Ideas

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 

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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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How do populist discourses influence policy termination?

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by Vandna Bhatia

Photograph of female academic Vandna Bhatia

In her recent article, How do populist discourses influence policy termination?, author Vandna Bhatia explores the relationship between populist political discourse and policy termination. Through a lens of ideational politics, the article offers a rare and timely contribution to the underdeveloped field of policy termination. Drawing on two high-profile cases from Ontario, Canada—the termination of the province’s carbon cap-and-trade programme and the repeal of its sexual health education curriculum—Bhatia shows how populist leaders use discourse to construct compelling narratives, mobilise coalitions, and legitimise disruptive strategies for dismantling existing policies.

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Experts – how influential are they in policymaking?

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Feb highlightsJohan Christensen with Sarah Brown

Highlights collection free to access from 1 February 2021 – 30 April 2021

Experts – how influential are they? By Johan Christensen based on his P&P article on Expert knowledge and policymaking: a multi-disciplinary research agenda

“We have to listen to the experts.” During the coronavirus pandemic, this phrase has been repeated by politicians across the world. Only a few years ago, we were told that “people have had enough of experts”. Now experts are back in demand. At press conferences, prime ministers are flanked by public health experts. And governments have set up a dizzying number of expert groups and task forces to examine policy measures to stop the spread of the virus, to formulate strategies to exit the crisis, and even to investigate the government response to the crisis. Continue reading →

How the political framing of the principle of basic income encouraged it to be seriously debated resulting in an implementation experiment in Finland

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PerkioJohanna Perkiö

There is a pressing need for policies that will help to overcome some of the intractable social and economic problems of our time, such as increasing economic inequality, growing insecurity and labour market polarisation, and, most importantly, the climate change crisis. Both academics and policymakers will need to learn to think ‘outside the box’ to explore new ideas and solutions. Continue reading →

The translation and re-circulation of ideas about health inequalities within policy

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Katherine Smith
Katherine Smith

Katherine Smith has been awarded the Bleddyn Davies Early Career Prize for Policy & Politics in 2013. Her winning article is ‘Institutional filters: the translation and re-circulation of ideas about health inequalities within policy’.

Exposition of article

Working as part of the University of Edinburgh’s Global Public Health Unit, Dr Smith has expertise in the fields of policy construction and knowledge transfer in the field of healthcare; and this article exemplifies the salient and policy-relevant research in which she is engaged.  In this article, Dr Smith seeks to account for the varying extent which research has informed policy-making in the field of health, despite the ostensible commitment to evidence-based policy-making by successive administrations across the United Kingdom.  Continue reading →