Trump that: the failure and farce of American politics

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Matthew Flinders

By Matthew Flinders

There is something very odd and bizarrely impressive about Donald Trump’s approach to democratic politics: it is quite obviously undemocratic. Indeed, if anything, his campaign is fueled by anti-political sentiment and populist slogans. It’s strong stuff. So strong that it deserves to be recognized in the form of a new political ideology: “Trump-ism” Eponymous…and yet also synonymous with the failure and farce of American politics. I’ve tried so hard not to write a piece about “you know who” Trump. I really have! It’s just too obvious and to some extent just too easy but as his apparent popularity in the United States grows so does my concern about who might actually hold the most powerful political office on the planet.

But in many ways my concern has nothing to do with partisanship, less to do with politics and everything to do with democracy.

I don’t care what party Mr Trump belongs to, I know that politics is a worldly art, but it strikes me that Donald is not democratic. Continue reading →

Over-blamed and over-responsibilised: elected actors in network governance

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Daniel Kübler, Karin Hasler, Anna Christmann & Frank Marcinkowski
by Daniel Kübler, Karin Hasler, Anna Christmann & Frank Marcinkowski

Many countries across the globe have seen an increasing involvement of non-state actors in public policies. Scholars have used the term of network governance to describe this phenomenon. In democracies, such networks pose challenges to the democratic legitimacy of public policies. How can citizens control non-state actors given that they cannot be held accountable via elections? Previous research on the topic has mostly focused on institutional aspects of ensuring democratic accountability of governance networks. Our recent Policy & Politics article entitled ‘Over-responsibilised and over-blamed: elected actors in media reporting on network governance’ shows that – beyond institutional mechanisms – the media play an important and independent role for holding policy actors accountable to the public, whether they are elected or not.

Empirically, we examine policy-making processes in big European city regions, where network governance is widespread and usually includes a wide array of policy actors. Are non-elected actors held accountable in the media as much as elected actors and do the media report adequately upon them? To verify these questions we examined 1200 news articles from 12 different newspapers in eight big cities in four European countries (Berlin, Stuttgart, Zurich, Berne, Birmingham, London, Paris and Lyon). We looked at the public accountability of different types of actors involved in governance networks: how visible are they in the media and to what extent are they held responsible for policy success or failure? We were interested whether the media simply informs the public or whether some actors are more interesting to the media than others (media logic). Continue reading →

Policy & Politics event in the US: sponsored panel on Ambiguity and Crisis: Disasters, Governance and Social Risk

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Nikos Zarariadis
Nikos Zarariadis

Policy & Politics sponsored an international symposium on Ambiguity and Crisis: Disasters, Governance and Social Risk in February 2016 convened by Editorial Advisory Board member Professor Nikolaos Zahariadis from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, US (pictured below) and Professor Tom Birkland  from North Carolina State University, US. You can read more about it in their article below.

While ambiguity is a fact of public life, scholarship on its implications for public policy is not yet well developed. The gap is particularly deep during periods of crisis because of rapid and turbulent change and the lack of adequate information and limited information processing capacities. We have a good understanding of the strategic use of ambiguity but do not fully comprehend its implications for creating winners and losers in public policy.

On February 28, 2016, Tom Birkland and Nikolaos Zahariadis convened a two-day symposium on ambiguity and its effects during crises. The symposium explored the implications of ambiguity on policy making as conceptualized through the multiple streams approach (MSA) during man-made crises and natural disasters. The approach draws inspiration from March and Olsen’s garbage can model of organizational choice and John Kingdon’s agenda setting framework. MSA contends there is a “right” (and “wrong”) time to propose solutions to pressing public problems. The likelihood of any one idea becoming official government policy has as much to do with when Continue reading →

Create Social Wealth Funds! It’s Time To Halt The Great Public Asset Boot Sale

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Stewart Lansley
Stewart Lansley

Britain’s public assets are now the subject of a giant boot sale. The great rolling privatisation juggernaut not only includes the £4bn Green Investment Bank, and the bailed-out Lloyds Bank but is now eyeing up assets like Channel 4 and the Met Office. The government hopes that together they will deliver £32bn in revenue this year alone from the sell-off.

Privatisation was originally sold as the route to Mrs Thatcher’s much vaunted ‘popular capitalism’. Yet shares bought by the public through privatisation have mostly been sold immediately. Far from spreading wealth, decades of sell-offs have merely skewed the economy even more heavily in favour of a few private owners helping to fuel Britain’s widening wealth and income gap.

No longer able to claim it will spread popular capitalism – always a myth – the government has a new defence: sales will help pay down the deficit. Yet it makes little sense to use long term capital assets to finance a temporary revenue gap. Continue reading →

Dr Claire Dunlop on policy learning and policy failure

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Dr Claire Dunlop talks about her motivation for editing a special issue on policy learning and policy failure, publishing January 2017, and why her subject is so important.

Professor R.A.W. Rhodes talks about the journal Policy & Politics

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Professor R.A.W. Rhodes talks about the journal Policy & Politics at the Political Studies Association conference in Brighton earlier this week.

Policy & Politics at the Political Studies Association conference talking about how to get published

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Sarah Ayres
Sarah Ayres

by Sarah Ayres, Co-editor, Policy & Politics

At Policy & Politics, we are passionate about ensuring that all of our published research is accessible, relevant and interesting for a broad range of readers worldwide. We are painfully aware of the huge proportion of research in general that is published in obscure outlets and read by very few people. This is why we invest heavily in promoting our content via our blog, our associates at Discover Society, LSE Public Policy and The Conversation and our social media channels. We’re so serious about this that we now have more twitter followers than any other international journal in the discipline!

In this blogpost, I’ve drawn on my experience of editing Policy & Politics for the last 4 years to set out a few golden rules to remember when submitting, although some of my points are relevant to getting published in academic journals more broadly. I should say these have been arrived at by looking at some of the most common reasons for rejection recently and by contrast, some of the papers which received most media and public attention.

Here are my 6 best tips: Continue reading →

Devolution to English cities is not sustainable without greater transparency and legitimacy in decision making

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Sarah Ayres
Sarah Ayres

by Sarah Ayres, Chair, Political Studies Research Commission, Examine the role of ‘informal governance’ on devolution to England’s cities

That is the conclusion of the Political Studies Association’s Research Commission to examine the role of ‘informal governance’ on devolution to England’s cities. The Commission is chaired by Dr Sarah Ayres (University of Bristol), Board Member of the Regional Studies Association and Co-editor of Policy & Politics and has involved the following Commissioners – Paul Buddery (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), Dr Jo Casebourne (Institute for Government), Tessa Coombes (University of Bristol), Ed Cox (Institute for Public Policy Research) and Mark Sandford (House of Commons Library).

The Commission is launching its report at a round table event at the Institute for Government on 3rd March 2016. The report offers some reflections on the process of decision making around the devolution deals to date. It draws on the shared learning and experiences of key actors involved to identify elements that have worked well and also potential areas for improvement. It concludes that the devolution agenda offers a real opportunity to empower local areas, boost economic productivity and improve public services. Yet, there is a danger that the initiative will falter in the absence of greater clarity around process and enhanced local ownership of decision making. Continue reading →

Same Sex Marriage and the Church, by Rev. Richard Coles

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Tessa Coombes
Tessa Coombes

by Tessa Coombes, University of Bristol

The Reverend Richard Coles of Radio 4 and ‘The Communards’ fame, presented this year’s Policy and Politics Annual Lecture, the 21st in the series. The theme of the lecture was same sex marriage and the church, delivered by the Reverend as a ‘ramble down memory lane’ and very much part of his own personal life story.

The lecture was, by turns, amusing, informative and challenging as well as saddening. It veered from funny anecdotes to tales of tragedy; from personal life events to big questions of principle. Overall it was a brilliant piece of oratory with just the right level of information and challenge, as well as being more than sufficiently thought provoking.

2016 Annual Lecture audience (smaller)
Richard addresses the crowd

Richard’s life story is well documented in his autobiography “Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went from Pop to Pulpit” published in 2014. It’s a colourful story of a young gay man from middle England making his way to London and becoming part of an ‘alternative gay culture’. In his presentation he described London in the 1980s as a polarized city: a place where Thatcher and Livingstone epitomized the ‘twin poles of values in the battlefield of London”. He saw it as a city where post-punk democratization was evident and an alternative gay culture was emerging, one with a ‘hard-left’ basis and a tribal culture, with a political common purpose. He told us about his involvement with the lesbian and gay support for the striking miners of South Wales, recently depicted in the film ‘Pride’. He describes the mid 1980s as a time of experimentation, creativity and excitement, when he found himself surrounded by a small group of people that came together to epitomize a significant cultural and political moment in gay history. Continue reading →

Policy & Politics 2016 best article prizes announced!

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We are delighted to announce the 2016 prizes for award winning papers published in Policy & Politics in 2015.

The winner of the Ken Young prize for the best paper overall was awarded to Michael Howlett, Ishani Mukherjee & Jun Jie Woo for their 2015 article entitled ‘From tools to toolkits in policy design studies: the new design orientation towards policy formulation research’, Policy & Politics, 43 (2), 291-311(21).

The winner of the Bleddyn Davies prize for the best early career paper was awarded to Owen Corrigan for his 2015 article entitled ‘Conditionality of legal status and immigrant occupational attainment in Western Europe’, Policy & Politics, 43 (2), 181-202(22).

Brief critiques of the winning articles follow, written by Co-Editor Felicity Matthews in celebration of their contribution. Continue reading →