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 public policy, target group constructions are crucial. Groups are granted additional rights, while rights from other groups are withdrawn, certain groups of people or other entities are regulated, while burdens elsewhere are lifted. As Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram’s work (1993) told us, such decisions are related to target groups’ power position, but also to their positive or negative construction.
But how do these social constructions work, and based on which criteria are target groups of public policy perceived as deserving or undeserving? These exact criteria guiding social constructions of groups have remained rather elusive in extant public policy research.
Collaborative innovation is gaining recognition as a critical strategy for public organisations, especially when addressing complex “wicked” problems. These challenges demand fresh thinking, and collaboration—particularly in diverse teams—can make all the difference. By bringing together varied perspectives, policymakers can unlock creative solutions that might not emerge in isolated decision-making. Working collaboratively not only expands the range of options but also makes thinking “outside the box” more productive and impactful.
Despite its promise, the concept of “collaborative innovation” is still mostly grounded in theory. Empirical studies are limited, and when they do exist, they often rely on case studies that lump all forms of collaboration together. This approach overlooks the nuances of different collaborative arrangements and makes it difficult to understand how specific types of collaboration contribute to innovation. Some research hints at distinctions among setups, linking them to innovation in theory, but no one has systematically compared their actual impact.
This is where our study steps in. For policymakers to truly harness the potential of collaboration, they need clear evidence about which actors to involve and how. In our recent article published in Policy & Politics entitled “Fostering innovation through collaboration: A comparison of collaborative approaches to policy design”— we examine the innovative potential of different collaborative arrangements. As expected, we find that collaboration—whether within government or with non-public actors—is a game-changer. But there’s a catch: not all contributors bring equal value to the table. Some actors possess greater capacity to innovate than others.
By Sarah Brown, Journal Manager with Dr. Elizabeth Koebele, co-editor
The theme of this quarter’s highlights collection from Policy & Politics is Policy Feedback Theory (PFT), an increasingly popular theory of the policy process that is featuring more regularly on public policy syllabi. In a nutshell, PFT considers how past policies (re)shape the political context in which new policies are formed.
Our first article in this collection has been one of our most popular and highly cited since its publication in 2022: New pathways to paradigm change in public policy: Combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback by Sebastian Sewerin, Benjamin Cashore and Michael Howlett. Here, the authors argue that policy science scholarship is better at explaining policy change in retrospect, rather than formulating forward-looking recommendations about how to achieve major or paradigmatic change. Potentially even more concerning, existing scholarship emphasises the importance of external shocks in initiating major policy change, which doesn’t augur well for proactively tackling the major problems of our time such as climate change. In their article, the authors identify two conceptual and theoretical gaps that might limit how policy scholars think about major or paradigmatic change: 1) a lack of shared understanding of what ‘policy change’ is, and 2) a focus on (changing) policies in isolation rather than on policies as part of complex policy mixes. Against this background, they argue that combining insights from policy design, policy mix and policy feedback literature allows us to identify other pathways towards initiating and achieving policy change.
Members of the media and the US president. Joe Biden himself, have suggested that Americans’ experience with COVID-19 and federal response policy may have increased support for social welfare. Much to their credit, our recent scholarly research into this question which has just been published in our article for Policy & Politics found evidence that this may be the case.
Quarterly highlights collection 3rd May – 31st July 2022
In this quarter’s highlights collection, we feature three articles that provide a range of insights from different contexts on the politics of governance. Continue reading →
When we wrote this blog, Ukraine had not yet been invaded by Russia. However, it would feel inappropriate to us to publish this blog without acknowledging it. We are aware that we are no experts in the field of geopolitics or international relations. However, we cannot help but remark that the strategies we found in our article have become amplified in the rhetoric that surrounds the war in Ukraine. Indeed, the epic-tragic mechanism is part and parcel of democratic processes – as we show in our article – but it is also a part of incomparably worse phenomena such as (threats of) war. Continue reading →
Innovation in the public sector has climbed to the top of government agendas with ambitions to make public administration flexible in the face of societal ruptures. There is a growing body of research which tries to identify how institutions and systems respond to surprises, uncertainty and errors. Studies also provide insights on how different institutional conditions enable individuals and organisations to respond to profound change. In my recent article in Policy & Politics, I argue that organisation theory may help to serve as a bridge between theory and practice linking scholarship to the realities of practice, concerned not just with how things are, but how things might be. Given certain goals, such as innovation in public organisations, organisation designers would thus be capable of recommending structural solutions. Continue reading →
The study of policy design has been of long-standing interest to policy scholars. Considering the renewed attention to researching policy design in the last decade, it is an opportune time to forge new pathways for developing this critical line of scholarship. In their recent article in Policy & Politics, authors Saba Siddiki and Cali Curley seek to take stock of the developments in policy design research, especially as they coincide with other developments in the study of the policy process. Continue reading →
Quarterly highlights collection 3rd May – 31st July 2022
Sarah van Duijn, Duco Bannink & Henk Nies
Saba Siddiki and Cali Curley
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 