In celebration of the broad aims of Policy & Politics, we decided to focus this quarter’s highlights collection on our three most popular reads of 2025 to date. Spanning narratives, policy design, and direct democracy, these articles beautifully illustrate the journal’s breadth of scope — unusual among top-ranked outlets in the field.
So, without further ado, here’s a précis of each to whet your appetite for the full research articles, which are free to view until the end of January 2026.
by Liz Richardson, Catherine Durose, Lucy Kimbell and Ramia Mazé
In a recent article published in Policy & Politics, Liz Richardson, Catherine Durose, Lucy Kimbell and Ramia Mazé explore how the fields of policy and design relate to one another — and why the common framing of ‘design for policy’ may be too narrow to capture the full range of interactions between the two. While design has become an increasingly visible feature of policymaking practice in recent years, the authors argue that existing accounts tend to list design methods (such as prototyping or visualisation) without fully exploring the purpose and politics behind their use.
In a recent article published in Policy & Politics, author Katharina T. Paul argues for a shift in how we analyse public health controversies by introducing a new methodology—policy valuography—that explores how different social actors assign value to vaccination. The article, entitled Towards a new policy analytical methodology in the study of vaccination governance, moves beyond familiar binary framings of vaccine hesitancy and proposes a deeper investigation of the “valuation practices” that shape vaccination governance.
We’re excited to welcome Kristin Taylor as a new co-editor of P&P in January! In anticipation, we caught up with her to find out a bit about her motivation for joining our team…
SB: Hey Kristin, we’re thrilled to have you joining our illustrious team in 2025 and wanted to hear what made you want to take on a co-editor role for P&P, and what you hope to get out of it?
KT: I’m glad the feeling is mutual! I was quite humbled when the editorial team approached me about the role. I have always held P&P in high regard because of the incredibly collegial and constructive review process. Given all the thoughtful effort the co-editors have devoted to the quality of P&P, I am honored to join the team. With that being said, I haven’t thought so much about what I hope to get out of being a co-editor of P&P, but I have thought quite a bit about what I can contribute to the journal and the editorial team. One of the aspects of my career that I have relished as I’ve become more established is the opportunity to mentor the work of new, up and coming scholars of public policy. I’m excited about the chance to contribute to the journal by fostering the work of new voices in the literature.
SB: We know that balancing priorities such as research, teaching and administration is more pressurised for prolific researchers like you, so what do you anticipate the benefits of the role will be for you?
In my recently published article in Policy & Politics, I ask how and why equal pay remains on the EU agenda, and, relatedly, if policy failure can be useful in policymaking.
Equal pay for equal work between women and men has been enshrined in European treaties since 1957. It is one of the EU’s founding principles, and, even though the EU’s action against gender inequalities has expanded to include areas as varied as domestic violence, integration of gender equality in external relations, gender budgeting or the articulation between private and working life, equal pay certainly remains the flagship and most symbolic policy domain of the EU gender equality policy. Equal pay can be considered as an identity marker for the EU. Implementing the principle of equal pay has regularly been on the European policy-making agenda since the 1970s with new legislation, case law, soft regulation, etc. However, the gender pay gap in the EU is 13% in 2022. It means that women would need to work 1.5 extra months to make up the difference. It also means that progress in closing the gender pay gap is extremely slow: it decreased by only 2.8% pp in 10 years.
Given these (poor) results, the EU equal pay policy could be assessed as a failure and its existence questioned. But, on the contrary, the EU equal pay policy seems unaffected by failure. Recently, the von der Leyen Commission has put equal pay at the heart of the Union of Equality programme and has proposed a Directive on pay transparency, which was adopted on 10 May 2023. My recent article “Can failure be useful in policy-making? The case of EU equal pay policy” explores this paradox: Why and how, despite repeated implementation failure, is the EU equal pay policy still up and running?
Oscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop, Elizabeth Koebele, Chris Weible and Sarah Brown
We are delighted to be ending the year on a high note. Submissions are at their highest level for over a decade, we’ve published policy scholarship from a far broader range of countries than ever before, and we’ve maintained our top quartile rankings in both Public Administration and Political Science with an impact factor of 4.7, thanks to the huge support of our loyal community. Congratulations to you all!
We are looking forward to seeing many of you face to face in 2023, particularly at the Conference on Policy Process Research in Syracuse in May, as well as other international conferences.
In the meantime, to celebrate all we have achieved together this year, we have made our top 10 most highly cited articles published in 2023 free to access until 31 January 2024, please see below for the full collection.
DORA, a public declaration launched in 2013 with now over 23,000 signatories worldwide, aims to radically revise the current methods of research assessment. It speaks of an urgent need to improve the ways in which research is currently evaluated by moving beyond the monopoly of the Impact Factor to a more diverse and inclusive set of measures.
At Policy & Politics, we recognise this need very well. So many in our community tell us how their professional lives are dominated by the Impact Factors of journals: from winning funding awards, to getting jobs and promotions. Indeed, many of our authors tell us that’s their main driver for publishing with us. We want to be part of the journey to change this, recognising the value of taking a broader view of how we’re evaluating research quality. But we can’t do it single-handedly. So we stand alongside those in our community in seeking to diversify the ways in which research is evaluated.
This edition of our quarterly highlights collection focuses on the role of evidence in policymaking. It’s a theme we’ve curated collections around regularly, but our readership figures for these articles remind us time and again how important our community find this topic.
So, our first article on this theme by authors Clementine Hill O’Connor, Katherine Smith, and Ellen Stewart explores the question of how to balance evidence with public preferences.
How can policy organisations deal with competing (and sometimes conflicting) imperatives to strengthen the role of evidence in policy, with simultaneous calls to better engage diverse publics? Academic research has much to say about both the value of evidence for policymaking to increase (or improve) the policymakers’ engagement with evidence AND investigating a wide range of methods through which publics can be involved in policymaking. Perhaps surprisingly, these contributions are rarely connected. This disconnect is the focus of Integrating Evidence and Public Engagement in Policy Work: An empirical examination of three UK policy organisations.
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?
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 →
Elizabeth Koebele with Sarah Brown
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 