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Call for Papers for a Themed issue in Policy & Politics on Transformational Change through Public Policy

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P&P 2021 EditorsOscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop and Chris Weible

Policy & Politics is a top quartile journal in public administration and political science. Its co-editors, Oscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop and Chris Weible, invite articles for a themed issue on “Transformational Change through Public Policy”. The deadline for abstract submissions is May 14 2021.

How can Public Policy as a discipline contribute to desperately needed transformational change in our societies? Climate scientists call for systemic change; our liberal democracies suffer from crises in legitimacy; economic and social inequality continues to grow; culture wars increasingly polarise societies, and so on. Scholars have excelled at describing and diagnosing these problems exploring and explaining how they have emerged, and occasionally positing few ideas for their improvements. Despite the knowledge gained in our scholarship, a need continues to persist and spread for ideas to achieve deeper and more transformative societal changes. Continue reading →

Policy & Politics announces the 2021 winners of the Early Career and Best Paper Prizes

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2020 P&P prize winnersWe are delighted to announce the 2021 prizes for award winning papers published in Policy & Politics in 2020.

The Bleddyn Davies Prize, which acknowledges scholarship of the very highest standard by an early career academic, is awarded to:

‘Applying design in public administration: a literature review to explore the state of the art‘ by Margot Hermus, Arwin van Buuren & Victor Bekkers from the special issue: ‘Improving public policy and administration: exploring the potential of design’.

The Ken Young Prize, which is awarded to the best article judged to represent excellence in the field published in Policy & Politics, is awarded  to:

‘When design meets power: Design thinking, public sector innovation and the politics of policymaking’ by Jenny M Lewis, Michael McGann and Emma Blomkamp from the special issue: ‘Improving public policy and administration: exploring the potential of design’.

Brief critiques of the winning articles follow, in celebration of their contributions. Continue reading →

Why does the publishing process for journal articles end once they are available online?

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P&P’s unique model of post-publication support to maximise the impact of your article

P&P blog promotion blogSarah Brown, Elizabeth Koebele and Katie Lucas

As the author of a research article, you’ve poured blood, sweat, and tears into crafting and recrafting the text, often through painstaking coordination with multiple authors, in an effort to make your article the very best it can be. After navigating the peer review process and honing your arguments, you’re delighted to receive the final acceptance decision from your journal of choice. You’re excited about the potential for your research to have a positive impact on the world and, of course, to develop your reputation as a leading thinker in the field. Except that one week, one month or even one year later, your notice that your paper has only had 10 downloads since publication – and you know that two of those were your co-author and your mother. Continue reading →

Announcing our expanded and increasingly globally representative editorial board

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P&P 2021 EditorsOscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop and Chris Weible

A warm welcome to all our new members from across the world of policy scholarship. We’re delighted to have your input into this new chapter of Policy & Politics. Continue reading →

Why nudges fail and other puzzles: insights from research on commitment devices

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manu savaniManu Savani 

Having just read the new special issue and accompanying blog series published by Policy & Politics entitled Beyond nudge: advancing the state-of-the-art of behavioural public policy and administration, I was inspired to respond to some of the arguments mooted.

The question of why we find behaviour change resolutions difficult to stick to has long been the subject of debate and research. It is familiar territory at this time of year as we contemplate new year’s resolutions. Knotty inter-temporal choices can be affected by present bias, where we focus on short-term gains rather than the long-term payoffs. Commitment devices – any voluntary strategy we use to influence our future decisions and achieve our goals – have shown promise in addressing present bias. These strategies can rely on financial stakes, as shown by the stickK approach, which reports having $51 million on the line across 527,000 individual commitments. Continue reading →

New editorial statement for the Policy & Politics journal

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P&P 2021 EditorsOscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop and Chris Weible

Policy & Politics is a world-leading journal that provides the primary outlet for scholars and reflexive practitioners to engage with the most pressing governance challenges inhibiting the continued advancement in the study of public policy and its practice. These challenges span the globe and link communities in a common struggle to realise and sustain human dignity and quality of life for all. Moreover, they entail questions about: the impact on governance of political inequality and economic inequality; the implications of such inequalities on political voice and who receives help and who faces barriers from our public policies; how we advance knowledge about public policies comparatively as global phenomena; how we link across macro and micro scales within and between countries in understanding public policy and politics; advancing our theories and methodologies to address these challenges as a policy community; and bringing together a public policy research community that is interconnected globally but also sometimes siloed in distinct approaches and assumptions. Continue reading →

Policy & Politics: Serving and Enhancing our Metacommunities

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Oscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop and Christopher M. Weible

In the study of ecological systems, there is a concept called metacommunities. The idea is that a species might be dispersed in different yet interconnected communities.  These metacommunities might emerge and grow for reasons of fit, space, survival, or chance.  These metacommunities interconnect through some species traversing between them either rarely or habitually. Over time metacommunities might also evolve and adapt to their particular niches. For those who care about supporting ecological systems that might be dispersed in interconnected niches, metacommunities provide a broad language and perspective to help visualize, understand, and govern.

As editors for Policy & Politics, we view this metaphor of metacommunities apt for describing the broadly defined field of public policy, which is dispersed in many communities, each with their own research approaches, lexicons, and traditions.  We also see that some scholars navigate between communities more than others.   In describing academia, we often refer to these metacommunities as silos where some silos are more isolated or connected than others as well as some silos existing within other silos.  Similar to metacommunities, silos might emerge and grow as scholars search for space to develop their ideas, self-sort with others of similar orientations, and more. Continue reading →

Merry Christmas from the Policy and Politics co-editors

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Merry Christmas from the Policy & Politics team!

Thank you to all our authors, reviewers, board members and friends in the unprecedented year that was 2020 and goodbye from the outgoing editors Sarah Ayres, Steve Martin and Felicity Matthews.

As the outgoing co-editors of this thriving journal, we wanted to express our huge gratitude for the loyalty and commitment that we’ve been fortunate enough to witness from our diverse community of scholars. It has been such a pleasure to steward the journal through the last five years (and in Sarah’s case, eight years) with positive developments too numerous to list. We are most grateful for our meteoric rise to an impact factor of 3.069 and to a consequent rise in ranking from the 3rd to the 1st quartile, which of course is testament to the quality of work published, courtesy of our authors and reviewers. Congratulations to you all!  To celebrate all we have achieved this year we have made our top 10 highly cited articles published in 2020 free to access until 31 January 2021, please see below for the full collection.

So from January 2021, we pass the baton to a new editorial team in whom we have enormous confidence and faith. We will watch with interest the excitement of a new chapter unfolding for the journal as it approaches its 50th year and fully expect to see it go from strength to strength.

We look forward to reading of new exciting advances in the field and to P&P’s continued contribution in communicating those advances to our community and to the broader public.

Policy & Politics Co-Editors: Sarah Ayres, Steve Martin & Felicity Matthews

p&p editors

Top 10 highly cited articles published in 2020 – free to access until 31 January 2021

The role of scientific knowledge in dealing with complex policy problems under conditions of uncertainty
Hanna Ylostalo

Improving public policy and administration: exploring the potential of design
Arwin van Buuren, Jenny M Lewis, B Guy Peters and William Voorberg

Policy windows and multiple streams: an analysis of alcohol pricing policy in England [Open Access]
Benjamin Hawkins and Jim McCambridge

Applying design in public administration: a literature review to explore the state of the art
Margot Hermus, Arwin van Buuren and Victor Bekkers

When design meets power: design thinking, public sector innovation and the politics of policymaking [Open Access]
Jenny M Lewis,  Michael McGann and Emma Blomkamp

What determines the audiences that public service organisations target for reputation management? [Open Access]
Jan Boon,  Koen Verhoest and Jan Wynen

Applying design science in public policy and administration research
A Georges L Romme and Albert Meijer

How do media, political and regulatory agendas influence one another in high risk policy issues?
Alette Eva Opperhuizen,  Erik Hans Klijn and Kim Schouten

Challenges in applying design thinking to public policy: dealing with the varieties of policy formulation and their vicissitudes
Michael Howlett

Designing environments for experimentation, learning and innovation in public policy and governance [Open Access]
Maurits Waardenburg, Martijn Groenleer and Jorrit De Jong 

Policy & Politics Highlights collection – all articles included are Open Access

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Sarah BrownSarah Brown
Journal Manager, Policy & Politics

This quarter’s collection highlights three of our most popular individual research articles downloaded in 2020. As so often typifies these collections, all the articles featured demonstrate one of the main hallmarks of Policy & Politics in foregrounding the politics of the policy-making process. Continue reading →