Public policy research is rife with questions about policymaking processes and outcomes. Yet, perhaps none as quintessential as – why do policy actors do what they do? In my recent article published in Policy & Politics, I explore this question through the lens of policy learning. In the early days of policy sciences, this question was predominantly answered from a lens of “powering”. This meant that policymaking was largely understood as an outcome of power struggles between competing factions, with winners and losers. Subsequently, pioneers of contemporary policy sciences such as Harold Lasswell, Karl Deutsch, John Dewey, and Hugh Heclo, among others, paved the way for a different explanatory lens: “puzzling”. In this view, rather than only competing for power, what drives and fuels policymaking is also actors’ puzzling or wondering about how to solve policy problems, in other words, how they “learn” in an attempt to develop solutions to emerging problems. This gave rise to what is now known as the discipline of policy learning, focused on policy actors’ pursuit, and processing of policy related information and knowledge in an attempt to find solutions to different policy problems. This is not limited to technical problems like healthcare, natural disasters, technology, and the economy, but also includes political and social challenges.
This puzzling lens substantively contributed to our understanding of the policy process, helping us better answer the questions of why policy actors do what they do, and why the policy process behaves this or that way. Theoretical developments over the past decades helped advance policy learning to the ranks of policymaking ontologies. i.e., positioning it as a fundamental behaviour and omnipresent process that shapes policymaking. These theoretical developments materialised across various ontological-epistemological approaches from mechanistic, positivist, interpretivist, to social constructivist.
Policy & Politics has been publishing innovative works at the intersection of public policy and politics for over 50 years. It is a world-leading, top quartile journal that is committed to advancing scholarly understanding of the dynamics of policy-making and implementation. By exploring the interplay between political actors, governing institutions and policy issues, the journal contributes to building policy process theory; and by reflecting on the evolving context in which these interactions occur, it provides timely and fresh insights into the influence of politics on policy and vice versa.
The journal’s co-editors invite proposals for a special issue that will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the nexus of public policy and politics.The journal only has space to publish one special issue each year, so this is a competitive process.
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.
Special issues of this scope generally take at least eighteen months to two years from the acceptance of a proposal through to final publication. In return, we offer constructive and clear editorial guidance throughout the development process to optimise its readership and impact. In addition, we undertake significant article-level marketing for special issues, as we publish one of the most widely read journal blogs in the discipline and have the highest X (Twitter) following of all the journals in this field as well as our more recent presence on BlueSky. Our special issues are also eligible for consideration for publication in book form in the Policy & Politics series published by Policy Press.
The timetable for evaluating proposals is set out below:
Call for proposals open; submit to mailto:sarah.brown@bristol.ac.uk
2nd January 2025
Deadline for submitting proposals to P&P
28th February 2025
Decision on selection of one proposal announced by P&P
We’re excited to welcome Kristin Taylor as a new co-editor of P&P in January! In anticipation, we caught up with her to find out a bit about her motivation for joining our team…
SB: Hey Kristin, we’re thrilled to have you joining our illustrious team in 2025 and wanted to hear what made you want to take on a co-editor role for P&P, and what you hope to get out of it?
KT: I’m glad the feeling is mutual! I was quite humbled when the editorial team approached me about the role. I have always held P&P in high regard because of the incredibly collegial and constructive review process. Given all the thoughtful effort the co-editors have devoted to the quality of P&P, I am honored to join the team. With that being said, I haven’t thought so much about what I hope to get out of being a co-editor of P&P, but I have thought quite a bit about what I can contribute to the journal and the editorial team. One of the aspects of my career that I have relished as I’ve become more established is the opportunity to mentor the work of new, up and coming scholars of public policy. I’m excited about the chance to contribute to the journal by fostering the work of new voices in the literature.
SB: We know that balancing priorities such as research, teaching and administration is more pressurised for prolific researchers like you, so what do you anticipate the benefits of the role will be for you?
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 more diverse 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 4.3, thanks to the huge support of our loyal community. Congratulations to you all!
To celebrate, we have made our top 10 most highly cited articles published in 2024 free to access until 31 January 2025. Happy holiday reading!
Top 10 most highly cited articles published in 2024 – free to access until 31 January 2025
by Ringa Raudla, Egert Juuse, Vytautas Kuokštis, Aleksandrs Cepilovs, Matti Ylönen
Financial technologies (FinTech) used to be material for science fiction movies, but suddenly they are everywhere. In fact, people barely think of their novelty anymore when paying with their cell phones, or when they trade stocks, cryptocurrencies, or currencies with mobile apps that bypass traditional banks. FinTech can also be used for credit scoring, client profiling, robo-advising, and insurance, just to name some examples. An important question in public policy is: how should policy react to such pervasive technological transformations?
Given the systemic importance of the financial sector for the economy and the potential of the FinTech sector to contribute to employment and public revenue, governments’ policy stance towards FinTech is a topic of major importance. FinTech policy faces significant dilemmas when balancing risks and innovation, and the ensuing choices can profoundly affect financial systems and society. Hence, in choosing their national FinTech policy stances, governments are caught between competing pressures. They are expected to boost competition and innovation while containing risks, preventing the build-up of vulnerabilities, and avoiding reputational damage to a country’s financial system.
by Rosario Queirolo, Lorena Repetto, Joaquín Alonso, Eliana Álvarez, Belén Sotto and Mafalda Pardal
Based on a qualitative design, our article recently published in Policy & Politics analyses the intended and unintended effects of the regulation of cannabis in Uruguay over the last ten years, and identifies the distance between its design and implementation.
The results are grouped into four key points:
1- The access mechanisms (homegrowing, cannabis social clubs (CSCs) and pharmacies) and the mandatory registry, designed for preventing the increase in cannabis consumption, had the unintended effect of excluding various types of users from the legal market. Examples include:
lower socioeconomic level users who cannot afford expensive memberships to CSCs or buying at a pharmacy;
those who live further away from urban areas where legal selling points are primarily located
younger users, who do not always meet the formal requirements for registration.
Thus, the regulation has pushed many cannabis users to seek supply via the illicit and grey markets.
2- The controlled prices in pharmacies, designed for competing with illicit market prices, provided little incentive to new pharmacies to join the dispensation system, due to the low profit margin, resulting in limited coverage across the country.
The Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) was originally developed to explain agenda setting within national government institutions and the United States Congress in particular. However, the last decade plus has seen an explosion of research applying the theory to new governing contexts (e.g., authoritarian states, transnational institutions, local governments) while extending it to the latter stages of the policy process (e.g. policy formulation and implementation). Yet few studies have applied the framework to subnational governments—and U.S. states in particular—a curious omission given the critical role they play in driving policy change within federal systems.
Our recent article just published in Policy & Politicsfills this gap by applying the MSF to the case of climate change adaptation policymaking in the State of Massachusetts. We specifically rely on a mixed methods research design combining a negative binomial regression analysis with process tracing to assess the effect of all three streams as well as policy entrepreneurship on agenda change.
One of the biggest barriers to conducting agenda setting research at the subnational level is the dearth of granular data documenting changes in issue attention across time. We overcome this by using data from State House News Service, an independent wire service that provides “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of policymaking within the Massachusetts State government. Although our study focuses specifically on Massachusetts, a cursory review of the public record suggests similar news agencies exist in other states as well, although it is unclear whether their coverage is as a comprehensive as State House News Service Massachusetts.
Contemporary liberal democracies suffer from a legitimacy crisis. The visible signs are rising levels of political polarisation and growing distrust in politicians and democratic political institutions. In a new article in Policy & Politics entitled Developing a Theory of Democratic Robustness, we argue that the crisis is at least in part due to a certain rigidity in the institutions of representative democracy that hampers their ability to change when society changes. This rigidity renders it difficult for them to continue to serve three core functions that categorise them as ‘democratic’: (1) empowered inclusion of those affected by collective decisions; (2) collective will formation and agenda setting that builds on inclusion; and (3) the capacity to make collective decisions that are broadly perceived as legitimate and binding. The current democratic crisis accentuates the question of how to build more robust democracies.
Over the last few decades, many researchers have stressed the need for democratic reforms, but few have discussed the capacities of democratic political systems to carry out such reforms in response to social chances—capacities that generate political system robustness. By robust democracies we mean democracies that possess a capacity to adapt and innovate the way they operate when changing societal conditions call for it. To be robust, a democracy must be ready and able to rearticulate the meaning of its core functions so that they are relevant to emerging challenges, adjust its modus operandi to shifting levels of politicisation, creatively combine the available channels for political participation, experiment when existing ways of tackling political contestations become ineffective or illegitimate, and flexibly relocate decisions to a level that is conducive to responding to specific political demands.
by Evangelia Petridou, Jörgen Sparf and Per Becker
Being an entrepreneur takes effort. It requires energy and presupposes the willingness to stick one’s neck out to bring about innovation. This is what the market tells us and the situation is not much different in politics. In fact, it’s arguable that achieving change in public policy requires even more time and energy, given the glacial speed that is sometimes the core feature of dynamic policy change. And yet, in our recent article published in Policy & Politics on this topic, we show that not all policy entrepreneurs are driven by a focus on intentionality, but by an a priori policy preference that prompts policy actors to seek, grab, and occasionally create opportunities to shepherd their preferred policy solution through the policymaking system.
In our case study, we use the concepts of the proactive and reactive policy entrepreneur (theorised in a previous paper) in Swedish flood risk governance at the municipal level. Proactive policy entrepreneurs, equivalent to market entrepreneurs by opportunity, act entrepreneurially out of a conscious choice. They have other alternatives, but they choose to be entrepreneurial because they have in mind an innovation that they believe will make a difference, and they actively promote it. By contrast, reactive policy entrepreneurs, the equivalent of market entrepreneurs by necessity, act entrepreneurially because it is the best choice available to them, but not their preferred choice. This implies that there are conditions that create a necessity for them to be an entrepreneur. In other words, the difference between these two kinds of entrepreneur is motivation.
This quarter’s highlights collection showcases 3 recent articles on policy process theories that make important contributions to this area of policy research and theory development.
In our first article, ‘Organisation, information processing, and policy change in US federal bureaucracies , authors Samuel Workman et al examine policy change in the US federal bureaucracy. They build on Punctuated Equilibrium Theory’s premise that institutional friction and limited attention are prime influences on policy change, and they introduce a new approach for measuring and modelling these dynamics. This new approach incorporates the centralisation of information, decision-making, and the complexity of the policy, into the architecture of different organisations. Specifically, it measures how different sized organisations delegate federally regulated agenda items across the US federal bureaucracy from 2008-2016.
Their findings suggest that larger bureaucracies may handle change and problem definitions more easily than smaller organisations. These bureaucracies are not forced to shift attention to each new problem. This is because being part of a department provides more capacity to handle various problems as they emerge onto the agenda. Additionally, the division of attention within these structures allows for a broader range of strengths and expertise to tackle problems better. These findings challenge the typical view that smaller, nimble organisations manage change better.
Our second article, by Johanna Kuenzler and co-authors, considers how the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) helps in understanding how policy narratives impact public policy processes. It offers a systematic analysis of the historical development of NPF research, examining the use of the NPF’s theoretical elements over five time periods. The article provides insight into the foundation of NPF, highlighting the influence of positivist and interpretivist approaches throughout its development.
Figure: Number of published articles according to historical stages of the development of the NPF
As illustrated in the figure above, the article highlights the unique contributions of key NPF publications across each of the time periods of its development. The findings indicate a consistent focus on the core theoretical components and methodological innovations, demonstrating the framework’s robustness.
Finally, the article suggests avenues to further develop the framework, drawing from past lessons such as the introduction of the beneficiary character, and proposes further investigation of character and narrative dynamics. It also encourages additional work to bridge positivist and interpretive approaches and outlines the strengths of each. In summary, the article is a welcome contribution and has much to offer to both those who are fluent and new to the NPF.
For decades, the authors explain, public policy researchers have tried to answer this question by using the policy theory called the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) which was originally developed to understand policymaking in the USA. Taking an overview of 178 studies that use the MSF to analyse policymaking and implementation in China, the authors found that scholars have increasingly used the MSF to examine how policies are made and implemented in China, as illustrated in the figure below.
Figure: China-focused MSF articles (N = 178) published per year.
Since the appearance of the first article that used the MSF to analyse policymaking in China (Zhou & Yan, 2005), almost two hundred journal articles have used the framework to identify the driving forces behind policymaking and policy implementation (or the lack thereof) in China. Based on the authors’ analysis of these studies, they offer important guiding principles for those who would like to use the MSF to analyse policy processes in China.
To conclude, the article identifies a range of under-examined areas for future policy research, such as banking, finance, energy, and health. In addition, more comparative studies are needed that help identify how policy processes in China are different from that in other political systems. The authors hope this article will help to inspire more studies that use the multiple streams framework to deepen our understanding of policymaking and implementation in China.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this quarter’s collection of articles focusing on a range of perspectives on different policy process theories. We wish you a relaxing break and look forward to bringing you more of the latest research from Policy & Politics in 2025!
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at:
Kuenzler, J., Stauffer, B., Schlaufer, C., Song, G., Smith-Walter, A., & Jones, M. D. (2024). A systematic review of the Narrative Policy Framework: a future research agenda. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2024) https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000046
van den Dool, A., & Qiu, T. (2024). Policy processes in China: a systematic review of the multiple streams framework. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2024) https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000038
Workman, S., Robinson, S. E., & Bark, T. (2024). Organisation, information processing, and policy change in US federal bureaucracies. Policy & Politics, 52(2), 278-297 https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000013
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