COVID-19 opened the door to major healthcare reform—but old systems and social norms still held much of the power.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare systems around the world were pushed to the limit. In Switzerland, this sparked strong public support for nursing staff and even led to a popular vote backing major improvements to nursing care. With political will, public awareness, and a clear workforce crisis, it looked like the perfect moment for real change. But did that happen?
In a recent article published in Policy & Politics, Lisa Asticher investigates how institutional legacies—particularly those tied to economic liberalisation and gender inequality—shaped the reforms that followed. The findings are both fascinating and sobering.
In public policy, target group constructions are crucial. Groups are granted additional rights, while rights from other groups are withdrawn, certain groups of people or other entities are regulated, while burdens elsewhere are lifted. As Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram’s work (1993) told us, such decisions are related to target groups’ power position, but also to their positive or negative construction.
But how do these social constructions work, and based on which criteria are target groups of public policy perceived as deserving or undeserving? These exact criteria guiding social constructions of groups have remained rather elusive in extant public policy research.
by Eric Montpetit, Antoine Claude Lemor, Maria Alejandra Costa, and Louis-Robert Beaulieu-Guay
Some might say that people can grow accustomed to almost anything—even the worst crises. Indeed, human beings learn to cope with disruptions that initially provoke serious fears, but over time become a “new normal.” This capacity to adapt can be so strong that it undermines the influence of expert knowledge guiding decisions in times of crisis. That is precisely what we observed in Quebec (Canada) during the COVID-19 pandemic, as discussed in our recent article published in Policy & Politics.
Experts often believe that raising alarms about an impending catastrophe is an effective way to heighten awareness among both the public and policymakers regarding the risks of inaction. While fear-based strategies can yield results early in a crisis, they may become counterproductive later on.
In March 2020, many epidemiologists warned decision-makers that, without the swift implementation of strict lockdown measures, COVID-19 would spread exponentially—leading to a horrific number of casualties. In several countries, immediate lockdowns followed, with little consideration for the associated economic costs or unprecedented restrictions on individual freedoms. By highlighting the gravity of the threat, epidemiologists initially exerted considerable influence on both the public and policymakers.
While people in countries such as the United States were discontented and heavily opposed to stricter COVID-19 mitigation measures, why did individuals in some democratic societies voluntarily request and support stringent policies? This was our central research question in our recent article published in Policy & Politics.
Securitisation scholars argue that the exceptionalism of allowing the government to restrict people’s liberties and allocate more resources to certain policies results from successful securitisation—a persuasive process that convinces people that COVID-19 is a national security threat.
However, despite extensive studies applying securitisation theory to public health crises, existing research often lacks empirical data. Additionally, securitisation theory does not clearly define “exceptionalism,” nor does it explain why successful securitisation leads to public support for some policies but not across all related policy areas.
The idea of innovation has become one of the most persistent and sought-after today. While too conceptually elusive to pin down to a single statement, innovation can be broadly understood as a process whereby new elements and approaches are introduced to existing ones, in an attempt to solve problems, add value, and contribute to knowledge. Being a problem-solving, value-oriented process, it is no surprise that the concept of innovation is increasingly finding footholds in different theoretical spaces within policy and political sciences, from collaborative arrangements, democratic practices, policy design and experimentation, to behavioural and cognitive theories. Within the public sector, innovation can be understood as the creation of new policies, services, advisory, governance and political arrangements, often leading to the development of novel shared views of what is acceptable and expected by the public as beneficiaries.
Intuitively, policy learning has a family resemblance to policy innovation. It seems almost self-evident that they should be considered together in the explanation of policy dynamics. Yet the two literatures have developed independently of each other. Studies which put them in conversation are few.
All articles featured in this blog post are free to access until 31 October 2024
It’s that time of year again when course syllabi are updated with fresh research. We hope to make this easier with the essential reading list below, which features some of the most significant research relevant to public policy students that we’ve published over the last year. We feature nine articles and a special issue for teaching topical themes such as health policy, policy learning and advocacy. All articles are ideal for Public Policy, Politics and Social Policy classes alike.
As always, we welcome your feedback on the articles featured, as well as future unit topics you’d like to see covered! Let us know what you’re teaching and how we can help!
Our first theme focuses on a substantive policy area that is increasingly taught in public and social policy courses, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and on-going climate crisis: health policy.
Our first article, “Analysing the ‘follow the science’ rhetoric of government responses to COVID-19” by Margaret Macaulay and colleagues, has been one of the most widely read and cited articles of last year and was the winner of our Best Paper prize for 2023. This is not surprising, as it advances bold and well evidenced claims on a hot topic in public health governance. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic – and in the face of widespread anxiety and uncertainty – governments’ mantra that they were “just following the science” was meant to reassure the public that decisions about pandemic responses were being directed by the best available scientific evidence. However, the authors claim that making policy decisions based only on scientific evidence is impossible (if only because ‘the science’ is always contested) and undemocratic (because governments are elected to balance a range of priorities and interests in their decisions). Claiming to be “just following the science” therefore represents an abdication of responsibility by politicians.
Our second featured article, entitled What types of evidence persuade actors in a complex policy system? by Geoff Bates and colleagues, explores the use of evidence to influence different groups across the urban development system to think more about health outcomes in their decisions. Their three key findings are: (i) evidence-based narratives have wide appeal; (ii) credibility of evidence is critical; and (iii) many stakeholders have priorities other than health, such as economic considerations. The authors conclude that these insights can be used to frame and present evidence that meets the requirements of different urban development stakeholders and persuade them to think more about how the quality of urban environments affects health outcomes.
Each time a crisis hits, be it a natural disaster, pandemic or a corruption scandal, several ad hoc units are assembled by governments for quick action, only to be dismantled soon after the crisis becomes manageable or settles. Are these groups deployed as a signal of assurance to the public that indeed some action is being taken, or to bypass long-drawn bureaucratic processes in favour of quick action or to efficiently assemble and utilise resources under crisis? Perhaps all of the above. The possibilities of how ad hoc groups can be structured and the range of functions these can offer are plenty.
The term ‘adhocracy’ first featured in the book titled ‘The Temporary Society’ (Bennis and Slater, 1968) to describe flexible, unstructured and adaptable organisational models, which operated in stark contrast to a typical bureaucracy. Owing to their transient nature, policy learning opportunities brought about by ad hoc groups, have received little attention in public policy literature. Our new article in Policy and Politics presents insights from an exploratory study to understand the diverse institutional roles played by ad hoc groups deployed during crisis.
Special issue blog series on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis
Kennet Lynggaard, Theofanis Exadaktylos, Mads Jensen & Michael Kluth
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, many of us would probably have been a little hesitant on the exact field of work, or even unaware of the existence, of experts such as a mathematical virologist or experimental epidemiologist. Well into the pandemic, after several lockdowns and reopening of societies, highly specialised concepts from virology and epidemiology had entered everyday conversations, just like experts involved in handling the pandemic have become household names and, in many countries, even minor celebrities.
Our article, just published in Policy & Politics, assesses the role for experts during the various stages of the pandemic, based on evidence collected from a survey of comparative politics scholars from 31 European countries in 2022, which you can find more detail on in the book: Governments’ Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic in Europe: Navigating the Perfect Storm 2023. In our P&P article, we analysed the role of experts during the processes of depoliticisation and re-politicisation at each stage of the pandemic, alongside their influence on government responses to the pandemic. We propose a new typology, classifying four different ideal types of roles for experts: leading, antagonistic, managerial, and auxiliary – see figure 1.
Special issue blog series on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis
Cosmo Howard and Bernadette Hyland-Wood
COVID-19 showed the world that statistical data are indispensable for government decision making, especially in times of crisis. Yet, data systems to support public policy were often found wanting during the pandemic.
In our recent article in Policy & Politics, we argue that contemporary data sharing systems often behave like natural ecosystems for several reasons. They can grow and adapt organically, their members are highly interdependent, they are steered by powerful ‘keystone actors’ like government agencies and big tech companies, and they can be harnessed to provide benefits for society. This makes modern data systems different from older models, which relied on a single official statistical agency or a tight network of data providers to supply statistics for policy making. To test the operation of data ecosystems in practice, we investigated how Australia’s infectious disease data ecosystem functioned during COVID-19. We found strong evidence for organic growth and adaptation, but we also saw that keystone actors like government departments sometimes restricted access to data, which hampered the work of some data analysts within the ecosystem. Furthermore, there was often insufficient leadership by keystone actors to ensure that data ecosystems functioned coherently, resulting in disagreements over interpreting the data, as well as gaps in data coverage.
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 