by Sarah Brown and Allegra Fullerton
Welcome to this quarter’s highlights collection featuring a range of our most popular, recent research on different aspects relating to gender policy. Whether you’re preparing to teach a unit on gender policy or are interested in keeping up to date with the latest research in that area, we hope you will find the articles we’ve featured of interest!
Continue readingBy Kate Mattocks
Governments around the world undertake policy experiments – temporary, often micro-level interventions – to try new things and ‘learn what works.’ But what makes an experiment successful? This is the question I explore in my recent article published in Policy & Politics.
Discussions of success are surprisingly absent from the literature. We might think of success as a positive hypothesis: i.e. achieving an expected result. But this doesn’t capture all of the possible outcomes of experiments, and it also doesn’t consider the process of carrying them out.
Continue readingby Janna Goijaerts, Natascha van der Zwan, Jet Bussemaker
Policies often set ambitious goals for social services, envisioning a welfare system that is preventative, tailored, and complementary. Yet, as middle managers in street-level organisations know all too well, reality frequently falls short of these ideals. In our recent research article, just published in Policy & Politics, we explore the discrepancy between policy goals and actual service delivery, shedding light on the role of middle managers within this gap.
Continue readingby Sonja Blum and Johanna Kuhlmann
In public policy, target group constructions are crucial. Groups are granted additional rights, while rights from other groups are withdrawn, certain groups of people or other entities are regulated, while burdens elsewhere are lifted. As Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram’s work (1993) told us, such decisions are related to target groups’ power position, but also to their positive or negative construction.
But how do these social constructions work, and based on which criteria are target groups of public policy perceived as deserving or undeserving? These exact criteria guiding social constructions of groups have remained rather elusive in extant public policy research.
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We are delighted to announce this year’s prizes for award winning papers published in Policy & Politics in 2024.
The Ken Young Prize for the best article judged to represent excellence in the field is awarded to Claire Dupont, Jeffrey Rosamond and Bishoy L. Zaki (University of Ghent, Belgium) for their article: Investigating the scientific knowledge–policy interface in EU climate policy. Well deserved, Claire, Jeffrey, and Bishoy!
The Bleddyn Davies Prize recognising scholarship of the very highest standard by an early career academic, is awarded to Leah McCabe, University of Edinburgh, UK for her article: An intersectional analysis of contestations within women’s movements: the case of Scottish domestic abuse policymaking. Congratulations Leah!
In celebration of these winning articles, the co-editors’ elucidate the distinct and important contributions these articles make to their fields.
Continue readingby Yael R. Kaplan, Melissa K. Merry and Michael D. Jones
In our recent article published in Policy & Politics, we explore how narratives shape the way countries behave in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), focusing on their voting behaviour. We argue that the big stories a nation tells about itself – termed “macro narratives” – play a crucial role in how that country votes. Essentially, these macro narratives help form a country’s identity and influence its political decisions in the global arena.
Through our analysis, we explain that narratives are not just random tales; they are powerful tools that help people make sense of complex situations. In politics, leaders and interest groups use these stories to shape public opinion and rally support for their goals. Our research emphasises that, while we know a lot about how narratives work at smaller levels – like within groups or communities – there’s still a lot to learn about how these stories operate on a larger, national scale.
Continue readingby Jeongyoon Lee and David Lee
Policy actors often clash during policy processes, especially in contentious areas like climate change, gun control, and healthcare reform. These actors—including government agencies, private companies, and interest groups—frequently vie for influence, and political rivalries can lead to gridlock or policy failure. Understanding the drivers of these conflicts and how to manage them is crucial in order to propose strategies that can mitigate their effects, and enhance network coordination.
In our recent article published in Policy & Politics, we explore the causes of political competition and propose strategies for reducing it, using the case of local fracking policy processes in New York as an example. The fracking debate involves a wide range of actors, such as landowners, media organisations, oil and gas associations, environmental groups, city agencies, local governments, and legal organisations—all competing over whether fracking should be permitted in the state. But what drives these actors to clash so intensely? We explore the underlying reasons for these clashes, investigating whether competition arises from shared struggles for scarce resources, similar structural positions in resource-sharing relationships, differing policy beliefs or all three.
Continue readingby Andrea Krizsán and Dorottya Fekete
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.
Continue readingby John Turnpenny
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.
Continue readingby Rodrigo Fagundes Cezar
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.
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