Author: policypressblog

Language revitalisation in an age of social transformation

policypressblogLeave a comment

Huw Lewis & Elin Royles

By Huw Lewis and Elin Royles, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University.

This post was originally published in Discover Society on 2 August 2017.

Currently, the Welsh Government is in the process of finalising the content of its new national Welsh language strategy. This new strategy, a successor to A living language: A language for living, published back in 2012, will outline the government’s vision for Welsh for the next 20 years. Given the Welsh Labour 2016 manifesto commitment of creating a million Welsh speakers by 2050, the strategy is likely to be an important document setting a series of key long-term goals. Meanwhile, up in Scotland, Bòrd na Gàidhlig, the official body tasked by the Scottish Government to promote the Gaelic language, recently concluded a process of consulting on the contents of its new National Gaelic Language Plan, the third to be published since 2005.

Continue reading →

Why do we need a Fiscal Centred Perspective on Welfare State Development?

policypressblogLeave a comment

michal koreh_daniel beland

By Michal Koreh (Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, University of Haifa) and Daniel Béland (Professor and Canada Research Chair in Public Policy, Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy)

This post was originally published in Discover Society on 5th July 2017.

Welfare state scholarship needs a fiscal centred perspective because focusing attention on the imperatives and interests related to the fiscal, revenue side of social programmes can shed new light on the historical and contemporary politics of social policy. This is particularly the case with programmes like social insurance that are directly involved in the extraction of revenues and that, in some countries, collect more revenues than personal income taxes.

In our recent Policy & Politics article titled ‘Reconsidering the Fiscal-Social Policy Nexus: The Case of Social Insurance’, we lay the foundations for such a fiscal-centred perspective. We bring together several bodies of theoretical literature situated beyond the conventional boundaries of welfare state research and combine their insights to suggest two interlocking claims. The first is that social insurance systems financed by payroll contributions can be used by state and non-state actors to advance their fiscal and economic goals beyond the financing of social benefits and services. The second claim is that, through mechanisms such as legitimacy production, institutional design, and coalition building, the design and management of social insurance contribution policies for such fiscal purposes can have substantial ramifications for the development of social programmes. Continue reading →

What kind of democracy is this? Scholars must look beyond the populist signal

policypressblogLeave a comment

MFlinders-new-smallMatt Flinders reflects on the changing nature of democratic politics and asks whether a focus upon all things ‘post’ – post-Trump, post-Brexit, post-truth, post-democratic, etc. – has prevented scholars and social commentators from looking beyond or beneath the populist signal.

This blog post was originally published on the LSE British Politics and Policy blog.

Although there is no doubt that we live in ‘interesting times’, I cannot help but think that there is something incredibly boring, possibly even myopic, about most of the political analysis that is surrounding recent events. A clichéd sameness, defined by narratives of impending democratic doom, wrapped-up in notions of ‘crisis’, ‘disaster’, ‘hatred’, and ‘death’ that tend to flow into (and out of) dominant interpretations of post-Trump, post-Brexit, post-truth, post-democratic politics. The contemporary democratic debate is arguably cocooned within its own intellectual echo chamber that specialises in problem identification but falls short in terms of a more vibrant brand of design-orientated, solution-focused political science. Continue reading →

Expertise and policies: How to take advantage of multilevel systems to develop policy solutions

policypressblogLeave a comment

 

 

Foto Mavrot Foto Sager

By Céline Mavrot (Researcher at the KPM Center for Public Management of the University of Bern) and Fritz Sager (Professor of Political Science at the KPM Center for Public Management of the University of Bern).

This post was originally published on Discover Society on 6th June 2017.

Against the backdrop of the current US-American presidency, the Brexit referendum campaign and the decision of the Hungarian government to drive its university of highest repute – the Central European University – out of the country, the fake news epidemic and the related question of the relationship between scientific evidence and democracy are all over the academic agenda. Scientific evidence generally is expected to make policies more coherent: addressing the right target groups, increasing the efficiency of their implementation and increasing their effectiveness. In her recent blog on the subject, Caroline Schlaufer goes beyond this functionalist view of scientific evidence and argues that the use of scientific evidence has also been found to improve democratic debates: Evidence-based arguments make democratic campaigns more rational. Informed citizens are reluctant to attack opponents on a personal basis which increases the deliberative quality of the discourse. However, this is not all. As we argue in our recent article in Policy & Politics, the use of evidence can encourage coherent policy formulation over different tiers in federal systems by creating vertical networks of expertise.

Continue reading →

So-called ‘toxic’ Prevent scheme to halt radicalisation has been misrepresented new research shows

policypressblogLeave a comment

Paul Thomas

Text by Sarah Brown based on Paul Thomas’ article: Changing Experiences of responsibilisation and contestation within counter-terrorism policies: the British Prevent experience

Britain’s Prevent Strategy was arguably the first post 9/11 attempt to operationalise ‘soft’, preventative counter-terrorism policies and it has been since significantly studied and copied by other states. Such preventative counter-terrorism policies adopted internationally have proved to be controversial, as fierce criticisms of Britain’s Prevent strategy have shown.

Continue reading →

Policy & Politics at the International Conference on Public Policy #ICPP3, Singapore

policypressblogLeave a comment

Representatives from the Policy & Politics journal team are delighted to be attending the 3rd International Conference on Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore. We are looking forward to celebrating with our authors, reviewers and board members over our recent impact factor rise which has taken us into the top quartile of all the international journals in both public administration and political science.

You can read the top cited articles contributing to our impact factor of 1.939 for FREE until 31 July!

Please look out for our representatives around the conference to discuss any relevant articles you are planning to publish. Continue reading →

Experience is not a dirty word

policypressblogLeave a comment

jenny_fleming_rod_rhodesBy Professor Jenny Fleming and Professor Rod Rhodes

The following blog post is based on an article recently published in Policy & Politics: ‘Can experience be evidence? Craft knowledge and evidence-based policing‘.

Government policy is to build on evidence of what works. So, we conduct randomised controlled trials, we ‘nudge’ citizens, and we evaluate policies to recover evidence of what does or does not work. No one denies that the more you know the better; but how do you acquire knowledge? More importantly what constitutes knowledge? Continue reading →

2016 Impact Factor: Free collection of highly cited articles

policypressblog2 Comments

P&P editors

Sarah Ayres, Steve Martin, Felicity Matthews, Diane Stone – Policy & Politics Editors

We are delighted to announce that Policy & Politics has achieved an impressive result in this year’s Journal Citation Reports with an Impact Factor of 1.939. This places the Journal firmly in the top quartile of international journals in both the public administration and the political science categories.

This fantastic outcome is testimony to the outstanding quality of research produced by our authors, the meticulous scrutiny of our peer reviewers, and the hard work of the Policy & Politics and Policy Press team. We would like to offer our thanks and congratulations to all.

To celebrate this increase we have made the most highly cited articles which contributed to the 2016 Impact Factor free to read until 31 July 2017: Continue reading →

News release: Policy and Politics achieves top international ranking

policypressblogLeave a comment

We are delighted to announce that Policy & Politics , which has been publishing key works in public and social policy and politics for 45 years, has just achieved an impact factor of 1.939.  It is now ranked 11th in the field of public administration, placing it firmly in the top quartile of international journals.

Policy & Politics, published by Policy Press, has gained a reputation for being more innovative and risk-taking than many of its competitors, partly due to its clear competitive advantage of being owned by the University of Bristol and therefore wholly independent.  Continue reading →

A seismic shift has occurred in British politics

policypressblogLeave a comment

MFlinders-new-smallBy Matthew Flinders, Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics, University of Sheffield

This post was originally published on The Conversation on 9 June 2017.

The 2017 general election was a once-in-a-generation opportunity that the Tories fumbled and Labour exploited to remarkable effect. The Tories managed to spook older voters and thereby alienate a core constituency; Labour, meanwhile, both connected with younger people and somehow got them to actually vote in large numbers.

All political scholars should beware reaching too quickly for their pens, keyboards or quills; to adapt the old adage, “write in haste, repent at leisure”. Nonetheless, it strikes me that a seismic shift has occurred in British politics. It is now clear that Theresa May’s gamble has been a catastrophic failure. With a hung parliament, the UK’s negotiating position on Brexit looks to be in tatters. Theresa May asked the British public to show its support for a “hard” Brexit, but the public declined. Continue reading →