by Sarah Brown and Allegra Fullerton
Welcome to this quarter’s highlights collection featuring a range of our most popular, recent research on different aspects relating to gender policy. Whether you’re preparing to teach a unit on gender policy or are interested in keeping up to date with the latest research in that area, we hope you will find the articles we’ve featured of interest!
Continue readingBy Kate Mattocks
Governments around the world undertake policy experiments – temporary, often micro-level interventions – to try new things and ‘learn what works.’ But what makes an experiment successful? This is the question I explore in my recent article published in Policy & Politics.
Discussions of success are surprisingly absent from the literature. We might think of success as a positive hypothesis: i.e. achieving an expected result. But this doesn’t capture all of the possible outcomes of experiments, and it also doesn’t consider the process of carrying them out.
Continue readingby Catherine Needham and Emily Burn
When is a law not a law? When it gets passed into statute but never enacted. Lord Norton (a Conservative peer and expert on UK parliament) calls these cases ‘law but not law’. Such cases have been missed in the policy literature to date. Existing literature looks at the difficult process of policy design and policy making, taking it to the moment of legislative approval. Other literature takes it from the point of enactment to see how well the implementation fares. But there has been a failure to acknowledge a slim but important set of cases in which policies which gain legislative endorsement but are never enacted. A review by the UK House of Lords library found 480 such examples in the UK parliament between 1960 and 2020. In a system where the executive usually controls the legislative agenda and is not required to implement legislative mandates that it did not instigate (eg. Westminster in the UK), non-enactment represents a particular puzzle.
In our recent article in Policy and Politics, we explore the phenomenon of non-enacted policy through the example of long-term care funding in England. Two legislative interventions to reform long-term care funding in England have been abandoned prior to enactment. A package of reforms – including a cap on private liability for care costs and an increase in the means-test threshold – was passed into law in the Care Act 2014, but enactment was first delayed and then abandoned. A very similar reform package was then passed into law again in the Health and Care Act 2022, with implementation scheduled for 2023. This too was delayed and then abandoned.
Continue readingby Ringa Raudla, Egert Juuse, Vytautas Kuokštis, Aleksandrs Cepilovs, Matti Ylönen
Financial technologies (FinTech) used to be material for science fiction movies, but suddenly they are everywhere. In fact, people barely think of their novelty anymore when paying with their cell phones, or when they trade stocks, cryptocurrencies, or currencies with mobile apps that bypass traditional banks. FinTech can also be used for credit scoring, client profiling, robo-advising, and insurance, just to name some examples. An important question in public policy is: how should policy react to such pervasive technological transformations?
Given the systemic importance of the financial sector for the economy and the potential of the FinTech sector to contribute to employment and public revenue, governments’ policy stance towards FinTech is a topic of major importance. FinTech policy faces significant dilemmas when balancing risks and innovation, and the ensuing choices can profoundly affect financial systems and society. Hence, in choosing their national FinTech policy stances, governments are caught between competing pressures. They are expected to boost competition and innovation while containing risks, preventing the build-up of vulnerabilities, and avoiding reputational damage to a country’s financial system.
Continue readingby Sarah Brown, Journals Manager
The idea of innovation has become one of the most persistent and sought-after today. While too conceptually elusive to pin down to a single statement, innovation can be broadly understood as a process whereby new elements and approaches are introduced to existing ones, in an attempt to solve problems, add value, and contribute to knowledge. Being a problem-solving, value-oriented process, it is no surprise that the concept of innovation is increasingly finding footholds in different theoretical spaces within policy and political sciences, from collaborative arrangements, democratic practices, policy design and experimentation, to behavioural and cognitive theories. Within the public sector, innovation can be understood as the creation of new policies, services, advisory, governance and political arrangements, often leading to the development of novel shared views of what is acceptable and expected by the public as beneficiaries.
Intuitively, policy learning has a family resemblance to policy innovation. It seems almost self-evident that they should be considered together in the explanation of policy dynamics. Yet the two literatures have developed independently of each other. Studies which put them in conversation are few.
Our motivation then is simple.
Continue readingby Philipp Trein and Thenia Vagionaki
In our article entitled, “Why policy failure is a prerequisite for innovation in the public sector,” we explore the relationship between policy failure and innovation within public governance. Drawing inspiration from the “Innovator’s Dilemma,”—a theory from the management literature—we argue that the very nature of policymaking, characterized by myopia of voters, blame avoidance by decisionmakers, and the complexity (ill-structuredness) of societal challenges, has an inherent tendency to react with innovation only after failure of existing policies.
Our analysis implies that we need to be more critical of what the policy process can achieve in terms of public sector innovation. Cognitive limitations tend to lead to a misperception of problems and inaccurate assessment of risks by decision makers according to the “Innovator’s Dilemma”. This problem implies that true innovation (non-trivial policy changes) are unlikely to happen before an existing policy has failed visibly. However, our perspective does not want to paint a gloomy picture for public policy making but rather offers a more realistic interpretation of what public sector innovation can achieve. As a consequence, learning from experts in the policy process should be expected to correct failures in public sector problem-solving during the political process, rather than raise expectations beyond what is possible.
Continue readingby Sophie Jacquot
UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles
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.
Source: Extract from Equal Pay? Time to close the gap! (European Commission, November 2022, https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2022-11/equal_pay_day_factsheet_2022_en_1_0.pdf). Reproduction allowed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
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?
Continue reading
Daniel J. Mallinson
Since the 1960s, political scientists from across the globe have been studying how and why policies spread. This substantial body of research begs the question, what have we learned? My project aims to answer that question, at least in part. It finds both substantial growth in the literature and gaps that remain to be filled.
I conducted a meta-review of policy diffusion studies that focus on the American states. By casting a wide net using Google Scholar and Web of Science, I identified all (to my knowledge) studies published between 1990 and 2018 that referred to “policy diffusion” and “berry and berry.” Berry and Berry are important because their 1990 study of state lotteries introduced the unified model of policy diffusion. Essentially, this model combined the internal characteristics of states with influences external to the states to explain policy adoption. Over time, scholars also recognized that the attributes of the policy innovations themselves condition how far and how quickly they spread. Continue reading
Sarah Brown
Journal Manager, Policy & Politics
This quarter’s highlights collection focusses on the popular theme of policy diffusion, bringing new analyses offering fresh perspectives on this extensive area of scholarship.
In our first featured article on policy diffusion, Daniel Mallinson continues his efforts in offering the most comprehensive analysis to date on how policy innovation diffuses across American states. Although hundreds of articles have tackled the fundamental question of why innovative policies spread, none has fully grappled with the scope of their disparate results.
To fill that gap, this article presents a state-of-the-art systematic review and meta-analysis of how policy innovation flows from US state to US state and the average effects of commonly used variables in the study of policy diffusion. In doing so, it highlights important biases in the research and makes recommendations for addressing those biases and increasing international collaboration on policy innovation research and results. Continue reading
Sarah Brown,
Journal Manager of Policy & Politics
Policy & Politics Summer Highlights collection free to access from 1 May 2019 – 31 July 2019.
This quarter’s highlights collection from Policy & Politics showcases the best of the journal’s most topical research, retaining our hallmark focus on combining robust science coupled with a real-world relevance that resonates across our diverse readership.
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 