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Design of services or designing for service? The application of design methodology in public service settings

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by Kirsty Strokosch and Stephen P. Osborne

The design of public services has traditionally been conducted by managers who aim to improve efficiency. In recent years though, human-centred design has been used increasingly to improve the experience of public service users, citizens and public service staff (Trischler and Scott, 2016). Design also encourages collaboration and creativity to understand problems and develop solutions (Wetter-Edman et al., 2014). This can include user research to understand current experiences and/or testing prototypes through quick repeated cycles of re-design.

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Do women leaders of nonprofit public service organisations help to reduce the gender pay gap?

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By Rhys Andrews

It is often assumed that female leaders are motivated to actively represent other women within the organisations that they lead by helping them to achieve promotions, pay rises and improved working conditions. In the public sector, such leaders are thought to act as ‘femocrats’ advancing gender equality through their deeds and decisions. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the potential for women leaders to actively represent female employees in the nonprofit organisations that are now responsible for many public services in the UK and elsewhere. In my recent article in Policy & Politics , I examine the role that women leaders might play in reducing the gender pay gap in Welsh housing associations – nonprofit public service organisations that provide most of the social housing in Wales, and which have a strong commitment to gender equality.

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How well do the UK government’s ‘Areas of Research Interest’ work as boundary objects to facilitate research use in policymaking?

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by Annette Boaz and Kathryn Oliver

Articulating the research priorities of government is one way to encourage the production of relevant research to inform policy. We have been working with the Areas of Research Interest (ARIs) produced and published by government departments in the UK. ARIs provide an opportunity to gain insight into what research is of interest to each department. It’s this research that forms the basis of our recent article in Policy & Politics: How well do the UK government’s ‘Areas of Research Interest’ work as boundary objects to facilitate research use in policymaking?

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Policy & Politics announces the 2023 winners of the Early Career and Best Paper Prizes

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We are delighted to announce the 2023 prizes for award winning papers published in Policy & Politics in 2022.

The Bleddyn Davies Prize, which acknowledges scholarship of the very highest standard by an early career academic, is awarded to Dr Libby Maman from the  Institut Barcelona D’Estudis Internacional, Spain, for her article entitled The democratic qualities of regulatory agencies.

In her prize winning article, Maman analyses the democratic qualities of public organisations – transparency, accountability, participation, and representation. These are seen by many as positive and desirable attributes in the context of public organisations, since they reflect the basic democratic value of maintaining power within the public and having citizens take part in and oversee the decisions made by public organisations. However, despite their importance, it is still challenging to measure and compare the extent to which public organisations possess these democratic qualities because a comprehensive measurement tool has not yet been developed.

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Transnational Politics opening a window of opportunity for policy adoption 

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By Rama Mohana R Turaga & Harsh Mittal

A new government came to power in India in May 2014 with the promise of reviving falling growth rates of the gross domestic product (GDP) used to measure economic growth of countries. Within only one and half years of its tenure, the government adopted stringent environmental standards to regulate coal-fired power plants. The new government’s consistent position on coal as an indispensable option for power generation in the near-term made the adoption of standards even more puzzling. This development thus took most stakeholders by surprise. This unexpected policy adoption presented a research opportunity to investigate the political process leading to adoption of the standards to better understand how agenda-setting and decision-making happen within the Indian federal (national) government.   

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Virtual Issue on the latest policy process theory research from Policy & Politics

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By Sarah Brown and Elizabeth Koebele

Welcome to our first virtual issue of 2023 featuring the latest policy process theory research published in Policy & Politics. This issue features three recently published articles that apply and develop different policy process theories across a range policy contexts.

Our first article, Advocacy Coalitions, Power and Policy Change by Tim Heinmiller, critiques a core principle of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) – that major policy change will not occur as long as the advocacy coalition that instated the policy remains “in power” in a jurisdiction. Firstly, Heinmiller explores what it means for a status quo advocacy coalition to be in power in a jurisdiction, especially as it relates to the ACF’s theory of policy change. After critically examining how this concept has been used in existing ACF scholarship, the author proposes a standard operationalization of being in power, drawing on the veto players literature, which he then illustrates using a case study of Canadian firearms policy. His conclusion demonstrates how the proposed operationalization is an improvement on existing practices that advances the theory around and measurement of policy change in the ACF.

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Learning in a crisis? Types of policy learning, policy change, and emergency food assistance in the COVID-19 pandemic

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Simone Busetti and Maria Stella Righettini

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a major social crisis, putting people out of work and unable to satisfy primary needs such as affording food. In response, Italy experimented with a programme of emergency food stamps funded by the national government and delivered by municipalities—a form of assistance never experimented with before in the country. Programme implementation followed the peaks of the pandemic waves; it started with the first lockdown in March 2020, was terminated in the summer when COVID-19 cases approached zero, but was restarted in late autumn when the pandemic struck back. The repetition of the programme over a short time and with the same budget offers a unique opportunity to investigate inter-crisis learning, i.e. if and how lessons from the first wave of implementation contributed to reforms in the second delivery. Did administrations learn from the first food stamp delivery and redesign the second round accordingly? These research questions underpin our recent article published in Policy & Politics entitled Policy Learning in a crisis: Lessons learned from the Italian Food Stamp Programme.

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How does policy learning take place across a multilevel governance architecture during crises?

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Bishoy L. Zaki, Ellen Wayenberg

Policy learning and crises

Over recent years and with a rising number of crises and complex policy issues, policymakers are increasingly engaging in systematic and continuous policy learning. These policy learning processes aim at reaching better understandings of policy issues and their contexts. One of the aims of this learning is to develop better ways of solving societal challenges (through forms of technical learning) or consolidating and cultivating political power (through political learning). In other words, policymakers face problems that are difficult to solve, so they seek out knowledge and information from different sources in order to learn how to effectively solve these problems.

With its longstanding tradition, policy learning research has illuminated several aspects, mainly focused on explaining how policy actors learn, what lessons they come out with, and the role that learning processes play in policymaking. During crises, policy learning can contribute to effective crisis responses. However, it can also cause confusion or induce policy failure.

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