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Thank you to all our authors, reviewers, board members, readers and friends of Policy & Politics for another great year in 2024 

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We are delighted to be ending the year on a high note. Submissions are at their highest level for over a decade, we’ve published more diverse scholarship from a far broader range of countries than ever before, and we’ve maintained our top quartile rankings in both Public Administration and Political Science with an impact factor of 4.3, thanks to the huge support of our loyal community. Congratulations to you all!   

To celebrate, we have made our top 10 most highly cited articles published in 2024 free to access until 31 January 2025. Happy holiday reading! 

Top 10 most highly cited articles published in 2024 – free to access until 31 January 2025 

1. Policy learning governance: a new perspective on agency across policy learning theories Bishoy Zaki 

2. Types of learning and varieties of innovation: how does policy learning enable policy innovation? Nihit Goyal and Michael Howlett 

3. Crisis management in English local government: the limits of resilience Tania Arrieta and Jonathan S. Davies 

4. Expert perspectives on the changing dynamics of policy advisory systems: the COVID-19 crisis and policy learning in Belgium and Australia Marleen Easton, Jennifer Yarnold, Valerie Vervaenen, Jasper De Paepe, and Brian W. Head 

5. Social identities, emotions and policy preferences Johanna Hornung  and Nils C. Bandelow 

6. The democratising capacity of new municipalism: beyond direct democracy in public- common partnerships Iolanda Bianchi 

7. The politics of anger: emotional appraisal mechanisms and the French pension reform protests Johanna Kuhlmann and Peter Starke 

8. Emotions and anti-carceral advocacy in Canada: ‘All of the anger this creates in our bodies is also a tool to kill us’ Jennifer M. Kilty and Michael Orsini
 
9. The challenges experts face during creeping crises: the curse of complacency Ahmad Wesal Zaman, Olivier Rubin, and Reidar Staupe-Delgado

10. Identifying proactive and reactive policy entrepreneurs in collaborative networks in flood risk management Per Becker, Jörgen Sparf, and Evangelia Petridou 

NEW SPECIAL ISSUE BLOG SERIES ON POLICY EXPERTISE IN TIMES OF CRISIS. BLOG 7: The challenges experts face during creeping crises: the curse of complacency

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Special issue blog series on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis

Ahmad Wesal Zaman, Olivier Rubin and Reidar Staupe-Delgado

The policy literature has generally presented crises as urgent public threats with clearly demarcated ‘focusing events’. As a result, most studies have identified the main challenges faced by expert agencies involved in evidence-based policymaking as managing uncertainty, time pressure and communication. However, less focus has been devoted to analysing the concrete challenges faced by expert agencies during creeping crises. Creeping crises are characterised by spatial and temporal fragmentation and elusiveness, which create an additional challenge for expert agencies: how to get the crisis on the political agenda.  

Comparing two global creeping crises: climate change (CC) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), our recently published article in Policy & Politics, highlights two distinct strategies for influencing policymaking. Our analysis showed how two expert agencies, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), pursued different strategies when setting the global agenda and influencing policymaking. Our findings showed that the WHO’s approach to policymaking regarding AMR was mostly guided by top-down, science-led, formal engagements and strategies. This approach has successfully increased the salience of the global challenge of AMR, providing strong, evidence-based solutions. But it has been less successful in promoting the challenge onto the global political agenda.  

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Are responses to official consultations and stakeholder surveys reliable guides to policy actors’ positions?

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Karin IngoldKarin Ingold

Policy scholars are interested in the positions and preferences of politically involved actors. Those preferences can either serve as independent variables (for example, to explain coordination among or the strategic behaviour of actors), or as dependent variables (for example to evaluate actors’ coherence over time). But how do I identify these policy positions or preferences? Should I perform interviews or code the official statements of actors involved in policymaking? How valuable are my survey results in comparison to media data? These are typical questions concerning methods of data gathering and there are unlikely to be absolute answers to the question of which is the best method. However, our recent Policy & Politics article contributes to the discussion regarding these questions and is based on unique data drawn from three cases. Using these data, it compares actor statements about policies, gathered once through surveys and once through text coding official statements. Continue reading →