyn M.; Boswell, John

Global evidence in local debates: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in Swiss direct-democratic debates on school policy
Authors: Schlaufer, Caroline

 

And Claire Dunlop’s special issue on Policy learning and policy failure:

Policy learning and policy failure: definitions, dimensions and intersections  
Author: Dunlop, Claire A.

Pathologies of policy learning: what are they and how do they contribute to policy failure?  
Author: Dunlop, Claire A.

Overcoming the failure of ‘silicon somewheres’: learning in policy transfer
processes  
Author: Giest, Sarah

Understanding the transfer of policy failure: bricolage, experimentalism and translation  
Author: Stone, Diane

British Columbia’s fast ferries and Sydney’s Airport Link: partisan barriers to learning from policy failure  
Authors: Newman, Joshua; Bird, Malcolm G.

Policy failures, policy learning and institutional change: the case of Australian health insurance policy change  
Author: Kay, Adrian

Policy myopia as a source of policy failure: adaptation and policy learning under deep uncertainty  
Authors: Nair, Sreeja; Howlett, Michael