Which audiences matter to public service organisations when managing their reputations?

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Jan Boon, Jan Wynen, Koen VerhoestJan Boon, Jan Wynen and Koen Verhoest

Why do public sector organisations target different stakeholder audiences when managing their reputations? This is the question we wanted to address in our recent Policy & Politics article entitled What determines the audiences that public service organisations target for reputation management.

A basic tenet in the reputation literature is that organisations are sensitive to their environment. Different audiences (be it clients, politicians, the media and others) expect different things from public service organisations, so how do they manage such conflicting demands? How do they prioritise the needs of their audiences? Continue reading →

Blog announcement from the Policy & Politics team

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P&P editorsSarah Ayres, Steve Martin and Felicity Matthews,
Co-editors of Policy & Politics

We are delighted to announce that Policy & Politics has achieved an impressive result in this year’s Journal Citation Reports with an Impact Factor of 3.069. This places the Journal in the top quartile of all public administration and the political science journals (10th out of 48 in the Public Administration category and 20th out of 160 in the Political Science category).

This fantastic outcome is testimony to the outstanding quality of research produced by our authors, the meticulous scrutiny of our peer reviewers, the hard work of the Policy & Politics and Policy Press team and the support of our Editorial and Management Boards. We would like to offer our thanks and congratulations to all.

To celebrate this increase we have made our most highly cited articles which contributed to the Impact Factor free to read until 31st August 2020. Please see the list below. Happy reading! Continue reading →

Virtual issue on The changing nature of welfare

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P&P editorsSarah Ayres, Steve Martin and Felicity Matthews,
Co-editors of Policy & Politics

New virtual issue from Policy & Politics: The changing nature of welfare

While Policy & Politics has always tracked debates about the changing nature of welfare globally, our need to understand the implications of such changes is proving more crucial than ever during this global pandemic.  In particular, it is clear that this pandemic will have differentiated impacts, with those who are poorer and more vulnerable more likely to be adversely affected. To help think about how these challenges can be tackled, this special collection brings together a range of insights from recent articles that consider the changing nature of welfare and what this means for welfare recipients. Continue reading →

Are responses to official consultations and stakeholder surveys reliable guides to policy actors’ positions?

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Karin IngoldKarin Ingold

Policy scholars are interested in the positions and preferences of politically involved actors. Those preferences can either serve as independent variables (for example, to explain coordination among or the strategic behaviour of actors), or as dependent variables (for example to evaluate actors’ coherence over time). But how do I identify these policy positions or preferences? Should I perform interviews or code the official statements of actors involved in policymaking? How valuable are my survey results in comparison to media data? These are typical questions concerning methods of data gathering and there are unlikely to be absolute answers to the question of which is the best method. However, our recent Policy & Politics article contributes to the discussion regarding these questions and is based on unique data drawn from three cases. Using these data, it compares actor statements about policies, gathered once through surveys and once through text coding official statements. Continue reading →

President Trump’s Policy Overreaction Style during Manufactured Crises

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moshe maorMoshe Maor

Recently, we have witnessed deliberate constructions of migration crises, for example, by Victor Orbán, in Hungary in the period 2015–2018, and by Donald Trump, in the run-up to the U.S. 2018 midterm elections. In both cases, Orbán and Trump skillfully exploited the challenges that the general public sometimes faces in determining when a crisis begins and when a crisis is over. Furthermore, both leaders were willing to see certain threats, or at the very least the perception that there is a threat, ramped up in order to advance their political goals. They were able to step up existential warnings while taking advantage of the opportunities that arose as they determined the starting point and other temporal elements of the immigration crises they manufactured. Continue reading →

Government’s social responsibility, citizen satisfaction and trust

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P&p blog authorsEran Vigoda-Gadot, Shlomo Mizrahi and Nissim Cohen

How much do we trust the government? To what degree do we feel that it has a responsibility to ensure that its citizens are healthy? Do these issues have any relationship with our satisfaction with the services the government provides?

These are important questions, particularly when we face major issues like pandemics. We know that when we trust people or institutions, we are more willing to cooperate with them, take risks, commit to them and share information with them. In contrast, when we don’t trust people or institutions, we may fear them, be defensive in our interactions with them, not cooperate with them and distort the information we give them. Continue reading →

Virtual issue on Working with citizens and changing behaviours

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p&p editorsSarah Ayres, Steve Martin and Felicity Matthews,
Co-editors of Policy & Politics

New virtual issue from Policy & Politics: Working with citizens and changing behaviours

In this month’s virtual issue we showcase our latest research on the topic of the state working with citizens and changing behaviours. As governments grapple with the longer-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, invoking behavioural change will be a key measure in the easing of lockdowns and the maintenance of social distancing,  Against this backdrop, the articles below provide a series of instructive lessons. Continue reading →

How the political framing of the principle of basic income encouraged it to be seriously debated resulting in an implementation experiment in Finland

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PerkioJohanna Perkiö

There is a pressing need for policies that will help to overcome some of the intractable social and economic problems of our time, such as increasing economic inequality, growing insecurity and labour market polarisation, and, most importantly, the climate change crisis. Both academics and policymakers will need to learn to think ‘outside the box’ to explore new ideas and solutions. Continue reading →

P&P annual prize announcement

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P&P prize winners

By Sarah Ayres, Felicity Matthews and Steve Martin
Co-editors of Policy & Politics

We are delighted to announce the 2020 prizes for award winning papers published in Policy & Politics in 2019. Continue reading →

Successful policy transfer and public sector reform in developing countries

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Ugyel and DaugbjergLhawang Ugyel and Carsten Daugbjerg

The scope and intensity of policy transfer—defined as the process in which policies and institutions from one time and/or place are used in another time and/or place—has increased in the last two decades. An area where extensive policy transfer occurs is public sector reform. In particular, developing countries frequently draw heavily on New Public Management (NPM) practices originally designed for Western democracies. Perceived as best practices, NPM-related reforms influenced the good governance agenda for most developing countries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They were based on market-like characteristics such as performance management systems and citizens’ charters. Developing countries have found these reforms irresistible, as they face a huge need to grow their economies and shrink their governments. Amidst the expansion of the practice of policy transfer, early studies assumed that a key to successful transfer was the transfer of policy models in their entirety. However, recent research – including our own article in Policy & Politics – suggests that local adaption is essential for success.    Continue reading →