Policy & Politics Highlights Collection on Energy Policy – free to access from 1st February – 30 April 2023

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Articles featured (free to download):

Advocacy strategies of industry and environmental interest groups in oil and gas policy debates (Jan 2023) Jennifer A. Kagan & Kristin L. Olofsson

Brexit implications for sustainable energy in the UK (May 2022) Caroline Kuzemko, Mathieu Blondeel & Antony Froggatt

The impact of participatory policy formulation on regulatory legitimacy: the case of Great Britain’s Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) (Jun 2022) Elizabeth Blakelock & John Turnpenny.

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Advocacy Coalitions, Power and Policy Change: ‘Powering’ and ‘Puzzling’

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It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what drew me to the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) about a decade ago. Part of it was frustration with the policy process theories I had used to that point. Part of it was the concept of advocacy coalitions, which – intuitively – seemed ubiquitous and important in policy-making. In truth, though, my interest in advocacy coalitions has always been instrumental – a platform on which to build a general understanding of how and why policies change. What drew me most to the ACF was its implicit incorporation of both the “puzzling” and “powering” dimensions of policy-making, to borrow Heclo’s (1974) terms.

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People and beliefs in governance

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Alex Osei Kojo

This blog post is based on a research article recently published in the Policy & Politics journal titled “Analysing the stability of advocacy coalitions and policy frames in Ghana’s oil and gas governance.” The article begins on the premise that there are several ways for people to engage in governance. One way is for people to join an association. The other way is to engage in policy debates.

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COVID-19 May Have Increased Support for Social Welfare in the US

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Wehde and Crabtree

Wesley Wehde & David Crabtree

Members of the media and the US president. Joe Biden himself, have suggested that Americans’ experience with COVID-19 and federal response policy may have increased support for social welfare. Much to their credit, our recent scholarly research into this question which has just been published in our article for Policy & Politics found evidence that this may be the case.

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Analysing the contextual factors that promote and constrain policy learning in local government

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Kristin Taylor, Nathan Jeschke & Stephanie Zarb

authors 2

In spite of the best efforts of government, sometimes policies do not work as designed. As scholars of the policy process and citizens in a representative democracy, our normative expectation is that government should learn when policies do not work to improve outcomes for communities. This is especially true in the wake of a natural disaster. Disasters can serve as an opportunity for governments to engage in policy learning by updating beliefs about policies and learning lessons about policy tools, instruments, and politics. Often, disasters can reveal physical and social vulnerabilities and gaps in preparedness that unevenly distribute the risk of damage within a community. In our recent article in Policy & Politics , we investigate which conditions constrain or promote policy learning. Understanding these conditions is of critical importance in gaining a better understanding of why some governments learn to improve policies after a disaster and some do not.

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Thank you to all our authors, reviewers, board members, readers and friends of Policy & Politics for another successful year in 2022

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Oscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop, Elizabeth Koebele, Chris Weible and Sarah Brown

Screenshot 2022-12-12 171359

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!  

We are looking forward to seeing many of you face to face in 2023, particularly at the Conference on Policy Process Research in Denver in January, and at the International Conference on Public Policy in Toronto in June.

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.

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Virtual issue on Asian scholarship published recently in Policy & Politics

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Sarah Brown & Elizabeth Koebele

Sarah and Elizabeth

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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Policy & Politics Highlights collection on Transformational Change in Public Policy Special Issue: free to access November 2022 – January 2023

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Sarah Brown

Sarah_Brown_credit_Evelyn_Sturdy

This quarter’s highlights collection focuses on three of our most widely read and cited articles this year. All three were featured in our special issue published in July on Transformational Change in Public Policy which was guest edited by our co-editors: Oscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop, Elizabeth Koebele and Chris Weible.

Our first article is the introduction to the special issue entitled Transformational change through Public Policy written by our four co-editors.

The authors highlight how significant time and effort has been spent seeking to understand policy change around the major societal issues we face. Yet their findings show that most change tends to be incremental. The consequent challenge they set out is whether or not public policy scholarship is up to the job of developing a coherent research programme to build knowledge and enable necessary, positive transformational change.

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Researching, renewing and reimagining gender pay gap politics and policy

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Mazur group photo sharpened

Ingrid Bego, Anne Charlott Callerstig, Elisa Chieregato, Isabelle Engeli, Ashley English, Lenita Freidenvall, Season Hoard, Sophie Jacquot, Andrea Jochmann-Doell, Veronika Lemeire, Iga Magda, Amy Mazur, Susan Milner, Lucie Newsome, Ania Plomien, Sophie Pochic, Jill Rubery, Olga Salido, Francesca Scala, Alexandra Scheele, Sydney Smith, Andrea Spehar, and Ines Wagner.

The politics and policy addressing gender inequalities in public and private life evident across supra-national, national, local or organisational contexts, especially but not exclusively in the Global North, are nothing short of remarkable. The range of issues various actors promote to advance equality include care, division of labour, education, employment, health, pay, political participation, poverty of income and time, reproductive rights, violence and more. All these interests are underpinned by gendered social norms and power. Yet, the existence and prominence of the wide assortment of gender politics and policies is as much a cause for celebration as it is for concern. It represents both an achievement of the feminist struggle to legitimise and institutionalise feminist goals of improving women’s lives, juxtaposed with the uneven, unfinished, or indeed unintended outcomes of these efforts. Does gender equality policy work in practice?

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2022 Policy & Politics Annual Lecture with Jess Phillips MP on “Everything You Really Need to Know About Politics”

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Oscar Berglund, co-editor Policy & PoliticsSPS Staff Portraits, University of Bristol

Last night, Policy & Politics was delighted to host Jess Phillips MP to speak to a large audience in Bristol about ‘Everything You Really Need to Know About Politics’.

Jess has been MP for Birmingham Yeardley since 2015 and is arguably one of Britain’s most prominent feminist politicians.

The aim of Phillips’ talk, based on her recent book of the same title, was to demystify British politics in an effort to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their elected representatives. The general scorn for politicians that is so common across the UK serves the Conservatives, she says. When people say ‘What’s the point in voting? You’re all the same’, people think that they are soldiers, that they are taking a stance. But on the contrary, to Phillips, it sounds like surrender.

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