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Did Low-income Essential Workers during Covid-19 Increase Public Support for Redistribution?

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by Jeong Hyun Kim, John Kuk and Yesola Kweon

Studies have shown that racial prejudice in the United States have led to lower levels of public support for redistribution. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased public attention on the essential role of low-income workers in society. During the pandemic, many low-income workers such as janitors were classified as essential to the basic functioning of American society, and they continued to carry out on-site jobs, putting their health at risk. Media outlets have hailed low-wage essential workers as heroes, celebrating them for their selflessness in the midst of a crisis. Has this increased attention on low-income workers fostered public support for redistribution?  

In our recent article in Policy & Politics, our study examines whether the increased awareness of low-income workers’ societal contributions increases public support for redistribution. We further investigate whether this increased awareness mitigates racial bias known to inhibit broad public support for redistribution. In order to study this, we conducted two survey experiments in which we varied the information about a hypothetical low-income worker. In particular, we varied the emphasis on the worker’s essential role and the race of the worker to see whether these variations change the way Americans evaluate how deserving this individual is of benefits from various welfare programmes.  

Our findings demonstrate that portraying a worker as an essential worker increases survey respondents’ appreciation of the worker’s contribution to society and their support for pandemic-related benefits. However, it did not increase overall support for redistribution. In addition, while we found negative effects of a Latino cue, particularly among white respondents, this effect weakened when information about the workers’ work ethic and other characteristics was provided. Additionally, contrary to well-established findings of the negative impact caused by stereotyping of Black individuals, we found that portraying a worker as Black did not decrease support for redistribution.  

Our research makes an important contribution to understanding public support for redistribution. While some evidence suggests the weaker role of social affinity in structuring public support for welfare programmes during the pandemic, our results show that racial considerations are still central to welfare policy preferences, even when welfare beneficiaries were portrayed as essential workers, although the effect varies across different racial groups. Additionally, this study has important implications for public communication about government social welfare programmes, showing that emphasising the characteristics of welfare recipients to highlight their work ethic can be effective in increasing public support for redistribution. 

You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Hyun Kim, J., Kuk, J., & Kweon, Y. (2024). Did low-income essential workers during COVID-19 increase public support for redistribution?. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2024). Retrieved Jan 11, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000008

If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested to read:
Calderaro, C. (2023). The racialisation of sexism: how race frames shape anti-street harassment policies in Britain and France. Policy & Politics, 51(3), 413-438. Retrieved Jan 11, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16832763188290

Ramírez, V., & Velázquez Leyer, R. (2023). The impact of self-reinforcing and self-undermining policy feedback on Mexican social policy: the end of the conditional cash transfer programme. Policy & Politics, 51(3), 508-529 from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16813697853773

Thank you to all our authors, reviewers, board members, readers and friends of Policy & Politics for another successful year in 2023

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Oscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop, Elizabeth Koebele, Chris Weible and Sarah Brown

Screenshot 2022-12-12 171359

We are delighted to be ending the year on a high note. Submissions are at their highest level for over a decade, we’ve published policy scholarship from a far broader range of countries than ever before, and we’ve maintained our top quartile rankings in both Public Administration and Political Science with an impact factor of 4.7, thanks to the huge support of our loyal community. Congratulations to you all!  

We are looking forward to seeing many of you face to face in 2023, particularly at the Conference on Policy Process Research in Syracuse in May, as well as other international conferences.

In the meantime, to celebrate all we have achieved together this year, we have made our top 10 most highly cited articles published in 2023 free to access until 31 January 2024, please see below for the full collection.

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Investigating the scientific knowledge–policy interface in EU climate policy

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by Claire Dupont, Jeffrey Rosamond and Bishoy L. Zaki

In our recent article published in Policy & Politics, we provide an historical overview of the evolution of some of the knowledge processes and linkages that are involved in EU climate policy. We explore whether developments in these knowledge exchanges reflect shifts in the politicisation of climate change.  

To address this question, we outline a conceptual model of politicisation that accounts for two different effects: (i) prioritisation leading to enabling conditions for knowledge exchange, and (ii) polarisation leading to constraining conditions. We analyse the politicisation of climate change in the EU since the 1990s, and discuss two key aspects of how knowledge exchanges develop: formal and informal aspects. Focusing on knowledge exchange with the European Commission, our analysis reveals connections between the development of the formal and informal aspects of knowledge exchange and changes in politicisation over time. We find that when the politicisation of climate change led to a negative or constraining context, informal knowledge exchanges stopped, making it more challenging for multidisciplinary scientific knowledge to be included. However, formal knowledge exchanges remained active, even under constraining conditions.  

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Policy & Politics Highlights collection on Policy Feedback November 2023 – January 2024 – free to access 

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By Sarah Brown, Journal Manager with Dr. Elizabeth Koebele, co-editor


The theme of this quarter’s highlights collection from Policy & Politics is Policy Feedback Theory (PFT), an increasingly popular theory of the policy process that is featuring more regularly on public policy syllabi. In a nutshell, PFT considers how past policies (re)shape the political context in which new policies are formed. 

Our first article in this collection has been one of our most popular and highly cited since its publication in 2022: New pathways to paradigm change in public policy: Combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback by Sebastian Sewerin, Benjamin Cashore and Michael Howlett. Here, the authors argue that policy science scholarship is better at explaining policy change in retrospect, rather than formulating forward-looking recommendations about how to achieve major or paradigmatic change. Potentially even more concerning, existing scholarship emphasises the importance of external shocks in initiating major policy change, which doesn’t augur well for proactively tackling the major problems of our time such as climate change. In their article, the authors identify two conceptual and theoretical gaps that might limit how policy scholars think about major or paradigmatic change: 1) a lack of shared understanding of what ‘policy change’ is, and 2) a focus on (changing) policies in isolation rather than on policies as part of complex policy mixes. Against this background, they argue that combining insights from policy design, policy mix and policy feedback literature allows us to identify other pathways towards initiating and achieving policy change. 

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Interview with Oscar Berglund, co-editor and Jessica Miles, Bristol University Press

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Listen to our top ten tips on how to get published in Policy & Politics in this 12 minute video with co-editor Oscar Berglund.

Tracing 25 years of ‘initiativitis’ in central government attempts to join up local public services in England

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by Michael Gibson, Felix-Anselm van Lier and Eleanor Carter


Over the last 25 years, central government has attempted to join up local public services in England on at least 55 occasions, illustrating the ‘initiativitis’ inflicted upon local governments by the large volume and variety of coordination programmes. In our recent article, Tracing 25 years of ‘initiativitis’ in central government attempts to join up local public services in England, we analysed and mapped some of the characteristics of these initiatives, and uncovered insights into the ways central government has sought to achieve local coordination. We observed a clear preference for the use of funding and fiscal powers as a lever, a competitive allocation process, and a constrained discretion model of governance, with some distinct patterns over time. These choices made in the design of initiatives are likely to be shaped by the perceived and real accountability structures within government, and so offer an opportunity to consider how accountability affects, and is affected by, particular programmatic efforts at a local level.

Our article makes a significant contribution to our understanding of coordination programmes at a central–local government level. By identifying patterns in the approach of government over the last 25 years, it offers an empirical lens to map the ‘glacial and incremental’ reframing of central–local relations and associated shifts in public accountability. In this way, the article provides more solid foundations to a range of issues – central government’s reliance on controlling the reins of funding, the competitive nature of allocation processes, and the enduring centralisation of accountability – that have been much discussed among policymakers, practitioners and researchers, but have lacked clear empirical grounding. 

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Evaluating Punctuated Equilibrium Dynamics within a Crisis Context

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by Saahir Shafi & Daniel Mallinson


Our recent article published in Policy & Politics sets out its research context by building upon the assumptions of Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET), which state thatpolicymaking in democratic countries tends to follow patterns of long periods of policy stability interrupted by rapid large scale policy shifts, or ‘punctuations’. PET explains this pattern of policymaking as arising from the friction built into political systems and the cognitive limitations of decisionmakers. Friction is necessarily built into democratic political systems to prevent the arbitrary exercise of political authority and, when combined with the cognitive limitations of decision makers, policymaking favours the status quo. Large-scale policy shifts tend to occur sparingly and only after a build-up of political pressure for change.

More recently, punctuated policymaking has been observed to exist in a few autocratic countries with one important distinction—policymaking features more large-scale shifts in autocracies compared to more open systems of government. This is attributable to the limitations in the flow of information through formal and informal mechanisms—press censorship and restrictions on the exercise of civil liberties, particularly expressions of opposition—found in autocratic regimes.

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Policy responsiveness and media attention

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by Catherine Chen


Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, has brought down the price of natural gas in the U.S. and made it an energy exporter to the U.K. and Germany, among other countries. In the meantime, anti-fracking movements have swept through states with rich shale gas reservoirs. Political conflicts about fracking play out on the national stage, featuring Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign promise of “no more drilling on federal lands”, and the “Drill Baby Drill” shawl worn by Congresswoman Lauren Boebert to the 2022 State of Union speech. Beyond these high-profile displays, citizens bear the day-to-day consequences of fracking, be it economic opportunities or environmental damages. Do state-level fracking policies genuinely respond to local public opinion? What are the driving forces behind the responsiveness of energy development policies?

My recently published research article, entitled Policy responsiveness and media attention, aims to address these questions by considering the media’s role as an intermediary between the public and the legislators within a U.S. context. Local newspapers, not national cable television, inform citizens of local affairs and state politics. Regarding matters such as releasing liquid from fracking production to a soil farm as a dumping ground, a local newspaper’s coverage is the source that local residents rely on, which in turn could lead to a bill proposal about regulating soil farms in the statehouse.

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Why Study Sub-national Policy Advisory Systems?

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by Andrew Connell, James Downe, Hannah Durrant, Eleanor MacKillop and Steve Martin


The study of Policy Advisory Systems sheds light on the wider network of actors, beyond government, who are involved in generating evidence that informs policy. Early studies of Policy Advisory Systems focused on national governments in Anglophone countries. More recently the concept has been reinvigorated by research in European countries and the global South. But there is a dearth of studies of Policy Advisory Systems at sub-national level.

Our recent research article, entitled Externalising policy advice within subnational governments, addressed this gap by using the concept of a Policy Advisory System to examine the role of a knowledge brokering organisation: the Wales Centre for Public Policy (WCPP). The WCPP provides ministers in the devolved Welsh Government with independent evidence and expertise.

Our study revealed significant differences in the ways that this initiative to externalise policy advice in Wales has played out compared to the results reported by previous studies of externalising policy advice in other settings. And we trace the differences we observed to three key features of the historical, institutional and political context in which the Welsh Government operates.

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