A Failure of Multiculturalism? Providing Support for those who Become Infertile Following Cancer Treatment

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Karl Atkin
Karl Atkin

Karl Atkin and Sangeeta Chattoo discuss their most recent paper in Policy & Politics, Clinical encounters and culturally competent practice

A recent Guardian Roundtable in association with the British Academy identified the increasingly ethnically diverse nature of British society, while acknowledging the contested nature of multiculturalism. Such debates are now a regular occurrence as the UK struggles to accommodate what Bhiku Parekh called back in 2000 a ‘community of communities’. The prime minster, David Cameron, no supporter of multiculturalism, has criticised the passive tolerance of different cultural values, which he sees as potentially undermining the nation’s collectively agreed sense of British-ness. Nor is this an isolated view and others go as far as to attribute the failure of multiculturalism to minority ethnic Continue reading →

Policy & Politics @ Thinking Futures

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As part of Thinking Futures, the Annual Festival of Social Sciences at the University of Bristol, Policy & Politics supported a session called ‘nudge and the state’. Professor Alex Marsh from the University of Bristol, and Dr Fiona Spotswood, from the University of the West of England, Bristol, debated the rights and wrongs of using nudge in public policy. Alex has posted a blog on the session, which you can read here.

Nudge has created considerable debate in both academic and policy circles. We are delighted to be able to make one of our articles on the subject free this month. In 2013 Peter John wrote on the subject in our Special Issue that year. Readers of that article might also like to see Will Legget’s piece from 2014.

Where are the Women?

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Karen Miller and Duncan McTavish
Karen Miller and Duncan McTavish

Karen Miller and Duncan McTavish from Glasgow Caledonian University discuss their latest article for Policy & Politics, ‘Representative Bureaucracy‘. 

As we approach the UK General Election in May 2015, and in 2018 the centennial anniversary of the suffragettes’ struggle, the absence of women in politics and public life is stark. Political and public institutions which formulate and implement equality policies often lack representation of minorities at the senior echelons of power. Our question of where are the women belies a more fundamental question of how can policies, which are formulated with objectives to achieve equality, be formulated by decision makers Continue reading →

Public Service Mutuals: An Effective Partnership or Political Challenge?

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Richard Hazenberg and Kelly Hall
Richard Hazenberg and Kelly Hall

Richard Hazenberg and Kelly Hall discuss their recent article in Policy & Politics, Public service mutuals: towards a theoretical understanding of the spin-out process.

Over the last few decades, successive UK governments have encouraged the transfer of local authority staff into new employee-owned mutual organisations (also known as ‘spin-outs’). These spin-outs often take the organisational form of social enterprises that continue to deliver public services, but as self-reliant and independent organisations. Policy-makers are hoping that by encouraging public sector workers to be more entrepreneurial, public services can become more innovative, efficient and responsive to the needs of those who use them. The ultimate aim of this policy is to improve services at the same time as making savings to the public purse. Continue reading →

Learning to Love Democracy: A Note to William Hague

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Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders

Originally posted on November 5th on the Oxford University Press blog.

British politics is currently located in the eye of a constitutional storm. The Scottish independence referendum shook the political system and William Hague has been tasked with somehow re-connecting the pieces of a constitutional jigsaw that – if we are honest – have not fitted together for some time. In this note Matthew Flinders encourages the Leader of the House to think the unthinkable and to put ‘the demos’ back into democracy when thinking about how to breath new life into politics.

Dear William (if I may),

I do hope the Prime Minister gave you at least a few minutes warning before announcing that you would be chairing a committee on the future constitutional settlement of the UK. Could you have ever hoped for a more exciting little project Continue reading →

Targets Can Enhance the Impact of Partnership-Working on Social Outcomes

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Rhys Andrews
Rhys Andrews

by Rhys Andrews, James Downe, and Valeria Guarneros-Meza, Cardiff University, UK

Targets for public service improvement are frequently derided as heavy-handed, top-down mechanisms that have dysfunctional and potentially disastrous effects on organizational behaviour. Yet, there is growing statistical evidence to suggest that targets can actually prompt public organizations to deliver improved service quality and responsiveness. While much of this research on targets has focused on relatively narrow public service outcomes, such as hospital waiting times or examination results, Continue reading →

Revisiting the ‘English Question’ Post the Scottish Independence Referendum

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Ayresby Sarah Ayres, Reader in Public Policy and Governance, University of Bristol

Despite growing recognition across the major political parties that the territorial system of government in England is in need of change, there remains no clear and shared imagery on how England should be governed within a devolved UK. Recent changes to the political and economic landscape of the UK, especially those arising from the economic crisis and the Scottish referendum result, have made it more vital than ever before to address the English Question in a cohesive manner. Enhanced devolution in England’s territories is a potential solution to the English Question. I make three central claims about what needs to happen if devolution in England is to Continue reading →

Women are worse affected by the crisis and changes to pensions

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Liam Foster
Liam Foster

Liam Foster gives us an insights into his latest article in Policy & Politics on the impact of the latest pension reforms on women. Liam is from the University of Sheffield, UK.

The global economic and financial circumstances since the summer of 2007 are without precedent in post-war history. The resultant higher unemployment, lower growth, increasing national debt and financial market volatility have made it harder to deliver on pension promises and demonstrated serious weaknesses in the design of many pension schemes and their long-term sustainability. The crisis has enhanced existing challenges as well as creating new ones. This has accelerated the momentum of change in relation to pensions in a number of EU countries. Recent strategies to deal with pension challenges have differed with some countries extending help to safeguard private schemes while, in others, pension Continue reading →

Profound policy change as messy, complex and multi-directional: UK Energy Policy in Transition

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Caroline Kuzemko
Caroline Kuzemko

Caroline Kuzemko, from the University of Exeter, discusses her article Measuring and explaining policy paradigm change: the case of UK energy policy written with Florian Kern and Catherine Mitchell, which is published in the latest edition of Policy & Politics.

Across the social sciences a great many scholars are engaged in trying to understand policy and institutional change – not least within political science. One reason for mounting interest in change has been the growing awareness of anthropogenic climate change, of continued growth in global emissions and of what kinds of (varied) implications this might have for societies around the world.  Energy has received a great deal of attention, not least because current (fossil fuel) systems are responsible for high percentages of emissions Continue reading →

Policy & Politics October 2014 issue

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42_4TOCThe October 2014 issue of Policy & Politics is now available in print and for download. The issue is an eclectic mix of the latest research and analysis covering a range of important policy process and analysis issues.

Rhys Andrews, James Downe and Valeria Guarneros-Meza open the issue with an analysis of the impact of Local Area Agreements on social cohesion. They find that Local Strategic Partnerships with a Local Area Agreement for social cohesion experienced a better rate of improvement in community cohesiveness than those without, and that tougher targets resulted in stronger improvement. Hooking in to wider debates about target and public service performance, they conclude that ‘the evidence we present seems to indicate that performance contracts with tough targets for improving outcomes may be an especially effective way of making agencies responsible for dealing with wicked problems work together’.

John Hudson and Bo-Yung Kim explore policy transfer through interviews with officials in South Korea. Their analysis, drawing on notions of ‘policy tourism’, suggests that ‘lesson drawing’ and ‘policy transfer’ are labels that are perhaps too strong for what happens in practice. Rather, it may be more apposite to instead consider the existence of a less direct and more general process of ‘policy learning’.

Drawing on literature pertaining to policy paradigms, Florian Kern, Caroline Kuzemko and Catherine Mitchell analyse policy change in the energy sector. Their paper offers a critique of institutionalist approaches, and they argue that researchers might benefit from expanding their focus to include insights from the sociotechnical transitions literature to better account for paradigm change.

Karen Johnston Miller and Duncan McTavish focus on representative bureaucracy, and particularly the representation of women. Using a four-fold typology of representative bureaucracy, they put forward a set of institutional strategies for the representation of women in public bureaucracies.

A gendered analysis is also constructed by Liam Foster. His paper suggests the need to put women at the centre of discussions about pension provision, especially in a context of financial and economic crisis.

A thought-provoking contribution on Sign Language Peoples (SLPs) is offered by Sarah Batterbury. This piece uses a perspective that incorporates ‘language justice’ within social justice, and calls for a democratisation of the policy process in order to give better outcomes for this group.

Karl Atkin, Sangeeta Chattoo and Marilyn Crawshaw consider culturally competent care. Their article, informed by literature on cultural competence, ethnic identity, and the social consequences of cancer and infertility, offers a nuanced understanding of the interactions of health care professional and patients, and is highly relevant to practice.

Neil Lunt, Daniel Horsfall, Richard Smith, Mark Exworthy, Johanna Hanefeld, and Russell Mannion examine the issue of medical tourism. In particular, they focus on three ‘myths’ by exploring primary and secondary data on the subject.

In the coming weeks we will be posting blogs on the above articles from the authors themselves.