April 2014 Special Issue: Perspectives on depoliticisation and repoliticisation

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Policy and Politics coverThe April issue of Policy & Politics is a special issue: Perspectives on depoliticisation and repoliticisation. It is available free online until the 31 May 2014.

This Special Issue of the journal centres on the issue of depoliticisation – ‘the narrowing of the boundaries of democratic politics’, according to Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood in the opening article. In that, and the second paper in the issue, they clear the ground upon which the others build, and argue for a broader, multifaceted approach to depoliticisation than has hitherto been the case. The other authors in the issue take up the challenge and offer a revealing set of empirical and theoretical contributions.

Paul Fawcett and David Marsh draw on literatures related to meta-governance and political participation, and conclude in their analysis that there is evidence for both depoliticisation and repoliticisation. Peter Burnham explores depoliticisation with reference to capitalist development and crisis management. He argues that the liberal-capitalist state is threatened by the politicisation of social relations. Using the North Atlantic and European debt crises, Bob Jessop explores the contours of politicisation, depoliticisation, and repoliticisation, arguing that matters such as the imposition of technocratic government can be understood with reference to these processes. Emma Ann Foster, Peter Kerr, and Christopher Byrne  link depoliticisation to Foucauldian notions of governmentality. They argue that depoliticisation can be interpreted as a means to further extend the neo-liberalisation of state apparatus. Stephen Bates, Laura Jenkins, and Fran Amery explore depoliticisation and repoliticisation within the context of assisted reproductive technologies. Their contribution raises issues around state-society relations. In relation to energy policy, Caroline Kuzemko tracks the depoliticisation and repoliticisation of energy policy since the 1980s. She links up the policy issue of energy and the potent language of security to offer a critique of the framing of the debate. Ross Beveridge and Matthias Naumann use a case study of the remunicipalisation of the Berlin water company to think through strategies of repoliticisation. Based in urban politics, this article implies continuing space for political agency.

David Sweeting, Associate Editor of Policy & Politics

Politics to reconnect communities

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Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders

By Matthew Flinders

Originally posted on the OUP blog on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2014

Why does art and culture matter in the twenty-first century? What does it actually deliver in terms of social benefits? An innovative new participatory arts project in South Yorkshire is examining the ‘politics of art’ and the ‘art of politics’ from a number of new angles.

“The general value of arts and culture to society has long been assumed,” a recent report from the Arts Council acknowledges, “while the specifics have just as long been debated.” It is this focus on ‘the specifics’ that is most interesting because in times of relative prosperity there was little pressure from neither public nor private funders to demonstrate the broader social impact or relevance of the arts. In times of austerity, however, the situation is very different. A focus on the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) risks eviscerating the funding for the arts and humanities unless these more creative and less tangible intellectual pursuits can demonstrate their clear social value. The vocabulary of ‘social return’, ‘intellectual productive capacity’, ‘economic generation’ may well grate against the traditional values and assumptions of the arts and culture community but it is a shadow that cannot be ignored.

The publication of The Impact of the Social Sciences (Sage, 2014) provides more than a sophisticated analysis of the value of the social sciences across a range of economic, cultural, and civic dimensions. It provides a political treatise and a strategic piece of evidence-based leverage that may play an important role in future debates over the distribution of diminishing public funds. I have no doubt that the impact of the arts and humanities is equally significant. But the problem is that the systematic creation of an evidence base remains embryonic. My personal belief that the arts and humanities are educationally critical is, in many quarters, meaningless without demonstrable evidence to support these beliefs. The methodological and epistemological challenges of delivering that research are clearly significant but as the Arts Council emphasizes ‘it is something that arts and culture organizations will have to do in order to secure funding from both public and private sources’.

As a political scientist I have always been fascinated with the relationship between art and politics. Though heretical to suggest to the arts community, I have often thought that the role of the professional politician and the professional artist (indeed, with the amateur politician and the amateur artist) were more similar than was often acknowledged. Both seek to express values and visions, to inspire hope and disgust, and both wish to present a message. It is only the medium through which that message is presented that differs (and relationships of co-option, patronage, and dependency are common between these professions). But having (crudely) established a relationship between art and politics, could it be that the true value of the arts lies not in how it responds to the needs of the economy but in how it responds to the rise of ‘disaffected democrats’ and the constellation of concerns that come together in the ‘why we hate politics’ narrative?

Parliament_at_Sunset
In a time of increasing social anomie and political disengagement, especially amongst the young and the poor, can participatory arts projects provide a way of reconnecting communities?

François Matarasso’s Use or Ornament (1997) provides one of the most systematic explorations of this question and concluded that “one of the most important outcomes of [the public’s] involvement in the arts was finding their own voice, or perhaps, the courage to use it.” More recently, the New Economics Foundation’s report Diversity and Integration (2013) suggested that young people who participated in arts programmes were more likely to see themselves as “holding the potential to do anything I want to do” and being “able to influence a group of people to get things done.” Other studies tentatively offer similarly positive conclusions but with little analytical depth in terms of identifying between political reconnection, civic reconnection or personal reconnection (in terms of personal understanding, confidence and aspiration). To return to the Arts Council’s recent report – The Wider Benefits of Art and Culture to Society – the existing research base is light on ‘the specifics’.

It is for exactly this reason that the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics has joined forces with ‘Art in the Park’ as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ‘Civic Value’ programme. Young people from all across South Yorkshire will be brought together to participate in an eight week arts project that uses music, film making, dance, writing, painting or whatever medium the young people select to explore social and political issues. Artists are embedded in the research and current and former politicians can be brought into the project to facilitate sessions if that is something the young people request. Surveys, focus groups, and interviews will capture how participating in the project affects political attitudes and understandings – positive, negative, political, civic, or personal – with the aim being able to answer if the arts can breathe life back into politics and reconnect communities. Now that really would be a wider benefit for society.

Matthew Flinders is Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield and also Visiting Distinguished Professor in Governance and Public Policy at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is the author of Defending Politics (2012). He was recently a winner in the ‘This is Democracy’ International Photography Competition – but his wife now claims she took the picture. Malaika Cunningham is the Research Officer for the project discussed in this article.

How to solve the paradoxes of politics? A response to David Blunkett

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Matt Wood
Matt Wood

Originally published on the Bernard Crick Centre blog (http://www.crickcentre.org/) on 28 March.

David Blunkett offers some compelling reasons why we should defend our traditional democratic institutions. But are they increasingly distant compared to people’s everyday social and political lives? Matt Wood suggests we need to investigate new forms of participation and ‘everyday politics’ to address the paradoxes of disengagement.

David Blunkett’s Policy & Politics lecture (you can download the full text from this blog post) is a lucid and reflective statement on many of the paradoxes that we find in contemporary politics. As has become somewhat of a mantra for our times in academic circles, he notes that many British people are incredibly disillusioned with and disengaged from traditional democratic institutions. But he goes a bit further than this, noting that people make unrealistic and contradictory demands of government and that these put politicians in an unenviable position of having to ‘please all of the people all of the time’. People want conviction politicians like Tony Benn or Margaret Thatcher, but they also want an end to ‘Punch and Judy’ politics and ‘common sense’ governing where the solutions, apparently, everyone agrees on. This makes things doubly difficult for addressing disengagement because the causes of the problem are often as contradictory and confusing as the various solutions.

What should be done, then? For Blunkett, the first point is not to resort to extremism. He argues passionately that as a society we should resist the temptations of David Graeber’s ‘anarcho-populism’ and the politics of Russell Brand. Simply ‘taking to the streets’ will be destructive and regressive, as any glance at the history of revolutionary politics tells us. Instead, we should all try and be more understanding and less hateful of politics and politicians. Politics, Blunkett notes, is a deeply civilizing and uplifting practice. Politics may not be perfect, but has been necessary to achieve some of the great social advances of the twentieth century (and hopefully will be the same in the twenty-first century). As he rightly notes, establishing and maintaining those formal political institutions that we in Britain take for granted is critically important for consolidating the gains made in the Arab Spring and to avoid the horrific bloodshed in countries like Syria. Blunkett mentions Bernard Crick’s famous book ‘In Defence of Politics’ as a brilliant statement of precisely this point, and Matthew Flinders’ update of the book, ‘Defending Politics’, makes a similar argument for the twenty-first century. The media, the market and meretricious, Brand-esque figures are in danger of doing down the social, economic and cultural benefits that we gain from our stable Parliamentary democracy, despite all its faults.

Is it enough though simply to defend the old system when, as Blunkett mentions towards the end of his speech, people are still often interested and engaged in political issues, they just might act on that interest in different ways? In fact, as a lot of current research shows, we may be seeing a real sea-change in how people engage with and try to solve what they see as the big political issues. Political scientists have a number of words for this type of behaviour, but a good way of summing it up is the term ‘everyday politics’. People doing everyday politics know all the values Crick defended are important, but they also know that new technology can be utilised to drive change outside the formal system. They do politics when they like, where they like and how they like. This might be on the internet, through a local community project, a charity, or boycotting unethical corporate brands (some people see boycotting the BBC by not buying a TV as a political statement!). These people might vote occasionally, when they get time out of their busy lives, but they don’t see voting as the best way to get things done. They’re similarly turned off by party politics, which strikes them as too narrow or obsessed with media spin, or by Parliament, which seems dispiritingly anodyne and idiosyncratically outdated.

There are, of course, a number of paradoxes and inconsistencies here as well. People might ‘act locally and think globally’, but does that really make any difference? Everyday politics is often sporadic, disorganised and consumer-driven. While people might think they can do more by acting ‘closer to home’ rather than with the system, are we in danger of throwing the democratic baby out with our institutional bathwater? Would it really be better if the NHS was organised on a part-time ‘do-it-yourself’ basis? We think not. Traditional democratic institutions clearly do, and should have a place, as Blunkett makes clear. What we do think is these new forms of participation aren’t going to go away soon, and that simply defending the old system isn’t necessarily enough if we’re going to improve politics for the twenty-first century.

The challenge for us at the Crick Centre as we embark on an exciting programme of research is delving into how people live their political lives in the twenty-first century. While there’s already a lot of research out there on alternative forms of participation, we think there needs to be more into how and why there is a disconnection between people’s increasingly busy and congested everyday lives and the slow, churning world of ‘big-P’ Politics. Once we understand this better, we can begin to address how the institutions we should cherish (our national and regional parliaments, political parties and local councils) can evolve and adapt to our paradoxical political world.

Matt is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield Department of Politics, and Deputy Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics. He is currently researching ‘everyday politics’ and solutions to political disengagement in advanced liberal democracies.

Using randomised controlled trials to evaluate public service delivery: how best to attract families to Sure Start?

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Sarah Cotterill, Peter John and Alice Moseley
Sarah Cotterill, Peter John and Alice Moseley

Sarah Cotterill, University of Manchester, Peter John, University College London and Alice Moseley, University of Exeter, discuss their article, ‘Does mobilisation increase family engagement with an early childhood intervention programme? A randomised controlled trial’ which was published in Policy & Politics in 2013, and is available free during April 2014.

Sure Start services are popular with families in the UK, but not all families who might benefit choose to attend. Two methods which are commonly used to promote Sure Start are leaflets and door-to-door visits. Both methods are known to be effective in other contexts, such as mobilizing citizens to vote or encouraging them to recycle, but, prior to our study, there was no evidence of their effectiveness in promoting attendance at local services. Working in partnership with a local authority provider of Sure Start services, we set out to test whether a leaflet about Sure Start or a door-to-door visit from an outreach worker are persuasive methods of attracting families to attend Sure Start centres.

We used a randomised controlled trial (RCT), which is fairly novel in research on public services, yet has the potential to provide a convincing estimate of the effect of policy interventions. Using the register of births, we identified children born in the previous eighteen months, whose families had not yet attended Sure Start. We randomly assigned families to one of three conditions: a leaflet about Sure Start, a visit from an outreach worker, or a control group that received no special treatment. Over several weeks we measured the outcome, by recording whether or not the families attended their local Sure Start centre. We compared attendance by families in the three groups to see whether attendance differed across the different interventions. The advantage of random assignment is that membership of the treatment and control groups are very similar in all respects. Therefore, any differences in observed outcomes between the groups can reasonably be attributed to the intervention rather than any other cause. We found that the brief doorstep visits and leaflets implemented in this study were not a worthwhile way of promoting Sure Start to families who are not already engaged: although we cannot rule out a small effect, the results of the visits and leaflets were not significantly different from the effect of the usual service.

We believe that RCTs could usefully be employed much more extensively in the evaluation of public services. Find out more from our book, Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, in which we describe the RCT method and offer examples of its use in testing various interventions to promote civic behaviour such as recycling, charitable giving and organ donation.

‘Does mobilisation increase family engagement with an early childhood intervention programme? A randomised controlled trial’ is available free on Ingenta during April 2014.

Policy & Politics Annual Lecture 2014: Bringing Politics Alive: Engaging the Disengaged in the 21st Century

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David BlunkettOn 27th March 2014 David Blunkett MP visited the University of Bristol to give the annual Policy & Politics lecture. To get a flavour of what was a fascinating evening, take a look at the short film we have produced to capture the event.

David also gave us the text of his talk beforehand. As you might expect, he didn’t stick entirely to script. He also took questions from the audience and via Twitter.

The paradox of security regulation: public protection versus normative legitimation

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Adam White
Adam White

Adam White, University of York, discusses his article, written with Martin Smith – The paradox of security regulation: public protection versus normative legitimation – available in issue 42.3 of Policy & Politics.

The UK private security industry has been playing an interesting and tricky hand of late. On one side, the Coalition government has presented it with huge opportunities for growth by simultaneously slashing police budgets and promoting outsourcing. On the other side, it has been prevented from taking full advantage of these opportunities because of its rather shady reputation – a problem intensified by recent high profile scandals, from the 2012 Olympics security debacle to overcharging the Home Office on electronic tagging contacts. 

One central way in which the industry has been playing this hand has been to throw down the regulation card. The industry has been using statutory regulation to cover itself in the reassuring images and symbols of the state, thereby cleaning up its shady image to a certain degree and putting itself in the position of being able to take full advantage of any opportunities coming its way.

In this article, we call this ‘normative legitimation’: the process through which the private security industry seeks to legitimate its activities to sceptical citizen-consumers by appealing to the state-centric norms which permeate the domestic security sector. We argue that this process creates an unusual and interesting regulatory politics. The more the state introduces regulation to protect the public from the industry, the more the state (consciously and unconsciously) legitimates the industry and allows it to come into further contact with the public.

After a brief tour through the history of liberal discourse and politics (where security becomes connected to the state), the article turns to the paradox of security regulation in postwar Britain. This article (we hope) will appeal to anyone interested in how the private security industry is positioning itself within today’s rapidly changing security landscape.

The paradox of security regulation: public protection versus normative legitimation is available on Ingenta.

How do you measure public confidence in public services?

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Richard Cowell and James Downe
Richard Cowell and James Downe

Richard Cowell and James Downe from Cardiff University discuss their article on the intricacies of measuring public confidence in public services. ‘Public confidence and public services: it matters what you measure’ (Policy and Politics 40(1)) is available free on Ingenta until 31 March 2014.

The belief that the public should have confidence in their public institutions is an enduring societal concern, yet as an outcome it seems increasingly elusive. One survey after another suggests continual public disaffection with politicians and politics. While governments across the political spectrum express concern about declining levels of confidence in our public institutions, and lay claim to actions to address it, they seem to be having little impact.

Our paper focuses on one of the most intuitive mechanisms by which governments might lift public confidence – by improving public services. Here we find a puzzle that official measures such as statutory performance indicators, inspection reports and user satisfaction surveys showed steady improvement in public services between 2001 and 2008 but, counter-intuitively, levels of public confidence declined.

Our argument was that if this elusive relationship between public services and public confidence was ever going to reveal itself, then the issue of measurement itself needed careful scrutiny i.e. does it matter what you measure? One immediate problem is that the public have a fragmentary knowledge of government services. Moreover, there are multiple and competing ways of measuring the quality of services – such as efficiency and value for money, or accessibility and quality – not all appreciated equally by all sections of society. The same fuzziness clouds concepts of confidence and trust. Confidence in public institutions may be based on evidence from using public services or on the sense of emotional attachment one feels towards the service provider. Public perceptions about services also come entangled in wider concerns about the honesty and responsiveness of public institutions, both of staff and the politicians to whom they are accountable.

Our approach used the (then) burgeoning piles of data about local government and its services to test statistically the performance-public confidence link. Some of the measures came from our own survey of local government managers, of whom we asked (i) the extent to which they thought services provided by their local council had improved and (ii) whether they believed that local people had a high level of confidence in their authority. Other measures came from external assessments of changes in performance and public confidence for each local authority.

Our analysis confirmed the paradoxical tendency observed at national level, in that improved local services was associated with declining public satisfaction with the way that councils run things. We also found that local managers – perhaps wisely – tended not to rely solely on official measures of service performance to judge how their council is doing, as the wider set of measures that managers used exhibited a slightly stronger and positive relationship with public confidence. From this we concluded that the idea of a relationship between service quality and public confidence should not be abandoned, but that the measures needed further thought.

Our analysis was conducted between 2008 and 2009, and the storms that have since blown across the UK and other democratic states give strong reason for an intensified focus on the public services/public confidence nexus.

Deep cuts in public spending have unfolded simultaneously with marked shifts in government priorities and new political narratives. For governments, being seen to be in control of public finances is now presented as a key determinant of public confidence, with efficiency suddenly pre-eminent among the basket of measures by which ‘performance’ might be measured. The May 2010 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government has sought to manage tensions between budget cuts and service quality through ‘the big society’ and ‘localism’, with the expectation that local communities can become more responsible for service provision (and less likely to place responsibility for any shortcomings on national government). It matters, we would argue, that researchers can trace these shifting policy theories and their outcomes.

We suggested developing multiple indicators alongside in-depth qualitative research to try and unpack what determines levels of public confidence. It is disappointing therefore that the coalition government also cut much of the data-gathering machinery that our research had utilised. Organisations with a keen interest in policy impact, such as the Audit Commission and the Standards Board for England, have been axed. The biennial Citizenship Survey, which gathered information on public participation activities and trust in government has been stopped as well as the regular survey of attitudes to standards in public life.

As our paper has shown, studying the relationship between service performance and public confidence is rarely likely to generate unambiguous good news, yet it matters for informed policy discussion that some measurements are made.

‘Public confidence and public services: it matters what you measure’ (Policy and Politics 40(1)) is available free on Ingenta until 31 March 2014.

Public Procurement in a Globalizing World

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Sangeeta Khorana
Sangeeta Khorana

Sangeeta Khorana and William Kerr discusses their article, Transforming Vietnam: a quest for improved efficiency and transparency in central government procurement, written with Nishikant Mishra (all from Aberystwyth University) in the latest issue of Policy & Politics

As the world becomes increasingly globalized and trade barriers to both goods and services decline through preferential trade agreements, one major aspect of economic activity remains closed, to a considerable degree, in most countries – government procurement. The continued isolation of government procurement processes is important because of the size and importance of government economic activity in national economic life. In most modern market economies, the proportion of gross domestic product comprised of government activity exceeds 30 percent and may range up to 50 percent. In some developing countries, the proportion attributable to government may be even higher. Excluding such large portions of economic activity from the benefits of trade liberalization may considerably inhibit economic growth and impede economic development.

There are many reasons why government procurement remains closed to international competition. It is often difficult for politicians to justify government expenditures on foreign products to taxpayers – even if those taxpayers are happy to purchase imports themselves. The question is also often asked by local suppliers to the government who are also taxpayers – “I pay taxes and you use that money to buy foreign products that compete with my products.” Politicians may also see procurement as a means to use public money to reward political supporters and as a means to buy votes. In the case of some goods and services, there may be a fear of losing local control or being dependent on foreign suppliers. Government procurement contracts can also offer considerable opportunities for garnering corruption income. Opening procurement contracts to foreign bidders often requires a higher level of transparency in the bidding process that makes it much more difficult for rent seekers to extract income through corrupt practices. As a result, the goods and services procured by governments are often the last major area of economic activity subjected to the pressure of foreign competition.

Widespread reservations about opening government procurement processes to foreign competition has also meant that arriving at an international agreement to liberalize government procurement has proved much more difficult that negotiating international trade agreements such as the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) or General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) – each with more than 150 signatory countries.

As a result, there is only a plurilateral international agreement on the liberalization of government procurement where countries can choose not to belong. The plurilateral agreement is the WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) which has not attracted a wide membership from the international community. Only 42 countries have chosen to join the GPA. Developing countries are conspicuous by their absence – only 6 have chosen to join.

In our article, Transforming Vietnam: a quest for improved efficiency and transparency in central government procurement, we use a cost benefit approach to discuss some of these issues. Vietnam joined the WTO in 2007 and was allowed observer status to the WTO GPA in December 2012. As a major and rapidly growing developing country considering joining the GPA, it would be a major coup for the liberalization of procurement as Vietnam might be an example to spur other developing countries to join. The decision to join the GPA, or not, has been a difficult one for Vietnam and its struggles with the question provides a fascinating case study that sheds considerable light on the questions that governments in developing countries face in considering membership to the WTO GPA.

Transforming Vietnam: a quest for improved efficiency and transparency in central government procurement is part of the Policy & Politics January 14 issue (volume 42, number 1) and is available on Ingenta.

Why do institutions fail?

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Sarah Spencer
Sarah Spencer

Sarah Spencer (Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford) discuss her article ‘Context, institution or accountability? Exploring the factors that shape the performance of national human rights and equality bodies‘, part of the new issue of Policy & Politics.

In recent months alone we need look no further than the Co-op bank, the UK Border Agency or Staffordshire hospital to find a systemic breakdown in performance, raising the question: why do institutions fail? Where failure is too harsh a judgement, we may nevertheless ask why we so regularly see a marked gap in the private and state sectors between public expectations and the outputs and outcomes that are achieved.

Is it an internal matter – a failure of leadership, poor management, or inadequate resources? If those factors play a part, do they merely reflect structural flaws in systems of regulation and accountability? Or should we be looking more to the external context: a hostile economic or political climate perhaps, or inflated public and media expectations which mean that the institution operates in an environment in which will inevitably and unfairly be seen to fail?

Teasing out the balance of factors that account for the performance of any institution is no easy matter where so many variables are at play and few impacts are measurable. It is necessary, however, if we are to avoid making simplistic assumptions that poor leadership is to blame, let’s say, or harsh budget cuts.

One set of institutions provides ripe territory for exploring these questions: statutory human rights and equality bodies. Britain’s troubled Equality and Human Rights Commission has not been alone in facing criticism of its performance since it was established in 2007: that of its counterparts in Northern Ireland and Ireland have likewise come under fire. The literature on the proliferating number of these bodies world wide, moreover, suggests the challenges they are facing, internally and externally, display some common themes.

Colin Harvey (Queen’s University, Belfast) and I attempt to throw light on this conundrum in ‘Context, institution or accountability? Exploring the factors that shape the performance of national human rights and equality bodies’. A comparative analysis of the six statutory human rights and (or) equality bodies in the UK and Ireland, in which we have both also served as Commissioners, draws on the experiences of 23 other informants who have been closely engaged in the work of these bodies alongside scrutiny of their statutes, secondary legislation and operational reports.

The establishment of these institutions over the past two decades coincided with a renewed confidence in arms’ length regulatory bodies using standard setting, monitoring and enforcement to improve the performance of others. The UN, Council of Europe and European Commission, within their respective mandates, encouraged the global expansion of such bodies, setting minimum standards of independence, accountability and mandate with which they should comply. Expectations in civil society often ran high in the early days, anticipating a step change in the protection of human rights and equality of opportunity. What happened next, the varying strengths (evident in many cases) but also the limitations in delivery require an explanation.

We found no single factor accounted for the performance of the six bodies in our study but differing combinations of positive and negative factors. Comparative analysis was revealing: for instance the more supportive political context in Scotland than that in Northern Ireland, and the accountability of the Scottish Human Rights Commission to the legislature rather than, as for the other bodies, to the executive. Institutional architecture, statutory duties, powers and resources differ markedly, as do the significance of relationships with the UN and European bodies on the one hand and civil society groups on the other.

Beyond the significance of each institution’s varying remit, powers, structure and resource constraints, leadership and effective management were found to be crucial factors, alongside the political acumen necessary to steer the ship through turbulent times. The institutions may take some comfort from the fact that it is those factors which are those most within their control.

Dr Sarah Spencer CBE
Senior Fellow
Centre on Migration, Policy and Society
University of Oxford
Sarah.spencer@compas.ox.ac.uk

‘Context, institution or accountability? Exploring the factors that shape the performance of national human rights and equality bodies‘, by Sarah Spencer and Colin Harvey, is part of the Policy & Politics January 14 issue (volume 42, number 1) and is available on Ingenta.

Water dripping on stone’? Industry lobbying and UK alcohol policy

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Ben Hawkins and Chris Holden
Ben Hawkins and Chris Holden

Ben Hawkins (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and Chris Holden (University of York) discuss their article ”Water dripping on stone’? Industry lobbying and UK alcohol policy’, part of the new issue of Policy & Politics.

Following the decision by the UK government in July 2013 to shelve plans for minimum unit pricing of alcohol (MUP), questions began to arise about the role and influence of David Cameron’s election strategist Lynton Crosby – who has worked for both the alcohol and tobacco industries – in the abandonment of a policy the government had committed to unequivocally in its 2012 alcohol strategy. The controversy surrounding Crosby was indicative of wider concerns amongst scholars and policy actors that the government had accorded too much influence to the alcohol industry. The previous New Labour government had also been widely criticised for its closeness to the alcohol industry. However, while Labour’s policy agenda was widely in line with industry preferences, the Coalition Government elevated the role of industry actors even further, institutionalising their involvement in the development and execution of policy through the Responsibility Deal Alcohol Network.

In contrast the Scottish National Party administration in Scotland was elected – initially in 2007 as a minority government and subsequently with an outright majority in 2011 – with a clear commitment to introduce MUP. Developments in Scotland represent a shift in UK alcohol policy from an almost exclusive focus on industry favoured measures with a weak evidence base towards interventions such as MUP which the international research consensus suggests is amongst the most likely to reduce harms, but which the majority of the alcohol industry oppose. Despite initial attempts to introduce MUP being voted down by the opposition MSPs in 2010, the measure was eventually passed by the Scottish Parliament in May 2012.

In the context of this highly contested and rapidly evolving policy debate, our article sought to examine the mechanisms through which alcohol industry actors engage in and attempt to influence policy debates. The alcohol industry consists not just of the producers and marketers of alcoholic beverages but the routes to market including pubs and nightclubs in the on-trade and off-licences, convenience stores and larger supermarket chains in the off-trade. We found that industry actors are involved at all stages of the policy process from agenda setting, through policy formulation and legislation, to implementation and evaluation. They seek to engage with a range of policy makers including MPs, MSPs, Ministers, civil servants and members of the public health and NGO community. Even members of the opposition are targeted, especially where a change of administration seems likely and there is potential to shape a future government’s policies from the outset.

Their modus operandi is to seek to establish long term relationships with key policy actors through a range of forums and channels including official policy consultations, party conferences, and All Party Parliamentary Groups on industry-related issues. Contacts are thus both formal and informal and initiated by individual corporations as well as their trade associations and social aspects organisations (e.g. The Portman Group). Many industry actors have extensive personal connections in government or employ outside consultancies and agencies who can provide these. Whilst smaller companies rely more heavily on trade associations and collective representation, larger companies may seek to represent their own interests where these are seen to deviate from the industry or sector more generally or where there is a perceived advantage from adopting a different approach (e.g. to be seen as a leader on a specific issue). All agreed though that the ability to present governments with a united front is a big advantage in pursuing a particular policy outcome.

Long term relationship building with policy makers has the effect not just of creating sustained alliances which can be used to pursue favourable regulation. More fundamentally, it creates the impression that industry actors are stakeholders in the policy making process; key partners who are part of the solution to alcohol related harms and who should have a place at the policy making table as a matter of course. The economic power of industry actors, their ability to provide local and national politicians with good news stories such as the opening of a new supermarket or photo opportunities at a local distillery, guarantees them additional access to politicians.

Positioning themselves as partners in this way is a key objective for industry actors and a key difference with tobacco companies, which are widely excluded from such forums. It affords them great power to shape, inform and delay policy decisions and creates the norm that industry positions should be heard and where possible accommodated. Whilst the position of industry actors in the policy making process is widely criticised by the public health community, it is widely accepted by many officials and politicians. Indeed policy makers explained how welcome industry input can be where they are able to provide resources (both financial and informational), or meet policy objectives through self-regulatory regimes which obviate the need for costly, time consuming legislation and enforcement mechanisms.

The ability to provide these ‘policy goods’ to ministers ensures their voices is heard in any policy deliberations. Where long-term relationships are unable to secure the desired outcomes, however, industry actors are fully prepared to employ short-term issue specific tactics. These include the initiation of legal proceedings, which are now holding up the implementation of minimum pricing in Scotland.

”Water dripping on stone’? Industry lobbying and UK alcohol policy’ is part of the Policy & Politics January 14 issue (volume 42, number 1) and is available on Ingenta.