As you plan reading lists for the coming academic year, this collection of recent articles offers fresh insights for units on emotions in public policy, the politics of environmental policy, and governance networks. Each article draws on cutting-edge empirical research combined with conceptual innovation, making them ideal for both undergraduate and postgraduate modules exploring the politics of policymaking.
We hope these suggestions save you time and effort in mining recent articles while ensuring your course materials reflect the latest research from the frontiers of the discipline.
Policy & Politics has been publishing innovative works at the intersection of public policy and politics for over 50 years. It is a world-leading, top quartile journal that is committed to advancing scholarly understanding of the dynamics of policy-making and implementation. By exploring the interplay between political actors, governing institutions and policy issues, the journal contributes to building policy process theory; and by reflecting on the evolving context in which these interactions occur, it provides timely and fresh insights into the influence of politics on policy and vice versa.
The journal’s co-editors invite proposals for a special issue that will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the nexus of public policy and politics.The journal only has space to publish one special issue each year, so this is a competitive process.
To be successful, proposals need to offer a coherent set of excellent original research articles that will reframe or develop knowledge on a topic that is at the leading edge of current debates and is clearly relevant to the journal’s worldwide readership. Proposals may include a mixture of theoretical, conceptual and empirical cases and a range of research methods, and must demonstrate how they will make a significant and lasting contribution to the field.
Special issues of this scope generally take at least eighteen months to two years from the acceptance of a proposal through to final publication. In return, we offer constructive and clear editorial guidance throughout the development process to optimise its readership and impact. In addition, we undertake significant article-level marketing for special issues, as we publish one of the most widely read journal blogs in the discipline and have the highest X (Twitter) following of all the journals in this field as well as our more recent presence on BlueSky. Our special issues are also eligible for consideration for publication in book form in the Policy & Politics series published by Policy Press.
The timetable for evaluating proposals is set out below:
Call for proposals open; submit to mailto:sarah.brown@bristol.ac.uk
2nd January 2025
Deadline for submitting proposals to P&P
28th February 2025
Decision on selection of one proposal announced by P&P
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?
by 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.
Public policy research is rife with questions about policymaking processes and outcomes. Yet, perhaps none as quintessential as – why do policy actors do what they do? In my recent article published in Policy & Politics, I explore this question through the lens of policy learning. In the early days of policy sciences, this question was predominantly answered from a lens of “powering”. This meant that policymaking was largely understood as an outcome of power struggles between competing factions, with winners and losers. Subsequently, pioneers of contemporary policy sciences such as Harold Lasswell, Karl Deutsch, John Dewey, and Hugh Heclo, among others, paved the way for a different explanatory lens: “puzzling”. In this view, rather than only competing for power, what drives and fuels policymaking is also actors’ puzzling or wondering about how to solve policy problems, in other words, how they “learn” in an attempt to develop solutions to emerging problems. This gave rise to what is now known as the discipline of policy learning, focused on policy actors’ pursuit, and processing of policy related information and knowledge in an attempt to find solutions to different policy problems. This is not limited to technical problems like healthcare, natural disasters, technology, and the economy, but also includes political and social challenges.
This puzzling lens substantively contributed to our understanding of the policy process, helping us better answer the questions of why policy actors do what they do, and why the policy process behaves this or that way. Theoretical developments over the past decades helped advance policy learning to the ranks of policymaking ontologies. i.e., positioning it as a fundamental behaviour and omnipresent process that shapes policymaking. These theoretical developments materialised across various ontological-epistemological approaches from mechanistic, positivist, interpretivist, to social constructivist.
However, despite the fact that puzzling was initially conceived as a supplementary (not an alternative) understanding to the then-dominant powering-based view of policymaking, a schism between puzzling and powering perspectives in policy learning literature has grown over the decades, rendering them almost mutually exclusive. As a result, the predominant view of agency in policy learning research has followed through this trend, becoming rather learner centric. This mainly focused on how policy actors exercise their agency as learners of policy lessons. For example, the research in this area expounds how actors pursue and process information and knowledge about policy problems, how their beliefs, biases, and cognitive structure influence what they learn and what lessons come out of this learning process. However, little attention has been paid to how policy actors exercise their agency and deploy their power to shape and direct the policy learning process, in other words, the influence of powering within the puzzling process.
All articles featured in this blog post are free to access until 31 October 2024
It’s that time of year again when course syllabi are updated with fresh research. We hope to make this easier with the essential reading list below, which features some of the most significant research relevant to public policy students that we’ve published over the last year. We feature nine articles and a special issue for teaching topical themes such as health policy, policy learning and advocacy. All articles are ideal for Public Policy, Politics and Social Policy classes alike.
As always, we welcome your feedback on the articles featured, as well as future unit topics you’d like to see covered! Let us know what you’re teaching and how we can help!
Our first theme focuses on a substantive policy area that is increasingly taught in public and social policy courses, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and on-going climate crisis: health policy.
Our first article, “Analysing the ‘follow the science’ rhetoric of government responses to COVID-19” by Margaret Macaulay and colleagues, has been one of the most widely read and cited articles of last year and was the winner of our Best Paper prize for 2023. This is not surprising, as it advances bold and well evidenced claims on a hot topic in public health governance. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic – and in the face of widespread anxiety and uncertainty – governments’ mantra that they were “just following the science” was meant to reassure the public that decisions about pandemic responses were being directed by the best available scientific evidence. However, the authors claim that making policy decisions based only on scientific evidence is impossible (if only because ‘the science’ is always contested) and undemocratic (because governments are elected to balance a range of priorities and interests in their decisions). Claiming to be “just following the science” therefore represents an abdication of responsibility by politicians.
Our second featured article, entitled What types of evidence persuade actors in a complex policy system? by Geoff Bates and colleagues, explores the use of evidence to influence different groups across the urban development system to think more about health outcomes in their decisions. Their three key findings are: (i) evidence-based narratives have wide appeal; (ii) credibility of evidence is critical; and (iii) many stakeholders have priorities other than health, such as economic considerations. The authors conclude that these insights can be used to frame and present evidence that meets the requirements of different urban development stakeholders and persuade them to think more about how the quality of urban environments affects health outcomes.
by Nadège Carlier, David Aubin, and Stéphane Moyson
In our recent article published in Policy & Politics as part of a special issue on Policy Learning: Types, Mechanisms and Effects, we researched the relative effects of diversity on collective learning in local collaborative networks in Belgium. Collaborative networks represent horizontal structures in public governance that facilitate interactions among diverse stakeholders, including civil servants, businesses, and citizens. These networks play a crucial role in fostering coherence, comprehensiveness, and innovation in cross-cutting public policies such as climate initiatives. However, achieving these benefits is particularly challenging in the aftermath of fragmented public action resulting from new public management reforms. To harness the advantages of collaboration, collective learning — defined as the broadened and mutual understanding of public issues resulting from repeated social interactions — is indispensable but not spontaneous. It requires participants within collaborative networks to update their beliefs and develop a deeper understanding of each other’s constraints, interests, and ideas. The diversity of participants within these networks presents learning opportunities that, while significant, do not always translate into tangible learning outcomes.
To explore how diversity contributes to collective learning in collaborative networks, our study focused on two networks within the city administration of Schaerbeek, Belgium. The first network centred on implementing sustainable procurement practices, while the second aimed to combat discrimination and promote diversity within the municipality. Over a span of approximately three years, public servants from various departments collaborated, exchanged information, and developed public policies.
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.
Each time a crisis hits, be it a natural disaster, pandemic or a corruption scandal, several ad hoc units are assembled by governments for quick action, only to be dismantled soon after the crisis becomes manageable or settles. Are these groups deployed as a signal of assurance to the public that indeed some action is being taken, or to bypass long-drawn bureaucratic processes in favour of quick action or to efficiently assemble and utilise resources under crisis? Perhaps all of the above. The possibilities of how ad hoc groups can be structured and the range of functions these can offer are plenty.
The term ‘adhocracy’ first featured in the book titled ‘The Temporary Society’ (Bennis and Slater, 1968) to describe flexible, unstructured and adaptable organisational models, which operated in stark contrast to a typical bureaucracy. Owing to their transient nature, policy learning opportunities brought about by ad hoc groups, have received little attention in public policy literature. Our new article in Policy and Politics presents insights from an exploratory study to understand the diverse institutional roles played by ad hoc groups deployed during crisis.
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 