We need to talk about poverty

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Seosamh Mac Cárthaigh
Seosamh Mac Cárthaigh

Seosamh Mac Cárthaigh discusses the background to his article on ‘Need and poverty’ which is about to be published in the next issue of Policy & Politics.

How much poverty is found in a society depends on how poverty is defined and measured. In an obvious sense, the definition of poverty must come first. If we do not have a clear understanding of what it means to say that people are poor, we are unlikely to be able to devise measures which yield meaningful estimates of the number of people who can be so described.

Unhappily, the meaning of poverty is often taken for granted in scholarly research on the topic. It is not uncommon for estimates of poverty to be presented without any supporting discussion of how those estimates are to be interpreted. Where issues of interpretation are addressed, the discussion is frequently limited to a few paragraphs or even sentences. While studies usually offer some description of the measures used, they generally have little to say about why those measures were chosen in the first place or about what they are intended to capture. Continue reading →

Welfare restrictions place financial pressure on new immigrant families

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Anna Boucher
Anna Boucher

Anna Boucher discusses her article ‘Familialism and migrant welfare policy: Restrictions on social security provision for newly-arrived immigrants’, published in the latest issue of Policy & Politics.

Liberal welfare states like Australia and Canada are often assumed to rely centrally on market mechanisms to provide welfare. Typically, in these countries, fewer obligations are owed by adult family members to other adults family members than in conservative welfare states. However, in the area of immigrant welfare, my research reveals that immigrant sponsors are increasingly bearing the brunt of financial costs of their parents and partners. Immigration selection policies place enduring contractual obligations upon adult immigrant sponsors to support their grown relatives, sometimes for long periods of time following immigration entry. These new forms of contractual obligations not only illuminate the stringent world of immigrant welfare provision, they also extend our understanding of familialism within welfare studies. Continue reading →

What difference does having a Directly Elected Mayor make?

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David Sweeting

by David Sweeting, Associate Editor, Policy & Politics

Originally posted in November 2013 on the Democratic Audit blog.

Directly Elected Mayors are back in the news – Lord Adonis is pushing the idea of a ‘metro-mayor’ for ‘Greater Birmingham. In this post, David Sweeting reflects on the introduction of a Directly Elected Mayor in Bristol.

It is well over a year since the first directly elected mayor of Bristol took office. While Bristol is not the only place in the country to have such a mayor, it was the only one of ten cities that said yes to a mayor in referendums held in May 2012. Despite various inducements from central government in the form of looking favourably at city deals, and also the prospect of a mayors’ cabinet with the PM himself, Bristolians were the only citizens in the country at that time to go for the option of replacing a traditional council leader with what many see as an American style figure at the head of city government. So, as the idea of Directly Elected Mayors moves back up the agenda, it seems appropriate to ask, what difference does having an elected mayor make? Continue reading →

Is the UK Civil Service becoming more representative of the population it serves and, if so, why?

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Rhys Andrews and Rachel Ashworth

by Rhys Andrews and Rachel Ashworth

Originally posted on June 24th on the Democratic Audit blog.

 

 

 

The UK Civil Service has long been regarded a bastion of white, middle class men, but there have been efforts to recruit a more diverse workforce in recent years. In this post Rhys Andrews and Rachel Ashworth assess the representativeness of Whitehall staff, in terms of gender, ethnicity and disability. They show that progress has been made in most departments, although there are still questions to be answered about the type of jobs that women, people from ethnic minorities and disabled people tend to hold.

In recent years policy-makers and politicians have been keen to encourage public organizations to become more diverse, especially within central government. For example, the shadow Cabinet Office Minister Michael Dugher recently stated that a future Labour government would ensure that a greater proportion of Fast Stream civil servants come from black and working class backgrounds. Government has sought to increase the representativeness of the civil service for two main reasons: firstly, so that it is more representative of society and can therefore be viewed as legitimate and, secondly to ensure that policies can generate outcomes that benefit all sections of society. Continue reading →

Dante and the spin doctors

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Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders

by Matthew Flinders, Editor, Policy & Politics

Originally posted on May 7th on the Oxford University Press blog.

First it was football, now its politics. The transfer window seems to have opened and all the main political parties have recruited hard-hitting spin-doctors — or should I say ‘election gurus’ — in the hope of transforming their performance in the 2015 General Election. While some bemoan the influence of foreign hands on British politics and others ask why we aren’t producing our own world-class spin-doctors I can’t help but feel that the future of British politics looks bleak. The future is likely to be dominated by too much shouting, not enough listening. Continue reading →

Depoliticisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates

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Stephen Bates, Laura Jenkins and Fran Amery
Stephen Bates, Laura Jenkins and Fran Amery

Stephen Bates, Laura Jenkins and Fran Amery, from the University of Birmingham, use work on in vitro fertilisation to think through depoliticisation. The full article  on the subject – (De)politicisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates – along with the rest of the special issue of Policy & Politics on depoliticisation, is available free throughout May.

Depoliticisation, in simple terms, involves disavowing political responsibility, or persuading the public that one is no longer responsible for particular decisions, with the result that deliberation and choice are restricted. Crucially, as the literature has identified, choices are still being made – e.g. politicians may retain mechanisms for indirect control – but they are concealed. Continue reading →

Evidence translation: an exploration of policymakers’ use of evidence

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Jo Ingold and Mark Monaghan from the University of Leeds discuss their forthcoming article ‘Evidence translation: an exploration of policymakers’ use of evidence’, available via fast track from Policy & Politics.

Given the UK Coalition government’s apparent ‘misuse’ of statistics in a range of policy areas, questions are often raised about the use of evidence in policymaking. Our key concern in this article is how evidence, ideas and knowledge are used (or not) in the policy process, drawing on a series of focus groups with 75 analysts and policy advisers in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The DWP seemed a good place to explore this issue – under New Labour it saw a huge increase in the number of evaluations and is currently the home of ‘flagship’ government policies such as Universal Credit and the Work Programme. Continue reading →

Policy & Politics conference 2014

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Bristol Marriot Royal Hotel
Bristol Marriot Royal Hotel

The Policy & Politics conference 2014 will take place at the Marriot Hotel in Bristol, on 16th and 17th September this year. For those interested in social and public policy, the event is fast becoming one of the main events in the UK conference calendar.

This year the conference theme is the challenges of leadership and collaboration in the 21st Century, and the occasion will be truly international in scope. All our plenary speakers – Chris Ansell, Erik-Hans Klijn, Helen Sullivan, and Jacob Torfing – come from beyond the UK. In previous years we have attracted close to 200 papers from around 20 countries. There is a good mix of established academics and younger researchers presenting in a mutually supportive and academically rigorous environment. As always there are opportunities for publication. The 2012 conference generated a Special Issue for the Policy & Politics journal, and our publisher, Policy Press, will be there to showcase the latest titles in the field and to discuss potential publishing proposals. Continue reading →

Behaviour change as psychological governance – making psy-citizens?

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Rhys Jones, Mark Whitehead and Jessica Pykett
Rhys Jones, Mark Whitehead and Jessica Pykett

Rhys Jones and Mark Whitehead, Aberystwyth University, and Jessica Pykett, Birmingham University discuss their article, Psychological governance and behaviour change which was published in Policy & Politics in 2013, and is available free during May 2014.

‘Behaviour Change’ has become a familiar term in UK public policy. This trend indicates the growing influence of the behavioural sciences (including behavioural economics, social psychology and, to a certain extent, neuroscience disciplines) on UK policy making communities in a range of sectors –from personal finance, through public health, to environmental communications. Our work to date has involved a policy ethnography of the emergence and rise of Behaviour Change as an agenda for governance which embeds behavioural insights into public policy design and delivery. We are now investigating the significance of the UK as a policy laboratory for these behavioural forms of governance, as the Behaviour Change agenda spreads internationally. We have identified hundreds of countries in which Behaviour Change initiatives are commonplace as well as several nations in which Behaviour Change has become a centrally-orchestrated programme for governance. Continue reading →

Demand side responses and energy supply (in)security

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Caroline Kuzemko
Caroline Kuzemko

Caroline Kuzemko, from the University of Exeter, discusses her article ‘Politicising UK energy: what speaking energy security can do‘ published in the latest edition of Policy & Politics. The whole issue is available for free download until the end of May.

Since the start of the latest Ukraine-Russia crisis the rhetoric of energy security has re-emerged as strongly as ever. What seems most evident this time around is the degree to which energy companies are deploying the energy supply security card in order to appeal for more state and political support for new capacity. The nuclear industry, never shy about letting a good energy crisis go to waste, has been active across Europe in using fear of Russia and the energy weapon to make the case for more European nuclear energy. In the UK Cuadrilla, ably assisted by William Hague and Michael Fallon, have argued that the UK should reduce reliance on gas imports by fracking for shale gas. It is worth noting the kind of language that is used in such appeals. Cuadrilla’s statement suggests that Britain may declare a ‘state of emergency’ if the Ukraine crisis worsens and in this instance Cuadrilla will ride to our rescue by producing shale within 4 years. This is strongly worded stuff – bordering on war-like discourse – and assumes home-grown energy supply solves the crisis for the UK. Continue reading →