Policy & Politics Journal Blog

Policy and Politics celebrate the 2015 Impact Factor

June 23, 2016policypressblogLeave a comment

We are delighted to announce that the 2015 Impact Factor for Policy and Politics has risen to 1.2 and the journal is now ranked as one of the top 20 globally in the Public Administration category of the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports.

We would like to thank our authors for helping us to remain highly placed, enabling their work to achieve global readership and high citations in the field.

To celebrate this increase we have made the most highly cited articles from the journal free to read for one month:

Depoliticisation, governance and political participation
Authors: Paul Fawcett, David Marsh

40 Years of public management reform in UK central government – promises, promises …
Author: Christopher Pollitt

Representing the family: how does the state ‘think family’?
Authors: James Cornford, Susan Baines, Rob Wilson

Rethinking depoliticisation: beyond the governmental
Authors: Matt Wood, Matthew Flinders

The politics of behaviour change: nudge, neoliberalism and the state
Author: Will Leggett

Rethinking the travel of ideas: policy translation in the water sector
Author: Farhad Mukhtarov

Left behind? The future of progressive politics

June 22, 2016June 21, 2016policypressblogLeave a comment

MFlinders-new-small By Matthew Flinders

Centre-left social democratic parties appear to have been left behind in the last decade. ‘‘Early in this century you could drive from Inverness in Scotland to Vilnius in Lithuania without crossing a country governed by the right,’’ The Economist highlighted just weeks ago, ‘‘the same would have been true if you had done the trip by ferry through Scandinavia. Social democrats ran the European Commission and vied for primacy in the European Parliament.’’ But recently their share of the vote has plunged- they have been ‘left behind.’

The challenge for anyone thinking about the future of social democracy is that we no longer have a vocabulary of politics that resonates with the broader public sphere. Even the title of this little piece – ‘Left Behind?’ – embraces an arguably tired and prosaic attachment to a notion of politics that remains tied to a ‘left-right’ spectrum. One might argue whether this ‘spectrum approach’ was ever really capable of grasping the subtle complexities of political life – either at the personal, party, organizational, or social level – let alone the innate irrationalities of political life itself with its inevitable mixture of messiness and compromise. A ‘new political project’ from this perspective might focus not simply on the concept of ‘the centre left’ but on the very nature of collective politics itself. This ‘new approach’ offers huge potential in terms of redefining and revitalising democratic politics – a rejection of the defensive and callowed version of social democracy that currently exists in the wake of the global financial crisis.

The simple argument here is that any starting point in a discussion about revitalizing politics – and therefore society – cannot be rooted in conceptions of either ‘the left’ or ‘the right’ (or ‘the centre’). Such historical signposts are now too crude to grasp the social complexity that defines the twenty-first century. The research of Jonathan Wheatley, for example, suggests that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are of little relevance to the contemporary electorate. “Evidently, left and right are amorphous concepts that mean different things to different people at different times’’, Wheatley notes, “Amongst younger, less well-educated and especially less politically interested users, items belonging to the economic scale were barely coherent at all. For these voters, the notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’, at least in economic terms, are really not meaningful at all”. The electoral basis of democracy therefore needs to be accepted not only in terms of its complexity but also in terms of the decline of monolithic class groups, the re-scaling of economic activity, combined with a shift towards single-issue or valence politics. The rise of political complexity therefore reflects a broader increase in social complexity.

If I were being provocative I might dare to suggest that, at one level, there was no such thing as ‘the public’ because as any politician (or impact-engaged academic) knows there are in fact ‘multiple publics with whom it is necessary to engage in multiple ways.’ This argument may have academic roots (in this case it’s Michael Burawoy’s work on public sociology) but in many ways it speaks to the challenges faced by thinkers, scholars, politicians, and policy-makers who aim to craft a new political project for what really are ‘new times.’ The challenge for any of the ‘mainstream’ political parties – or for any of the new ‘insurgent’ parties – is to learn how to engage with multiple audiences in multiple ways with a message that has resonance and meaning while also being accessible. From this perspective the ‘traditional’ parties too often appear like dinosaurs wandering aimlessly across the political savannah who don’t really understand where they are going and why. The terrain, the savannah, has become more complex and yet the beasts remain incredibly cumbersome with their committees, conferences, headquarters and ‘desiderata’ of an arguably earlier political age. The elements of this increased complexity are diverse, contested, and inter-related (social media, increased public expectations, individualization, migration, etc.) but they culminate in a well-known focus on ‘the problem of democracy’ with its ‘disaffected democrats’ and ‘critical citizens.’ (The irony for the Labour Party is that, as Andrew Gamble has argued, ‘the Corbyn effect’ was fuelled by anti-politics and populist sentiment within an established political party.)

One way of thinking about this problem – and possibly a solution – is to think of Zygmunt Bauman’s work on ‘liquid modernity’, which when stripped down to its core components, emphasizes the decline in traditional social anchorage points (jobs for life, national identity, religion, marriage, close knit communities, trade unions, etc.). All that was once solid has apparently melted away and has been replaced with a hyper-materialism that ultimately leaves the public(s) frustrated. To make such an argument is to step back to C Wright Mills classic The Sociological Imagination (1959) and his arguments about ‘the promise’ and ‘the trap.’ We have identified a perceived trap in the form of the decline of the centre left and the dominance of market logic across and within social relationships. But where is ‘the promise’ in terms of a new vision possibly inspired by the insights of the social sciences that cuts across traditional partisan lines?

Politicians make promises but the public no longer perceives that these promises are ever delivered, or fail to understand exactly why – as Bernard Crick argued – democratic politics tends to be so messy. Politicians have no simple solutions to complex problems and nor do I. And yet, as a way of generating a discussion, I would suggest that ‘the promise’ of social democratic politics will only be achieved when three elements are secured:

A Clarity in terms of not only a stable vision of why ‘working together’ through collective endeavours matters but also in terms of how it can provide meaning, , control and choice;
A Confidence in terms of a positive political narrative that inspires belief and hope, and redefines specific ‘threats’ as opportunities; and,
A clear and confident ‘language of politics’ that is not defensive or defined by the past, that makes no mention of Guild Socialism, Golden Ages, Fabianism, Richard Crossman, ‘Lefts’ and ‘rights’, etc.

The challenge for the Labour Party in 2020 already looks greater than it did in 2015, not least because the party too often appears engulfed in (internal) tribalism within an increasingly post-tribal world. The challenge for a future political leader is to reject and re-frame the dominant anti-political sentiment for the simple reason that it is rarely anti-political in nature and more accurately interpreted as frustration with the current system. Redefining ‘anti-politics’ as ‘pro-a-different-way-of-doing-politics’ lies at the heart of any new political project that seeks not to be left behind.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics and founding director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is also Chair of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom. During the Spring Bank Holiday he hopes to be ‘left behind’ – in the sense of slipping away from the hustle and bustle of day-to-day life – in the quiet Norfolk town of Cromer. He is the author of Defending Politics: Why Democracy Matters in the 21st Century.

If you enjoyed this blog, you may also be interested to read Depoliticization, governance and the state by Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood.

This post was originally published on the Oxford University Press blog at http://blog.oup.com/2016/06/social-democracy-politics-complexity/ on 2nd June 2016 and is reposted under the Creative Commons license

There is more than one way to involve the public in policy decisions

June 15, 2016June 7, 2016policypressblogLeave a comment

By Rikki Dean

Imagine you are a civil servant. You have just convinced your somewhat skeptical colleagues that your new policy initiative should incorporate extensive public participation in its design process. You now have some tough choices to make: who is going to participate in the process, for example? You know that if you keep participation open to all, then the process will be criticized within your department for just involving the usual suspects. But if you restrict participation, to a randomly selected group for instance, then you know there are some influential policy NGOs who will be vocal about their exclusion.

Or imagine you are a citizen who has decided to get involved in a participatory governance initiative. You were told this initiative was going to give you an opportunity to hold policy-makers to account. But, now you’re taking part you realize it is more about working collaboratively to input your ‘experiential expertise’ into the process. You also have some choices to make. Do you try to rattle the cage from the inside, or comply with the rules of the game and play nice? Or do you simply stop participating at all? Continue reading →

Inspired by the Issue: a review of Participatory policy making under authoritarianism: the pathways of local budgetary reform in the People’s Republic of China’ by Xiaojun Yan and Ge Xin

June 8, 2016June 7, 2016policypressblogLeave a comment

By Yijia Jing, Policy & Politics Editorial Advisory Board member, Fudan University, Shanghai

Browsing through the latest April 2016 issue of Policy & Politics, I was ‘inspired’ to review the article entitled ‘Participatory policy making under authoritarianism: the pathways of local budgetary reform in the People’s Republic of China’ by Xiaojun Yan and Ge Xin. Their research touches an interesting innovation in China’s public sector that aims to engage citizens in local budgetary decisions. The fundamental dilemma, as the authors clarify, is the enthusiasm of an authoritarian system in civic participation. Why do local governments of China adopt reforms to empower citizens? To what extent have these kinds of reforms empowered citizens? What is the potential for these kinds of reforms to be expanded and upgraded? These are all critical questions to understand China’s evolving political system. Usually the corporatist strategy, namely the state’s authoritative recognition of an organization as the legal and sole representative of certain sectoral interests, has been adopted to explain Chinese governments’ policy toward external forces, for example the rising economic and social elites (for example, Truex, 2014) and the rising new social organizations (for example, Jing and Gong, 2012). So are there differences in engaging ordinary citizens? Keep in mind that the Communist Party of China(CPC) never lacked citizen engagement in its history. Even after the civil war and the establishment of People’s Republic of China, the CPC frequently used mass movements to engage citizens for multiple political and policy purposes. Continue reading →

The challenges of implementing targets in UK government – a ‘multiple streams’ approach

June 1, 2016May 25, 2016policypressblogLeave a comment

By Christina Boswell and Eugenia Rodrigues

It has long been observed that policies can get lost in implementation. The best intended legislation or programme adopted by central government can get reinterpreted, distorted or even subverted when applied at local level, or across different areas of government. This was certainly the case with the British Labour government’s system of targets rolled out in the 2000s. Number 10 and the Treasury (the ‘core executive’) adopted a series of quantified performance targets designed to improve public services. And the government even monitored how far they were being achieved through rigorous reporting arrangements. But the targets were appropriated and applied in quite different ways across departments. What factors shaped how different parts of government implemented targets? Continue reading →

Top tips on how to get published in Policy & Politics

May 25, 2016January 22, 2026policypressblogLeave a comment

By Alex Marsh and Sarah Ayres

Hear our top ten tips on how to get published in Policy & Politics in this 4 minute interview with Co-Editor Sarah Ayres and Chair Alex Marsh from the University of Bristol.

If you enjoyed this blog you may also enjoy Policy & Politics at the Political Studies Association conference talking about how to get published.

Media attention for complex governance processes: does it matter?

May 18, 2016April 21, 2016policypressblogLeave a comment

Media are everywhere nowadays and it is well known that politicians are very well aware of that and try to stage their performance to get as much media attention as possible. There are even authors who speak of modern democracy as the drama democracy where everything is about staging media attention and performance and not about implementation (eg Elchardus, 2002).

Are politicians different from rock stars?

As a result of the increasing mediatization of our society we now judge our politicians and public officials with the same standards as we judge our celebrities (rock stars, soccer players, TV personalities). Politicians appear on stage with wife and children, we want to know their private life and they appear as guests on talk shows. Research shows that media pay much more attention to private life of politicians than say for instance 30 years ago.

But the mediatization literature also suggests that the rules of the media logic (like the emphasis on drama, conflict and personal stories and the tendency to frame everything in short soundbites) penetrate other spheres of life (like the political domain, but also public administration). In our Policy & Politics article: Managing commercialised media attention in complex governance networks: positive and negative effects on network performance, we examine the impact of commercialised media attention and its positive and negative effects on network performance in complex governance networks. Since various authors point to the commercialisation of news as the main driver for this media logic we have labelled such attention “commercialised news” in our article. Continue reading →

The Dismal Debate: would a “Brexit” mean more power for the UK?

May 11, 2016May 3, 2016policypressblogLeave a comment

By Matthew Flinders

“Money, money money. Must be funny. In a rich man’s world.” As an academic I’m highly unlikely to ever have either “money, money, money” or live in a “rich man’s world.” But as a long-time student of politics I’ve been struck by how the debate in the UK about the forthcoming referendum on membership of the European Union has been framed around just two issues – money and power. The political calculation being peddled in the UK is therefore embarrassingly simple: leaving the EU would mean that the UK had more money and more power.

This really has been a dismal debate. Those in favour of “Brexit” or “Bremain” have both engaged in an almost hysterical game of chasing shadows and creating phantoms. Shadows in the sense of making largely spurious claims about the impact of leaving the EU (i.e. “It would be very very bad!” or “It would be very very good”) when the truth of the matter is that no one really knows what would happen if the UK left the Union. Predictions must try to grapple with so many variables and uncertainties that the only way anyone would ever really know what would happen would be by the UK actually leaving. And yet part of this rather childish playground-like debate has been an automatic default to simplistic zero-sum games that are of little value in the real world. Would the UK really save any money if it stopped paying in to the EU budget? Well at a simplistic level it would but at a more sophisticated level it may not because the UK would then no longer receive funding back from the EU or have a seat at the table in major decisions concerning large infrastructure projects.

Would the UK really have more power, and the EU therefore “less” power, if the UK walked away? There seems to be no understanding of either positive-sum conceptions of power (i.e. by pooling some powers with other actors we overall actually gain more power and influence in some policy areas than we could ever have on our own) or the real world of global governance or international affairs. Does the UK really think that a small island just nine hundred miles long off the coast of continental Europe really still remains a global heavyweight with the capacity to “go it alone?” The seas of contemporary international politics rage like a storm: there is great value in setting sail in flotillas rather than in single small boats, and far better to have safe and secure anchorage points in the middle of a tornado. (And recent years have sent us political and economic storms, tornadoes and hurricanes that really should make the UK think twice.)

In this context, President Obama’s recent intervention was a beautiful mixture of charm laced with menace. The UK, was for him, taking a huge step into the unknown and caution was being urged. But Obama’s intervention also raised two issues that have simply not received the attention they deserve, issues that could transform a dismal debate into something quite different. The first is a shift away from a simplistic focus on power and money and back to a more basic focus on war and terror. To make such a point is not to engage in ‘the politics of fearmongering’ that is ripe in the UK at the moment but to make the simple point that the EU was from its very inception framed around the need to ensure peace through collective efforts. From the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 the underpinning ideal of the EU knew the value of international co-operation and not just its price. In terms of fostering peace and co-operation across an ever-larger union of countries the EU can only be seen as a success.

This leads me to the second (‘Obama-esque’) issue: national confidence. I can’t help wondering if what is actually driving the Brexit campaign in the UK is a lack of confidence and national belief. This might seem odd in light of the desire to ‘go-it-alone’ but there is a lot of huff and puff behind the UK’s constant position as an “awkward partner” within the EU. The missing component – the political ‘X-Factor’ – of the current debate about the UK and the EU is not about leaving but about recommitting to the ideals and vision of the EU in a different but positive way. This is not the same as adopting a federal vision or embracing ‘ever closure union’ but it is about adopting a more positive ‘Yes We Can!’ attitude to re-shaping the EU with the UK at its core and not dragging its feet like a recalcitrant teenager on its periphery. Now wouldn’t that make for a more refreshing debate?

Matthew Flinders is Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre at the University of Sheffield and is also Chair of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom. He has just launched a major research and public engagement project called ‘Designing for Democracy’ which is focused on the restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster in London and uses this multi-billion pound infrastructure project to re-think the nature of democracy “in theory” and democracy “in practice.” http://www.designingfordemocracy.com

If you enjoyed this blog, you may also be interested to read Depoliticization, governance and the state by Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood.

Reposted with kind permission from: http://blog.oup.com/2016/05/brexit-uk-eu-power/, where this article first appeared on 1 May 2016

How politics and power create poor health: ‘I think they’re trying to kill folk aff’

May 4, 2016January 22, 2026policypressblogLeave a comment

By Mhairi Mackenzie, Chik Collins, John Connolly, Gerard McCartney, Mick Doyle

We know from decades of international research that power, politics and specific social and economic policies have a fundamental role in creating health. These factors contribute very significantly to the gradient we see across income groups in terms of life expectancy and more general wellbeing.

However, many health policy researchers have identified how policies which claim to be about reducing health inequalities seldom squarely address these fundamental determinants of health. Instead, policies have a distinct tendency to focus on changing the behaviours of (mainly) poor people. The message is often that people smoke too much, drink too much or don’t make the best use of services that are available to them. These messages do not give proper consideration to why particular health damaging behaviours occur in particular places or why health is worse in certain places even in the absence of these behaviours. Even those policies which do start with a broader analysis of the problem of disparities in health are subject to lifestyle drift when it comes to putting policy into practice. Although policy documents may state that the causes of poor health or inequalities in health are to do with poverty and deprivation, the interventions which actually operate on the ground focus much less (if at all) on changing people’s material circumstances and rather more on trying to change behaviours (which are in fact heavily shaped by material circumstances).

In light of the above, it is unsurprising that research in different countries also shows that when policy makers and practitioners talk about how health is created they tend not to give due regard to these known fundamental causes. Again, the emphasis is on explanations that focus on individual lifestyles. Behavioural interventions aimed at changing the lives of poor individuals clearly have a powerful draw on the attention of policy makers. The reasons for this preference are many and varied and include the desire for quick policy wins over longer term action and the seductive appeal of short and simplistic causal pathways to health, in preference to having to deal, intellectually and practically, with the longer and more complex pathways which are actually at work.

Another reason, however, for the hardiness of the behavioural intervention as a policy tool – despite its apparent lack of success in addressing the problem – is that it fits within a broader contemporary political narrative. That narrative tells us that individuals are responsible for making and breaking their own life chances. Consequently, their health and social outcomes lie overwhelmingly in their own hands. There is, in this view, ‘no such thing as society’, or at least no wider societal determinants which individuals can’t be expected to just over-ride through their personal choices and individual acts of will. In this narrative the state’s role is to ‘nudge’, ‘activate’ or mandate individuals to do the right thing rather than to challenge fundamentally the existing power relations within society.

This kind of thinking is part of the wider set of discourses, policies and practices associated with neoliberalism. These provide both the context in which, and the mechanisms through which, the lives of some communities have become in many ways much more difficult since the 1980s – and their existence and identity much more marginalised. Research tells us that it is this fundamental part of the story of how poor health is created that is largely missing from the discourse of those in policy and practice.

In our recent Policy & Politics article: working-class discourses of politics, policy and health: ‘I don’t smoke; I don’t drink. The only thing wrong with me is my health’, we wanted to look at how people living in deprived communities – which had felt the brunt of deindustrialisation in the 1980s and had been at the sharp edge of austerity in current times – talked about how politics and policies had impacted on their health, and that of their families and their wider communities. Unlike the messages from policymakers, our sample of participants in the towns of Kilmarnock and Cumnock in East Ayrshire, Scotland, brought vividly to life how it is that power, politics and social and economic policies are indeed a fundamental matter for health – at both an individual and community level.

Here are some of the things our participants told us:

They do not feel at all valued by political elites; on the contrary they are made to feel literally surplus to requirements. An ex-miner told us: ‘I’ve heated their bums wae coal…we’ve served wur cause. If they could dae away wae you noo, they would dae away wae you, because you’re a drain on society…They want me, noo, to work til I’m sixty-seven. I’ve no chance of working to I’m sixty-seven. I’ll no’ see sixty-seven.’ Similarly, another respondent, reflecting on ‘austerity’ and so-called ‘welfare reform’, simply said, “I think they’re trying to kill folk aff”.

They sense that deliberate action was taken by government to destroy the industries on which their communities had depended, and to undermine the strong and more solidaristic community relationships which had prevailed in the past. A respondent from Kilmarnock said: “She [Thatcher] allowed a’ the work to go abroad. And oor factories in Kilmarnock…we had a great town, and it just finished. Factory after factory, well-known brands…employers went. They all went wi’ a feeling o’ sorrow but it didnae help the workers.” Another ex-miner from Cumnock, reflecting on the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike across the UK, said: “looking back you can see the preparation got made. And they really backed the union into a corner … it was to diminish the power of the unions and fragment communities”.

Where ‘negative lifestyles’ exist within these communities, they are seen as closely connected to broader social and political circumstances. Another ex-miner told us how downwardly spiralling morale and behaviours in his community were rooted in changing circumstances: ‘The factories started slimmin doon, cutting workforces. The ability for young people to get into work was becoming limited. We started to see probably drugs in our community for the first time. And probably the excessive drinking was starting to take a hold as well…’ Further, not all of our participants were able to understand their current poor health in terms of their own behavioural decisions – as we indicate in the title of our research paper – one man in poor health summed up this personal conundrum by saying ‘I don’t drink; I don’t smoke – the only thing wrong with me is my health’.

Participants are conscious of current day political strategies to set poor and struggling communities apart from the rest of society. One young woman said: ‘They are using the media…tae bombard folk wi’ … the good old ‘divide and conquer’…it’s like stigmatising full groups at a time. It comes in waves. I mean, the immigrants’ll be due a shot…it’s a’ their fault. It’s like they’re trying to deliberately create this, ‘Everybody that’s on incapacity’s a scrounger.’”

All in all, our research participants provided a vivid articulation of links between politics, policies, deindustrialisation, damage to community fabric and impacts on health. We ask: given the way in which these lay participants’ understandings of health reflect (and enrich) the views of researchers, should our participants and the many who share their stories, actually be the ones educating policy makers and practitioners, rather than being seen as the recipients of perennially failing health education messages? What might be the impact of turning the traditional health education model on its head? How would such a shift in who is doing the educating be received by policy-makers and practitioners?

Mhairi Mackenzie is Professor of Public Policy in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Chik Collins is Professor of Applied Social Science in the School of Media, Culture and Society at the University of the West of Scotland. John Connolly is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of West of Scotland. Mick Doyle works for the Scottish Community Development Centre. Gerry McCartney works for NHS Health Scotland.

If you enjoyed this blog you may also be interested to read Policy, Politics, Health, and Housing in the UK.

Reposted with kind permission from: http://discoversociety.org/2016/04/05/policy-briefing-how-politics-and-power-create-poor-health-i-think-theyre-trying-to-kill-folk-aff/

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