Policy & Politics Highlights Collection on Energy Policy – free to access from 1st February – 30 April 2023

Articles featured (free to download):

Advocacy strategies of industry and environmental interest groups in oil and gas policy debates (Jan 2023) Jennifer A. Kagan & Kristin L. Olofsson

Brexit implications for sustainable energy in the UK (May 2022) Caroline Kuzemko, Mathieu Blondeel & Antony Froggatt

The impact of participatory policy formulation on regulatory legitimacy: the case of Great Britain’s Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) (Jun 2022) Elizabeth Blakelock & John Turnpenny.

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Brexit & UK Net Zero Energy: It’s Far from Over

Caroline Kuzemko, Mathieu Blondeel, and Antony Froggatt.

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Now, a year and a half post the end of the transition period and as the Northern Ireland Protocol bill passes its first round of votes in the House of Commons, is a good moment to assess the implications of Brexit for UK energy and climate policy.

Brexit was framed as a route back towards a truly ‘Great’ Britain. Getting Brexit done was meant to ‘take back control of our money, laws and borders’ and enable new, global trading relationships, whilst also reducing bureaucratic burdens and keeping public funds in the UK, to be spent on the NHS. This infers that the UK would be able to do things ‘better’ than the EU.

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Public participation in energy market regulation in Great Britain

Blakelock and TurnpennyElizabeth Blakelock and John Turnpenny

Politicians in Great Britain are severely constrained when it comes to influencing the energy system. This is largely because decision making has been delegated – away from elected representatives to technical experts, and, specifically in the case of energy markets, to the regulator, Ofgem (the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets). Although legislation can attempt to shape Ofgem’s work, the impact of attempts to do so have been mixed at best. Continue reading

Updating your course reading lists? Check out our essential reading recommendations for teaching Public Participation, Gender and the Policy Process, and Policy Innovation from Policy & Politics

Elizabeth SarahElizabeth Koebele with Sarah Brown

Are you planning a new policy or politics-focused course? Or maybe you’re updating your existing syllabi with some of the newest research on policy and politics? We’re here to help! In this blog, we provide recommendations for new Policy & Politics articles (as well as a few older favorites) that make excellent contributions to syllabi for a diversity of courses. We hope this saves you time and effort in mining our recent articles while also ensuring your course materials reflect the latest research from the frontiers of the discipline. Continue reading

Policy & Politics Highlights collection on policy and regulation August 2022 – October 2022 –free to access

Sarah_Brown_credit_Evelyn_Sturdy
Image credit: Evelyn Sturdy at Unsplash

Quarterly highlights collection 1 August – 31 October 2022

Welcome to this quarter’s highlights collection featuring three articles that provide a range of insights from different perspectives on policy and regulation. Continue reading

Are responses to official consultations and stakeholder surveys reliable guides to policy actors’ positions?

Karin IngoldKarin Ingold

Policy scholars are interested in the positions and preferences of politically involved actors. Those preferences can either serve as independent variables (for example, to explain coordination among or the strategic behaviour of actors), or as dependent variables (for example to evaluate actors’ coherence over time). But how do I identify these policy positions or preferences? Should I perform interviews or code the official statements of actors involved in policymaking? How valuable are my survey results in comparison to media data? These are typical questions concerning methods of data gathering and there are unlikely to be absolute answers to the question of which is the best method. However, our recent Policy & Politics article contributes to the discussion regarding these questions and is based on unique data drawn from three cases. Using these data, it compares actor statements about policies, gathered once through surveys and once through text coding official statements. Continue reading