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.
Expertise, evidence, and policy advice
What happens to experts when the politics around them turns hostile, crowded, or simply indifferent to what they know? These four articles follow knowledge as it is produced, defended and fought over across multiple contexts. They offer valuable material for modules on evidence-informed policymaking, implementation, agenda setting, governance, and public administration.
In our first article on this theme, Legitimising policy knowledge in autocratising contexts: the case of Hungary, authors Krizsán and Fekete examine how policy experts and think tanks maintain legitimacy in Hungary’s increasingly autocratising political environment. Their interviews with Hungarian think tanks reveal a trap: experts aligned with the regime are written off as government mouthpieces, while those who stay independent are excluded, scrutinised, or blacklisted. The interesting move is how knowledge producers fight back, abandoning claims to neutrality in favour of openly values-driven work.
In our second featured article, The performance of accountability and the treatment of experts by politicians: UK parliamentary select committees during the COVID-19 pandemic, authors Matthews and Wood explore how politicians engaged with expert witnesses in UK parliamentary select committees during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their findings challenge assumptions about anti-expert politics as they did not find evidence of partisan grandstanding or blame games, treating experts instead as genuinely useful. This piece also provides a useful entry point for discussions of accountability, representation, and evidence use in democratic institutions.
Next, in Lived experience as evidence in anti-poverty policy making: a governance-driven perspective, authors Hill O’Connor and Bennett turn to the growing role of lived experience in anti-poverty policymaking and argue that lived experiences can flow top-down. They recast the turn to lived experience as a form of governance-driven democratisation: state-led participation rather than grassroots driven. Their Scottish anti-poverty case shows the language of participation and deliberation appearing in the rationale, then being quietly squeezed out as institutional needs take over.
Finally on this theme, in Experts in governance: a comparative analysis of the Nordic countries, authors Christensen et al analyse the role of academic experts in government advisory commissions across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Their comparative study challenges assumptions about a single Nordic model of governance and offers an excellent introduction to debates about policy advice and expert involvement in decision making.
Policy process, agenda setting, and policy dismantling
How does an issue seize political attention while others are ignored, and what happens when a government sets out to tear an existing policy down? This group of articles runs from agenda setting through to dismantling, and would be a fantastic addition to policy courses.
We begin with Lewallen’s analysis of conflict and agenda setting in the US Congress. Using committee report “views” and floor amendments, the author shows that prioritising an issue in order to decide it actually certifies conflict: the issues that attract the most disagreement at the agenda-setting stage are the ones that cause the most disagreement when it is time to act.
Next, in How do populist discourses influence policy termination? author Bhatia explores how populist discourses influence policy termination. Populism is treated less as an ideology and more as a way of building coalitions through emotionally resonant stories of betrayal and renewal. The key finding here is conditional and important: populist leaders can mobilise support for tearing a policy down, but only when the story lines up with people’s lived realities and values.
In our third article, González-Viveros and López Guerra examine the consequences of policy dismantling in Mexico following the termination of a major childcare programme. Their findings show how subnational governments responded to federal retrenchment, making the article a particularly useful case for teaching policy dismantling, multilevel governance, and social policy.
In our final article on this theme, author Asticher investigates healthcare workforce reforms in Switzerland following the COVID-19 pandemic. A pandemic that exposed a chronic shortage of healthcare workers ought to have been an open door for reform. Drawing on the concept of policy windows, the article demonstrates that it mostly wasn’t, and demonstrates how institutional and gender legacies continue to shape policy design even during periods that appear favourable to major reform.
Interpretive process tracing
Our final theme turns to research methods. Process tracing (PT) is now widely taught across public policy and political science programmes, and this themed section introduces students to an innovative interpretive approach that places meaning-making, context, and actor perspectives at the centre of the analysis. It offers valuable material for courses seeking to connect methodological debates with substantive policy research.
The section’s introductory article, Interpretive Process Tracing in Policy Research by van Meegdenburg, Plümer & Kuhlmann introduces readers to PT. It is paired with an empirical article from van Meegdenburg: Interpretive process tracing? How PT can become amenable to interpretive research. Together, these pieces offer the conceptual foundations of Interpretive Process Tracing and provide a valuable resource for methods teaching by showing how PT can be adapted to interpretive and constructivist research traditions.
The empirical articles in this themed issue also demonstrate how these ideas can be applied in practice. For example, Smith Ochoa traces how poverty became recognised as a legitimate policy issue in Germany, showing how civil society actors, researchers, and policy makers gradually reshaped understandings of poverty through social reporting and advocacy.
Finally, Münch examines the diffusion of assisted voluntary return policies in Germany. By focusing on how actors interpret, frame, and share policy ideas, the article illustrates how interpretive process tracing can generate richer accounts of policy diffusion and institutional change.
Every article in this collection is free to read from July – September, so this is the moment to explore and incorporate them into your course syllabi. Happy summer reading!
Expertise & evidence in policymaking
Legitimising policy knowledge in autocratising contexts: the case of Hungary
Lived experience as evidence in anti-poverty policy making: a governance-driven perspective
Experts in governance: a comparative analysis of the Nordic countries
Policy process, agenda setting and policy dismantling
The influence of conflict on agenda setting in the US Congress
How do populist discourses influence policy termination?
The effects of policy dismantling on the policy-making process
Interpretive process tracing
Interpretive Process Tracing in policy research
How social reporting put poverty on the agenda in Germany: an interpretive process tracing analysis
The role of causal mechanisms in policy diffusion: assisted voluntary return policies in Germany
Interpretive process tracing? How PT can become amenable to interpretive research
Read the full Student Reading List collection here.
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