by Sarah Brown & Allegra Fullerton
This quarter’s highlights collection brings together three of Policy & Politics’ most read open access articles of 2025. Taken together, they speak to a shared concern at the heart of contemporary policy scholarship: how governments define, authorise and act on evidence under conditions of institutional constraint, political short-termism and contested authority. Each article examines a different moment in the policy process — from the mobilisation of lived experience, to the organisation of state capacity, to the formal enactment (and non-enactment) of law — offering complementary insights into why policy ambition so often falters in practice.
Our first article, “Lived experience as evidence in anti-poverty policy making” by O’Connor and Bennett, examines how lived experience is increasingly invoked as a legitimate form of policy evidence in debates about poverty and inequality. Drawing on empirical analysis of anti-poverty policymaking, the authors explore the tensions that arise when experiential knowledge is incorporated into policy processes shaped by established hierarchies of expertise. Rather than treating lived experience as an unproblematic corrective to technocratic decision-making, the article shows how it can be selectively mobilised, constrained or instrumentalised by institutional norms. The contribution lies in moving beyond advocacy for inclusion to a more critical assessment of how lived experience functions politically as evidence, raising important questions about power, representation and epistemic authority in social policy.
Our second article shifts attention to the organisation of the state itself. In “The inefficiency of centralised control and political short-termism”, Warner et al interrogate the limits of highly centralised policymaking in contexts characterised by electoral cycles and short-term political incentives. They argue that centralised control can undermine policy effectiveness by discouraging learning, adaptability and long-term investment, particularly in complex policy domains. Through their analysis, they advance debates on governance capacity by linking institutional design to temporal political pressures. This article’s popularity among our readership reflects a wider scholarly concern with how states balance control, coordination and durability in the face of accelerating political time horizons.
Our final article, “‘Law but not law’: explaining unenacted policy as a type of policy failure” by Needham and Burn, focuses on a neglected but consequential phenomenon: legislation that is formally passed but never implemented. Using the case of long-term care funding reform in England, the authors develop the concept of non-enactment as a distinctive form of policy failure. The article challenges assumptions in the policy failure and implementation literatures that equate legislative passage with policy commitment. Instead, it shows how governments may deliberately abandon enactment when the reputational risks of implementation outweigh the political costs of retreat. In doing so, the article makes an important theoretical contribution by repositioning non-enactment within debates on policy feedback, institutional capacity and blame avoidance.
Read together, these three popular articles illuminate different dimensions of the same underlying problem: the fragility of policy action once ideas encounter institutions, incentives and political calculation. Whether through the partial recognition of lived experience, the constraints of centralised governance, or the strategic abandonment of enacted law, they demonstrate how policy outcomes are shaped as much by what governments cannot — or choose not to — do as by formal commitments.
All three articles are open access and free to read via the links below. Their popularity with our readership underlines their resonance with ongoing scholarly debates about evidence, governance and the limits of state action, and we are pleased to feature them together in this quarter’s highlights.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at:
Lived experience as evidence in anti-poverty policy making: a governance-driven perspective by Clementine Hill O’Connor and Hayley Bennett
The inefficiency of centralised control and political short-termism: the case of the Prison Service in England and Wales by Sam Warner, David Richards, Diane Coyle and Martin J. Smith
‘Law but not law’: explaining unenacted policy as a type of policy failure by Catherine Needham and Emily Burn
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