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!
Continue readingby Sarah Brown and Allegra Fullerton
Welcome to our first themed collection of 2025, featuring our most popular, recent research published in Policy & Politics! Our first collection centres around themes of Democracy. Whether you’re preparing to teach a unit on democracy or doing research in that area, or are just interested in keeping up to date with the latest concepts in democratic innovations, we hope you will find these highlighted articles interesting!
Our first article in this collection, is a conceptual article which presents a new theory of robust democracy. In this powerhouse of an article, authors Sørensen and Warren argue that such a theory is needed to strengthen the capacity of liberal democracies to adapt and innovate in response to change. While many democratic theorists recognise the necessity of reforming liberal democracies to keep pace with social change, the authors argue that what enables such reform is rarely considered. The authors posit that liberal democracies are politically robust when they are able to continuously adapt and innovate in ways that enable them to serve their core democratic functions, even in the face of disruptive political demands and events. These functions include securing the empowered inclusion of those affected, collective agenda setting and will formation, and the making of joint decisions. This theorising becomes all the more urgent in response to three current challenges that the authors highlight which urgently demand the adaptation and innovation of liberal democracies to become more politically robust: an increasingly assertive political culture, the digitalisation of political communication and increasing global interdependencies. The new theory suggests that when a political system serves these three core democratic functions, this not only deepens democracy, which is justifiable on its own terms, but it also increases political robustness.
Continue readingby Lucy J. Parry, Nicole Curato and John S. Dryzek
Proponents of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) highlight their ability to break political deadlock, provide informed citizen input into policymaking, and bring diverse, considered perspectives into decision-making. DMPs are composed of randomly selected citizens convened to deliberate upon and yield policy recommendations.
Some suggest that DMPs face risks of being used instrumentally by decisionmakers to bolster popularity or legitimacy. This is exacerbated because governance decisions around DMPs are often opaque or ad hoc. As their popularity increases, so too do these risks. Unlike other forms of political participation, such as elections, there are no generally accepted standards to uphold integrity of DMPs. To what extent can challenges in their ethics and governance be monitored and mitigated?
In our recent article published in Policy & Politics, we found divergent views on this question. We used Q methodology to map shared viewpoints on the integrity and governance of DMPs, with members of the DMPs community: practitioners, researchers, advocates and policymakers involved in their study, design, implementation and promotion. Our study identified five viewpoints on the integrity and governance of deliberative mini-publics as follows.
Continue readingby Sarah Brown, Senior Journal Manager
In our first highlights collection of 2024, we are delighted to feature three topical open access articles illuminating several different perspectives on feminist politics. All three emphasise the importance of considering intersectionality in politics and policymaking, which we’ve underlined in our previous spotlight features, for example with Professor Julia Jordan-Zachary and Dr Tiffany Manuel.
In the first article, Charlène Calderaro explores the racialisation of sexism, looking at how race frames shape anti-street harassment policies in her case studies from Britain and France.
To introduce her research, Calderaro points out that, while gender-based violence is increasingly addressed through public policy, it also follows a process of ‘othering’ marked by racialisation in many European contexts. This racialisation process is particularly evident when examining the problem of gender-based violence in public spaces, for example, street harassment, where sexism is often attributed to migrant men or men from ethnic minorities. However, the extent of this racialisation process varies significantly across national contexts.
The findings show that the racialisation of sexism in policy-making against gender-based violence can be exacerbated by nationally embedded ideas on race and racism. It also suggests that, by extension, these different conceptions of race can affect the ability to prevent “femonationalism”, which refers to the increasing use of women’s rights to foster nationalism in the form of racial exclusion.
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Sarah Brown
Journal Manager, Policy & Politics
Welcome to our first virtual issue of 2021 and to a new year of reflecting on some of the latest thinking on the major policy questions of our time including the growing importance of digital democracy and on-line public service delivery, the decline of public trust in conventional politics, and the potential of citizen participation to reconnect electorates with political and policymaking processes.
Given that on-line working has become so pervasive and so important during the coronavirus pandemic, we start this virtual issue with a collection of papers that explores the role of digitalisation in promoting public participation and delivering public services. Read on as we journey from analyses of these innovative examples of digitalisation, stopping off at some familiar but important themes for regular readers of the journal including direct democracy, political leadership, and new insights into citizen participation. Continue reading
Vesa Koskimaa and Lauri Rapeli
It seems that people are growing increasingly disappointed with how representative democracy functions. A big part of the problem is arguably a de-attachment of policymakers from citizens’ everyday problems, which prompts citizens to react by turning their backs on conventional politics. Many scholars and other observers have turned to democratic innovations for solutions on how the link between democratic publics and their democratic leaders could be improved. Innovations based on the theory of deliberative democracy have probably received most attention by scholars and practitioners. Deliberative democracy refers to a decision-making process, which emphasizes informed, reflexive and egalitarian interpersonal communication.
To put theory into practice, mini-publics, like citizen initiative reviews, juries and assemblies have been widely used in democracies across the world. In these deliberative groups, randomly selected individuals discuss and decide upon a specific political issue on the basis of best expert knowledge and argumentation. A considerable number of studies have discussed theoretically whether deliberative bodies could fix the problems of contemporary representative democracy. Other studies have used experimental methods to examine the internal proceedings and effects of these deliberations. What has, however, almost totally been ignored by scholars are the views of policy-making elites, whose opinions on democracy eventually determine the shape of new democratic institutions. Continue reading
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