Oscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop, Elizabeth Koebele, Chris Weible and Sarah Brown
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.
by Efrat Mishor, Eran Vigoda-Gadot & Shlomo Mizrahi
Our article, entitled Exploring civic engagement dynamics during emergencies: an empirical study into key drivers, investigates the importance of civic engagement during emergencies. We consider various individual-level factors such as trust, risk cognition, fears about the emergency and cost–benefit analyses of engagement as factors that motivate citizens to become engaged.
We argue that governments should recognise the value of community initiatives and civic engagement in coping with emergencies. Our empirical investigation uses data collected in Israel during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our results demonstrate that trust in government and interpersonal trust may influence citizens’ perceptions of engagement during emergencies but have no effect on engagement behaviour. However, risk cognition and cost–benefit analyses are better predictors of future engagement intentions during emergencies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The Co-Editors of Policy & Politics invite proposals for a special issue to be published in 2025. Submissions close on 1 October 2023. Read the call for proposals to learn more: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/pp/pp-overview.xml?tab_body=call-for-papers Policy & Politics is a leading, top quartile journal that is committed to advancing scholarly understanding of the dynamics of policy-making and implementation.
The journal’s co-editors are seeking proposals for a special issue that will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the nexus of public policy and politics. To be successful, proposals need to offer a coherent set of excellent original research articles that will reframe or develop knowledge on a topic that is at the leading edge of current debates and is clearly relevant to the journal’s worldwide readership. Proposals may include a mixture of theoretical, conceptual and empirical cases and a range of research methods, and must demonstrate how they will make a significant and lasting contribution to the field.
