evidence based policy

What types of health evidence persuade actors in a complex policy system?

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by Geoff Bates, Sarah Ayres, Andrew Barnfield, and Charles Larkin

Good quality urban environments can help to prevent non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, mental health conditions and diabetes that account for three quarters of deaths globally (World Health Organisation, 2022). More commonly however, poor quality living conditions contribute to poor health and widening inequalities (Adlakha & John, 2022). Consequently, many public health advocates hope to convince and bring together the stakeholders who shape urban development to help create healthier places.

Evidence is one tool that can be used to convince these stakeholders from outside the health sector to think more about health outcomes. Most of the literature on the use of evidence in policy environments has focused on the public sector, such as politicians and civil servants (e.g., Crow & Jones, 2018). However, urban development decision-making processes involve many stakeholders across sectors with different needs and agendas (Black et al., 2021). While government sets policy and regulatory frameworks, private sector organisations such as property developers and investors drive urban development and strongly influence policy agendas.

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How well do the UK government’s ‘Areas of Research Interest’ work as boundary objects to facilitate research use in policymaking?

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by Annette Boaz and Kathryn Oliver

Articulating the research priorities of government is one way to encourage the production of relevant research to inform policy. We have been working with the Areas of Research Interest (ARIs) produced and published by government departments in the UK. ARIs provide an opportunity to gain insight into what research is of interest to each department. It’s this research that forms the basis of our recent article in Policy & Politics: How well do the UK government’s ‘Areas of Research Interest’ work as boundary objects to facilitate research use in policymaking?

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Policy & Politics favourites of 2021

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Thea Cook, Journals Marketing ExecutiveThea-Cook

We wanted to share some of our readers’ favourite content that you might have missed. Please enjoy free access to some of our most read and highly cited articles, along with some of our editors’ highlights from recent issues. Continue reading →

Policy & Politics Highlights collection – all articles included are Open Access

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Sarah BrownSarah Brown
Journal Manager, Policy & Politics

This quarter’s collection highlights three of our most popular individual research articles downloaded in 2020. As so often typifies these collections, all the articles featured demonstrate one of the main hallmarks of Policy & Politics in foregrounding the politics of the policy-making process. Continue reading →

Behavioural insights teams in practice: nudge missions and methods on trial

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Ball and HeadSarah Ball and Brian W. Head

They go by a variety of names; nudge units, behavioural insights (BI) teams and behavioural economics teams. However, they all owe a debt to the pioneering work of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) in the United Kingdom (UK). Based on behavioural research on the ‘irrational’ behaviours of citizens and/or policy target audiences, ‘nudge’ instruments have been tested through rigorous research in the form of randomised controlled trials. Using this approach, the BIT UK has had a significant impact on the policy innovation landscape across the globe. Teams have emerged in Europe, the US, Canada, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Australia, New Zealand and many more countries.

Our research recently published in Policy & Politics explores the BI phenomena as it emerged in Australia, from which we derive analysis relevant to global actors and governments engaged BI. In two independent exploratory studies, we sought to understand how such teams actually operate in practice. One study was an in-depth observational study of staff in the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA). The other was an interview-based study of three teams, namely, those operating in two state governments, New South Wales and Victoria, together with the Australian government’s BETA. Continue reading →

Knowledge brokering for policy: What do we know?

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Eleanor MacKillop, Sarah Quarmby and James Downe

If only policy could be better informed by evidence, it would be more efficient, effective and deliver better outcomes. That belief is the premise for most of the current research into what is called ‘knowledge brokering’– linking research to policy and practice. It’s also what has led governments worldwide into investing significant resources into bridging the evidence-policy ‘gap,’ such as What Works Centres in the UK, Productivity Commissions in Australia and New Zealand, or the What Works Clearinghouse in the United States. Unfortunately, the existing literature isn’t clear about what knowledge brokering is, and whether it works.  Continue reading →

Is it time to give up on evidence-based policy? Four answers

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richard frenchRichard D. French

This blog post was originally published on the Discover Society – Policy and Politics blog on 2 January 2019.

I have watched an enthusiastic, well-intentioned lobby for evidence-based policy on my campus for several years. However, I frequently reflect that if I were to opine publicly on evolutionary biology, or astrophysics, with as little knowledge of the subject as various scientifically trained persons hold forth on public policy, I would soon be read out of the intellectually reputable part of the university community – and rightly so.

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Free research articles for APPAM 2018 from Policy & Politics on improving policy-making by engaging with evidence

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Sarah Brown 1Sarah Brown,
Journal Manager of Policy & Politics

In celebration of this year’s APPAM theme of improving policy-making by developing and engaging with evidence, we bring you the latest and best of our research on this topic. From our prize-winning article on Evidence translation: an exploration of policy makers’ use of evidence by Jo Ingold and Mark Monaghan, which defines a new conceptual model of evidence translation highlighting the crucial role evidence plays in the policy process, to Richard French’s exploration of answers to the question whether it is time to give up on evidence based policy.

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Making policy in the era of Nudge

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Joram FeitsmaJoram Feitsma

In their efforts to professionalize, contemporary governments have embraced the idea of evidence-based policy. They draw legitimacy from science, basing their ideas for new policies on ‘what works’. A particular wave of evidence-based thinking that is very vivid at the moment is ‘Behavioural Insights’. This is the subject of my recent research article in Policy & Politics entitled: Brokering Behaviour Change: The Work of Behavioural Insights Experts in Government. Continue reading →

Data Matters…Sometimes: Revisiting the Connection between Problem Indicators and Policy Maker Attention

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DeLeoRob De Leo

An extended version of this blog post was originally published on Discover Society.

From the number of drug overdoses to annual average temperatures, public transportation ridership rates to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), government is inundated with data documenting social problems. In theory, these statistics should lead to more informed decision making. In practice, they are heavily politicized. Organized interests compete to ensure that their preferred statistic is adopted as the preferred measure of a given policy problem, a testament to these so-called “problem indicators” are important determinants of policy maker attention.  

Virtually every major theory of policy making suggests indicators and other forms of information play an important role in stimulating issue attention and provoking policy maker action. My recent paper, “Indicators, agendas, and stream: Analysing the Politics of Preparedness,” applies the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), which argues policy change is facilitated by the coupling of three distinct streams: (1) the problem stream, which consists of the various social issues competing for policy maker attention; (2) the policy stream, which encompasses the various policies and programs designed to address items in the problem stream; and (3) the politics stream, which broadly describes the current political environment, including trends in public opinion as well as the composition of government. Coupling is aided by a policy entrepreneur or an individual or organization willing to invest considerable amounts of time and energy to secure policy change. Once the three streams are coupled, a policy window is opened providing organized interests with an opportunity to push their pet issues onto the policy agenda and, ideally, secure policy change.  Continue reading →