What role should charitable funding play in the provision of public services?

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by Helen Abnett, James Bowles and John Mohan

Our recent research, published in Policy & Politics, shows that in the English and Welsh National Health Services (NHS), support from NHS-linked charities funds a wide range of goods and services. This includes substantial spending on amenities intended to make hospital visits more comfortable for patients and staff. Charities pay for newspapers, toiletry packs, toys for play areas, cushions and books. Charity support also funds education and wellbeing activity and medical research.

We also find that support from charities funds basic hospital equipment and furniture, such as vital signs monitors, bladder scanners, pulse oximeters, mattresses, and chairs, as well as some larger pieces of medical equipment (x-ray machines and ultrasounds).

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Understanding how policymakers respond to problems by learning from abroad

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by Umut Aydin

Policymakers frequently introduce policies originating in other countries, even when they are initially sceptical that they will work in their own country. Researchers have called this phenomenon ‘policy transfer’ and have sought to explain why and how it happens. However, frequently it is hard to distinguish why policymakers in one country adopt a foreign-inspired model: Is it because the policy is imposed by a powerful country or an international organization as part of a trade deal or membership negotiations? Or do policymakers imitate other countries’ policies voluntarily but rather automatically, without reflecting on whether it is appropriate for them? Alternatively, do they learn from other countries, observing how they tackle similar problems and borrowing from successful examples? 

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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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