Ideas

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 →