by Sarah Brown and Allegra Fullerton
Welcome to this quarter’s highlights collection featuring a range of our most popular, recent research on different aspects relating to gender policy. Whether you’re preparing to teach a unit on gender policy or are interested in keeping up to date with the latest research in that area, we hope you will find the articles we’ve featured of interest!
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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
by Sophie Jacquot
UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles
In my recently published article in Policy & Politics, I ask how and why equal pay remains on the EU agenda, and, relatedly, if policy failure can be useful in policymaking.
Equal pay for equal work between women and men has been enshrined in European treaties since 1957. It is one of the EU’s founding principles, and, even though the EU’s action against gender inequalities has expanded to include areas as varied as domestic violence, integration of gender equality in external relations, gender budgeting or the articulation between private and working life, equal pay certainly remains the flagship and most symbolic policy domain of the EU gender equality policy. Equal pay can be considered as an identity marker for the EU. Implementing the principle of equal pay has regularly been on the European policy-making agenda since the 1970s with new legislation, case law, soft regulation, etc. However, the gender pay gap in the EU is 13% in 2022. It means that women would need to work 1.5 extra months to make up the difference. It also means that progress in closing the gender pay gap is extremely slow: it decreased by only 2.8% pp in 10 years.
Source: Extract from Equal Pay? Time to close the gap! (European Commission, November 2022, https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2022-11/equal_pay_day_factsheet_2022_en_1_0.pdf). Reproduction allowed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Given these (poor) results, the EU equal pay policy could be assessed as a failure and its existence questioned. But, on the contrary, the EU equal pay policy seems unaffected by failure. Recently, the von der Leyen Commission has put equal pay at the heart of the Union of Equality programme and has proposed a Directive on pay transparency, which was adopted on 10 May 2023. My recent article “Can failure be useful in policy-making? The case of EU equal pay policy” explores this paradox: Why and how, despite repeated implementation failure, is the EU equal pay policy still up and running?
Continue readingSpecial 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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Policy & Politics Journal Blog 