Immigration Policy

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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Interpretive process tracing themed section article on “Policy diffusion and interpretive process tracing: explaining the spread of assisted voluntary return policies”

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by Sybille Münch

This article examines how assisted voluntary return (AVR) policies diffuse across European and national contexts, focusing on Germany within the multi-level governance system of the European Union. Developing an interpretive, mechanism-based account of policy diffusion, author Sybille Münch argues that understanding how policies travel requires close attention to how actors construct meaning, rather than relying solely on abstract diffusion models. 

Moving beyond single diffusion mechanisms 

Policy diffusion research often seeks to identify a dominant mechanism—such as learning, emulation, or competition—to explain how policies spread. Münch instead proposes a more fine-grained approach, drawing on interpretive process tracing and the concept of complex causal mechanisms. These mechanisms operate as sequences of actor-driven actions and interpretations, rather than as singular explanatory forces. 

This approach challenges assumptions that policies are simply transferred intact between contexts. Rather, policies are actively interpreted, adapted, and sometimes contested as they move across governance levels.  

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