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Updating your student reading lists? Read our essential reading recommendations for public policy and politics courses on expertise and evidence in policymaking, policy process theories, and interpretive approaches to policy research 

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By Allegra Fullerton & Sarah Brown 

As you update reading lists for the coming academic year, we present a curated collection of policy and politics scholarship that will engage students in fresh arguments and support robust classroom discussion. This collection of recent articles offers fresh material for teaching on expertise and evidence in policymaking & politics, policy process theories, and interpretive approaches to policy research. Together, these articles showcase some of the latest developments in public policy and political scholarship, combining conceptual innovation, empirical analysis, and methodological reflection. They provide useful additions to undergraduate and postgraduate modules across public policy, politics, governance, and research methods. 

We hope these suggestions save you time in identifying recent scholarship while ensuring your course materials reflect current debates at the forefront of the discipline – and they are all free to access from July to September, so you can get reading straight away.  

Read the full Student Reading List collection here.

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Gender equity policy and visibility politics in the film and television industries

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by Kevin Guyan, Doris Ruth Eikhof and Amanda Coles

In their recent article on gender equity policy and visibility-politics in the film and television industries, Guyan et al. examine how the politics of visibility shapes gender equity policy across film and television in the UK, Canada and Germany. Drawing on documentary analysis and 34 semi-structured interviews from an international comparative study, the authors show that visibility is mobilised in three distinct imaginaries—as evidence, as solution, and as demonstration of action—each carrying important policy trade-offs. 

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How do populist discourses influence policy termination?

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by Vandna Bhatia

Photograph of female academic Vandna Bhatia

In her recent article, How do populist discourses influence policy termination?, author Vandna Bhatia explores the relationship between populist political discourse and policy termination. Through a lens of ideational politics, the article offers a rare and timely contribution to the underdeveloped field of policy termination. Drawing on two high-profile cases from Ontario, Canada—the termination of the province’s carbon cap-and-trade programme and the repeal of its sexual health education curriculum—Bhatia shows how populist leaders use discourse to construct compelling narratives, mobilise coalitions, and legitimise disruptive strategies for dismantling existing policies.

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What is successful policy experimentation?

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By Kate Mattocks

Governments around the world undertake policy experiments – temporary, often micro-level interventions – to try new things and ‘learn what works.’ But what makes an experiment successful? This is the question I explore in my recent article published in Policy & Politics.

Discussions of success are surprisingly absent from the literature. We might think of success as a positive hypothesis: i.e. achieving an expected result. But this doesn’t capture all of the possible outcomes of experiments, and it also doesn’t consider the process of carrying them out.

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