Claims of the increasing irrelevance of universities are ideology masquerading as evidence

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Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders

By Matthew Flinders, Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker. This was originally published on the Political Studies Association blog.

In a recent column in The Telegraph, Allister Heath claims that the humanities and social sciences are suffering from increasing groupthink, inwardness and irrelevance – creating an environment in which certain political outlooks are suppressed and academic research rarely resonates beyond the hallowed halls of the university. Such an account simply does not square with the realities of universities in 21st Century Britain. Heath praises the University world of the twentieth century but then neglects the golden rule that drove that work and is still present in twenty-first century academia: make sure you have robust evidence to support your arguments. In terms of academic research, the supposed thought police of the left are in little evidence in the pluralistic university faculties that we know across the U.K., places in which rich debates over theory and methods take place.

When it comes to Heath’s arguments over the narrow reach of academic research in terms of citation, Heath’s arguments rely on tenuous evidence. The claim that “98 per cent of academic papers in the arts and humanities are never cited in any subsequent research” comes from a twenty-five year old study that was at the time shown to have been misleading. Continue reading →

The Welfare state: A Case of Plus cá change?

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Anthony McCashin
Anthony McCashin

by Anthony McCashin, Trinity College Dublin

Paul Pierson shaped the terms on which we considered the sources and scale of welfare state change. Would a critical review of Pierson’s claims still endorse them? Our Policy & Politics article entitled How much change? Pierson and the welfare state revisited attempts to answer this question.

First, welfare state resilience: while appropriate, perhaps, to Pierson’s analysis of ‘early’ retrenchers like Reagan in the US, or Swedish Social Democrats in the 1990s, this term no longer reflects the variety and depth of change – especially in social security. Second, globalisation: here Pierson is on more certain ground. On the one hand, there are strong nationally based drivers of change- such as ageing and health care costs. On the other, individual welfare states have quite distinct economies (and institutions) and these filter the influence of globalisation. Welfare states remain specific and diverse and are not flattened into conformity by globalisation. Continue reading →

Viewpoint from Danny Dorling on Inequality and the 1%

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Danny Dorling
Danny Dorling

Over the festive period, spare a thought for the 1% lowest earners in the UK. Read on if you care…

The Conservatives won a narrow majority in May 2015. The result shocked a London based commentariat. This was hardly surprising as the Capital swung to Labour and London remains where life’s winners congregate, a place from where losers must be expelled. It was life’s losers who did not turn out to vote for the main alternative on offer, a watered-down version of Conservative austerity being sold to them by Ed Miliband. We were then told that the Labour Party did not appeal enough to those who were aspirational and wanted more, including people who wanted more largely irrespective of who had to have less. But perhaps fear and fantasy greatly appealed too, an eighth of the English electorate voted for the UK Independence party (UKIP).

In Scotland all but three of the constituencies fell to the Scottish National Party (SNP) which now represented as wide a cross-section of society as it is possible to imagine. The former Royal Bank of Scotland oil economist, Alex Salmond became Continue reading →

Fire and ashes: success and failure in politics

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Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders

By Matthew Flinders. This was originally published on the Oxford University Press blog.

Politics is a worldly art. It is a profession that is founded on the ability to instill hope, convince doubters and unite the disunited – to find simple and pain free solutions to what are in fact complex and painful social challenges. In recent months a small seam of scholarship has emerged that explores public attitudes to politics and politicians through the lens of Daniel Kahneman’s work on behavioral economics and psychology. ‘Think fast’ and the public’s responses are generally aggressive, negative and hopeless; ‘think slow’ and the public’s responses are far more positive, understanding and hopeful. Such findings resonate with my own personal experience and particularly when I founded a “Be Kind to Politicians Party” as part of a project for the BBC and it was amazing how many people I was able to recruit in a fairly short time.

The aim of telling this tale is not to make the reader feel sorry for politicians, or really to defend them or their profession. The ‘aim’ – if there really is one – is to promote the public understanding of political life and to steer it away from over-simplistic representations of sleaze, scandal and self-interest. (P.J. O’Rourke’s Don’t Vote for the Bastards – It Just Encourages Them! suddenly springs to mind.) Continue reading →

Governing, governability, the future of the state and other minor issues

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Jon Pierre
Jon Pierre

Jon Pierre is Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg and professor of public governance at the Melbourne School of Government, University of Melbourne. He serves on the editorial advisory board of Policy & Politics.

Two recent papers in the October 2015 edition of Policy & Politics  provoked my thinking about governing and governance; Bob Jessop’s “Crises, crisis-management and state restructuring: what future for the state?”, and Allan Cochrane, Bob Colenutt and Martin Field’s “Governing the ungovernable: spatial policy, markets and volume house-building in a growth region”. They did so for quite different reasons. Or so I thought.

The two texts could not be more different in style and presentation. For me, reading Bob Jessop has always been like having a bowl of fettuccine al burro in an Italian restaurant; it is pure delicacy but at the same time so incredibly rich that in order not to choke you have to proceed very slowly. You read a paragraph or even just a sentence (sometimes that can be one and the same thing) and then find yourself forced to sit back to take in and digest Bob’s argument. His analysis covers several discourses and perspectives, then puts a diachronic spin on the analysis and ends up asking Continue reading →

Winners and losers in George Osborne’s spending review

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by Peter Taylor-Gooby, Professor of Social Policy, University of Kent. This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

George Osborne
George Osborne

George Osborne always plays the role of the smiling conjurer who pulls the rabbit out of the hat and steals the scene with aplomb. In his 2015 spending review and autumn statement, the surprise announcement was that cuts to tax credit will not be as stringent as expected – although housing benefit claimers are the losers. Concealed within the chancellor’s hat are cuts of more than 50% in grants to local government and tense optimism about the growth, employment and pay forecasts on which everything depends.

The chart below gives the main winners and losers in the spending review over the period up to 2019-20. Cuts are legion. The winners are the big players – the NHS and pensions – both accounting for about a fifth of total spending – which receive real increases of 3 to 4%.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/X00ta/1/

Pensioners will benefit from the transition to the new flat-rate pension from next April onwards, increasing spending in this area by some 4%.

International development has a 21% increase, although some of the new money will be spent to aid security objectives and some in the UK on Syrian refugees. The new Single Intelligence Account for the security Continue reading →

The Regulation of Ministerial Appointments and its unintended consequences

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Felicity Matthews
by Felicity Matthews

The Cabinet Office is currently undertaking a review of the role and remit of the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments, which is being conducted by Sir Gerry Grimstone.  As part of this review, in September I presented to the Committee on Standards in Public Life the findings of research conducted by Matthew Flinders and me regarding the UK’s experience of public appointments.

Upon the recommendation of the first Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments (OCPA) was established in 1995 to improve confidence in the system by addressing widespread beliefs that ministerial appointments were not always made on merit.  By closely regulating the appointments within its remit, OCPA sought to ensure that ministerial appointments were made solely on merit, rather than party political loyalties or personal ties.  Indeed, comparative research reveals that the patronage capacities of British ministers are now amongst the lowest in Europe; and that OCPA is an exemplar in terms of promoting probity and integrity.

Nonetheless, whilst the capacity of ministers to intervene in public appointments has been reigned in, the involvement of parliamentarians has expanded through the introduction of pre-appointment scrutiny in 2007; and the relationship Continue reading →

Does political control increase bureaucracies’ responsiveness to public pressures?

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Saar Alon-Barkat & Sharon Gilad
Saar Alon-Barkat & Sharon Gilad

Nowadays, probably more than ever, bureaucratic organizations and senior civil servants are directly exposed to public pressures, including media coverage, public protest and shifts in public opinion. In our recent article in Policy & Politics entitled Political Control or legitimacy deficit? Bureaucracies’ symbolic response to bottom-up public pressures, we explore what makes a bureaucracy more or less attentive and responsive to bottom-up public pressures – a question that stems from our broader concern with the responsiveness of government institutions.

In our article, we suggest two possible explanations for bureaucracies’ attentiveness to public pressures. On the one hand, one might expect higher levels of political control to render bureaucracies more attentive to public pressures in order to preempt intervention by politicians who are reliant on public support. On the other hand, regulation scholars have suggested that autonomous bureaucratic organizations (such as independent regulatory agencies), which are subjected to lower degrees of political control, are nonetheless eager to display their attentiveness Continue reading →

Inspired by the issue: The challenges to operationalising gender justice in India

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Geetanjali Gangoli
Geetanjali Gangoli

As a friend of Policy & Politics, former editor and someone who has (very) recently stepped down as Chair of the Policy & Politics Management Board, the journal is of particular interest to me. The October issue has an article by Keerty Nakray that speaks directly to my research interests on feminisms, gender and India: Gender budgeting and public policy: the challenges to operationalizing gender justice in India.)

Nakray’s article raises the important issue of gender budgeting in the Indian context, and the role of feminist intervention in introducing this concept to India. Gender budgeting refers to not only a gendered analysis of the national (or state level) budgets, but at a broader and much more conceptual level, to locating gender relations within the economy as a whole. Nakray also raises Continue reading →

Talking public health

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Katherine Smith
Katherine Smith

Policy & Politics talking public health in Milan last month with Editorial Advisory Board member Katherine Smith

In a session jointly sponsored by Policy & Politics and the University of Glasgow Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, leading international experts explored how public health professionals perceive the role of the alcohol, tobacco and food industries in shaping public policy. . The international panel of speakers, appearing at the 8th European Public Health Conference which took place in Milan on 14-17 October was chaired by Professor Oliver Razum, Dean of the School of Public Health at Bielefeld University, Germany. It included Professor Nicholas Freudenberg of City University New York, Dr Lori Dorfman from the Berkeley Media Studies Group and the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, Dr Benjamin Hawkins from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Dr Heide Weishaar from the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow and Policy & Politics’ Editorial Advisory Board member Dr Kat Smith from the Global Public Health Unit, University of Edinburgh.   The session was organised by Heide and Kat along with Dr Shona Hilton of the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow. This blog sums up the issues discussed and sets out an agenda for future research in this area.

Tobacco, alcohol and processed food industries – Why are they viewed so differently?
Tobacco, alcohol and processed food industries – Why are they viewed so differently?

One of the few indisputable truths in life is that we will all, eventually, die but what we will die of, and at what age, is changing across the world, with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) increasingly accounting for excessive morbidity and mortality burdens. The growing prevalence of NCDs is triggering substantial policy concern, evident, for example, in the 2011 UN high level meeting on NCDs. Yet, it is clear there are very different ways of thinking about this ‘epidemiological transition’: it has been framed, on the one hand, as a consequence of the choices that individuals make and, on the other, as a consequence of the strategies Continue reading →