In our recent article in Policy & Politics, we delve into the changing context of policy advice in autocratising Hungary. In this context, the legitimacy of policy expertise is closely linked to the experts’ relationship with the political regime. As experts are increasingly clustered on opposite sides of the political divide – some with limited or no access to policy processes; others too close to the government, undermining their professional credibility – they rely on a series of practices to construct legitimacy.
Policy advisors use various strategies to construct legitimacy. They balance scientific rigour with political relevance. Our analysis demonstrates that even if the main bases of legitimacy (policy relevance and scientific robustness) continue to be seen as benchmarks for constructing legitimacy, they gain new meanings in the context of polarised, autocratising Hungary. This balancing involves distinctive discursive, individual and organisational practices.
There has been concern in many countries for decades about poor wellbeing and mental health among students and staff in Higher Education institutions, including universities. In response, there is no shortage of recent initiatives to support wellbeing. In the UK, for example, there are research programmes, evidence hubs, charters, and strategies. There are also many different interventions, from direct support for people with wellbeing or mental health issues, to more indirect preventative measures such as improving supervision training.
However, why does such support sometimes struggle to have the desired impact? In my recent article in Policy & Politics, I examine some of the political and operational challenges of supporting wellbeing of postgraduate researchers (PGRs[1]), and the interactions between these challenges. In the UK there is an ongoing debate about PGRs’ status: they are often seen as neither, or confusingly both, staff and students. While PGRs pay fees to their institution, they contribute significantly to research and teaching, often while on casual contracts. I show how and why this status ambiguity has profound and complex implications for the capacity to design, steer, implement, engage with or benefit from support.
Why do interest groups mobilise to change the design of international institutions? The existing research on this topic expects moments when there is a peak in political action, but generally does not consider how such peaks might impact future mobilisations. To fill this gap, my recent article published in Policy & Politics entitled Policy feedback and the politics of trade agreements, seeks to provide an explanation for the conditions under which interest groups mobilise around trade policies using a policy feedback framework.
In particular, I argue that interest groups are more likely to mobilise around polarising (aspects of) trade policy when they have had bad experiences with them before. In other words—organisations are more likely to take action when they have reason to believe that a particular policy will harm their constituents or goals because they have engaged in political learning.
by Eric Montpetit, Antoine Claude Lemor, Maria Alejandra Costa, and Louis-Robert Beaulieu-Guay
Some might say that people can grow accustomed to almost anything—even the worst crises. Indeed, human beings learn to cope with disruptions that initially provoke serious fears, but over time become a “new normal.” This capacity to adapt can be so strong that it undermines the influence of expert knowledge guiding decisions in times of crisis. That is precisely what we observed in Quebec (Canada) during the COVID-19 pandemic, as discussed in our recent article published in Policy & Politics.
Experts often believe that raising alarms about an impending catastrophe is an effective way to heighten awareness among both the public and policymakers regarding the risks of inaction. While fear-based strategies can yield results early in a crisis, they may become counterproductive later on.
In March 2020, many epidemiologists warned decision-makers that, without the swift implementation of strict lockdown measures, COVID-19 would spread exponentially—leading to a horrific number of casualties. In several countries, immediate lockdowns followed, with little consideration for the associated economic costs or unprecedented restrictions on individual freedoms. By highlighting the gravity of the threat, epidemiologists initially exerted considerable influence on both the public and policymakers.
All articles featured in this blog post are free to access until 31 October 2024
It’s that time of year again when course syllabi are updated with fresh research. We hope to make this easier with the essential reading list below, which features some of the most significant research relevant to public policy students that we’ve published over the last year. We feature nine articles and a special issue for teaching topical themes such as health policy, policy learning and advocacy. All articles are ideal for Public Policy, Politics and Social Policy classes alike.
As always, we welcome your feedback on the articles featured, as well as future unit topics you’d like to see covered! Let us know what you’re teaching and how we can help!
Our first theme focuses on a substantive policy area that is increasingly taught in public and social policy courses, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and on-going climate crisis: health policy.
Our first article, “Analysing the ‘follow the science’ rhetoric of government responses to COVID-19” by Margaret Macaulay and colleagues, has been one of the most widely read and cited articles of last year and was the winner of our Best Paper prize for 2023. This is not surprising, as it advances bold and well evidenced claims on a hot topic in public health governance. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic – and in the face of widespread anxiety and uncertainty – governments’ mantra that they were “just following the science” was meant to reassure the public that decisions about pandemic responses were being directed by the best available scientific evidence. However, the authors claim that making policy decisions based only on scientific evidence is impossible (if only because ‘the science’ is always contested) and undemocratic (because governments are elected to balance a range of priorities and interests in their decisions). Claiming to be “just following the science” therefore represents an abdication of responsibility by politicians.
Our second featured article, entitled What types of evidence persuade actors in a complex policy system? by Geoff Bates and colleagues, explores the use of evidence to influence different groups across the urban development system to think more about health outcomes in their decisions. Their three key findings are: (i) evidence-based narratives have wide appeal; (ii) credibility of evidence is critical; and (iii) many stakeholders have priorities other than health, such as economic considerations. The authors conclude that these insights can be used to frame and present evidence that meets the requirements of different urban development stakeholders and persuade them to think more about how the quality of urban environments affects health outcomes.
In our recently published article in Policy & Politics, we explore the context for local authorities in England that have been pushed to develop “resilience.” This has been as a result of the austerity policies that have led to the phasing out of the Revenue Support Grant (e.g., a grant given to local authorities to finance expenditure on any service), increased service demand and the need to absorb more responsibilities in their communities. Whilst having a reduced capacity, local authorities also faced the challenges imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of living-crisis. Several have issued Section 114 “bankruptcy” notices indicating that they cannot balance their budgets as required by law, further escalating pressure on local services in responding to the growing inability of many to meet basic subsistence costs, such as the cost of food and housing.
Exploring resilience through the lens of crisis management, our article investigates in what ways and for whom resilience generates positive, zero and negative- sum outcomes. We believe this is a crucial moment in understanding the medium and longer-term consequences of resilience measures deployed by councils to ameliorate the effects of austerity, as they face rising financial hardship with a severely depleted resource base. Our work centres on four resilience strategies used by two unitary authorities in the East Midlands in England: Leicester City Council and Nottingham City Council. These resilience strategies are savings, reserves, collaboration, and investment.
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.
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.
Oscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop, Elizabeth Koebele, Chris Weible and Sarah Brown
Thank you to all our authors, reviewers, board members, readers and friends of Policy & Politics for another successful year in 2022.
We are delighted to be ending the year on the high note of maintaining our top quartile ranking in Political Science with an impact factor of 3.297, thanks to the huge support of our loyal community. Congratulations to you all!
In the meantime, to celebrate all we have achieved together this year, we have made our top 10 most highly cited articles published in 2022 free to access until 31 January 2023, please see below for the full collection.
Welcome to our virtual issue featuring scholarship on Asia published in Policy & Politics in the last two years. We have a strong body of work surfacing a range of policy issues in the region with wider relevance as well and look forward to receiving similar submissions in the future!
As part of our focus on Asia, Policy & Politics is proud to be an official partner of the Annual Conference of the Asian Association for Public Administration (APPA 2022) in Shanghai, China on 3-4 December 2022. If you are presenting your work there, please consider submitting your final paper to Policy & Politics.
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