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 

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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Interpretive process tracing themed section article on ‘Interpretive Process Tracing? How Process Tracing Can Become Amenable to Interpretive Research 

by Hilde van Meegdenburg

In Interpretive Process Tracing? How PT Can Become Amenable to Interpretive Research, Hilde van Meegdenburg advances an analyticist approach to PT and explores how process tracing can be made amenable to interpretive research. In this important research article in our new themed section advancing an interpretive approach to process tracing, the author addresses a key methodological tension: while process tracing is widely used in policy research and foreign policy analysis, it has largely been developed within a regularity-oriented, broadly positivist framework. 

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