policymaking

Review of Policy & Politics in 2025 and happy holidays!

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by the P&P editorial team: Chris Weible, Allegra Fullerton, Oscar Berglund, Elizabeth Koebele, Kristin Taylor, Claire Dunlop & Sarah Brown

A photo of the Policy & Politics editorial team: 5 women and 2 men stood outside in front of some grass, trees, and a building

Dear authors, reviewers, Editorial Board members, Early Career Editorial Board members, readers, and friends of Policy & Politics,

As 2025 draws to a close, we want to extend our sincere thanks to all of you. Your scholarship, rigour and sustained engagement have played a central role in making this another strong year for the journal and the blog. In this final blog of 2025, we reflect on P&P’s achievements this year, feature our most popular blog in 2025, showcase the highest number of open access articles we’ve published this year, and consider the year to come with gratitude for our community and hope for the future of the journal and its contribution to policy scholarship.

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NEW SPECIAL ISSUE BLOG SERIES ON POLICY EXPERTISE IN TIMES OF CRISIS. BLOG 6: Did the Covid-19 pandemic cause enduring change in the roles of experts in politics?

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Special issue blog series on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis

Kennet Lynggaard, Theofanis Exadaktylos, Mads Jensen & Michael Kluth

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, many of us would probably have been a little hesitant on the exact field of work, or even unaware of the existence, of experts such as a mathematical virologist or experimental epidemiologist. Well into the pandemic, after several lockdowns and reopening of societies, highly specialised concepts from virology and epidemiology had entered everyday conversations, just like experts involved in handling the pandemic have become household names and, in many countries, even minor celebrities.  

Our article, just published in Policy & Politics, assesses the role for experts during the various stages of the pandemic, based on evidence collected from a survey of comparative politics scholars from 31 European countries in 2022, which you can find more detail on in the book: Governments’ Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic in Europe: Navigating the Perfect Storm 2023. In our P&P article, we analysed the role of experts during the processes of depoliticisation and re-politicisation at each stage of the pandemic, alongside their influence on government responses to the pandemic. We propose a new typology, classifying four different ideal types of roles for experts: leading, antagonistic, managerial, and auxiliary – see figure 1.

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Why Study Sub-national Policy Advisory Systems?

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by Andrew Connell, James Downe, Hannah Durrant, Eleanor MacKillop and Steve Martin


The study of Policy Advisory Systems sheds light on the wider network of actors, beyond government, who are involved in generating evidence that informs policy. Early studies of Policy Advisory Systems focused on national governments in Anglophone countries. More recently the concept has been reinvigorated by research in European countries and the global South. But there is a dearth of studies of Policy Advisory Systems at sub-national level.

Our recent research article, entitled Externalising policy advice within subnational governments, addressed this gap by using the concept of a Policy Advisory System to examine the role of a knowledge brokering organisation: the Wales Centre for Public Policy (WCPP). The WCPP provides ministers in the devolved Welsh Government with independent evidence and expertise.

Our study revealed significant differences in the ways that this initiative to externalise policy advice in Wales has played out compared to the results reported by previous studies of externalising policy advice in other settings. And we trace the differences we observed to three key features of the historical, institutional and political context in which the Welsh Government operates.

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Policy & Politics Highlights collection on Transformational Change in Public Policy Special Issue: free to access November 2022 – January 2023

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Sarah Brown

Sarah_Brown_credit_Evelyn_Sturdy

This quarter’s highlights collection focuses on three of our most widely read and cited articles this year. All three were featured in our special issue published in July on Transformational Change in Public Policy which was guest edited by our co-editors: Oscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop, Elizabeth Koebele and Chris Weible.

Our first article is the introduction to the special issue entitled Transformational change through Public Policy written by our four co-editors.

The authors highlight how significant time and effort has been spent seeking to understand policy change around the major societal issues we face. Yet their findings show that most change tends to be incremental. The consequent challenge they set out is whether or not public policy scholarship is up to the job of developing a coherent research programme to build knowledge and enable necessary, positive transformational change.

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Updating your course reading lists? Check out our essential reading recommendations for teaching Public Participation, Gender and the Policy Process, and Policy Innovation from Policy & Politics

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Elizabeth SarahElizabeth Koebele with Sarah Brown

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 →

New Special Issue Blog Series : Blog 3 – Lessons from policy theories for the pursuit of equity in health, education and gender policy

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Special issue blog series on Transformational Change through Public Policy.

 

CairneyPaul Cairney, Emily St.Denny, Sean Kippin, Heather Mitchell

Could policy theories help to understand and facilitate the pursuit of equity (or reduction of unfair inequalities)? We are producing a series of literature reviews to help answer that question, beginning with the study of equity policy and policymaking in health, education, and gender research, which has just been published in Policy & Politics. Continue reading →

Policy & Politics Highlights collection November 2021 – January 2022 – all articles included are free to access

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Sarah_Brown_credit_Evelyn_Sturdy
Image credit: Evelyn Sturdy at Unsplash

Sarah Brown
Journal Manager, Policy & Politics

This quarter’s collection highlights three of our most popular and highly cited articles in 2021 which, based on their readership and citation levels, have clearly made an important contribution to their fields.

The first article, A theoretical framework for studying the co-creation of innovative solutions and public value, forms an introduction to the special issue on co-creation in public policy and governance, guest edited by Jacob Torfing, Ewan Ferlie, Tina Jukić and Edoardo Ongaro, published in April 2021. The central proposition is that the concept of public value carries unexploited potential as a ‘game changer’ for advancing the co-creation of innovative solutions in the public sector. They argue that it allows us to appreciate the many different public and private actors, including service users, citizens and civil society organisations, which can contribute to the production of public value. The authors quip that co-creation is the “new black” because it mobilises societal resources, enhances innovation and builds joint ownership over new public value outcomes. Continue reading →

SPECIAL ISSUE BLOG SERIES: Blog 6 – The maturing of Behavioural Public Policy: A constructive proposal

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Special issue blog series on advancing our understanding of the politics behind nudge and the ‘behavioural insights’ trend in public policy.

Ewert and LoerBenjamin Ewert and Kathrin Loer

There is a controversial debate going on about using public policy to influence people’s behaviour. The discussion becomes particularly heated when behavioural public policy is accused of being manipulative or opaque. Scholarly thinking on Behavioural Public Policy (BPP) as a relatively new policy concept that has been established in recent years is not neutral but influenced by heuristics and biases. BPP is often equated with “nudge”, a notion that goes back to Thaler’s and Sunstein’s definition of the concept in 2008. Moreover, BPP has not integrated with a range of behavioural sciences but instead has been associated with rather restricted insights from behavioural economics and psychology, by behavioural scientists such as Kahneman, Tversky and Thaler. Indeed the fact that BPP suffers from inherent biases is somewhat ironic since the concept’s main claim is precisely to disclose the heuristics and biases that influence human behaviour and to counteract them by behaviourally informed policy designs. That’s the theory. However, in practice, BPP is pretty much determined by “nudge theory”, a fact that, on the one hand, has contributed to the rapid popularisation of the policy concept but, on the other hand, has constantly fuelled criticisms predominantly about its lack of understanding of how people’s behaviour is influenced by social contexts (e.g. families, communities and place of employment) and triggered by situational effects (e.g. peer-group pressure). Continue reading →

Comparing citizen and policymaker perceptions of deliberative democratic innovations

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koskimaa and rapeliVesa Koskimaa and Lauri Rapeli

It seems that people are growing increasingly disappointed with how representative democracy functions. A big part of the problem is arguably a de-attachment of policymakers from citizens’ everyday problems, which prompts citizens to react by turning their backs on conventional politics. Many scholars and other observers have turned to democratic innovations for solutions on how the link between democratic publics and their democratic leaders could be improved. Innovations based on the theory of deliberative democracy have probably received most attention by scholars and practitioners. Deliberative democracy refers to a decision-making process, which emphasizes informed, reflexive and egalitarian interpersonal communication.

To put theory into practice, mini-publics, like citizen initiative reviews, juries and assemblies have been widely used in democracies across the world. In these deliberative groups, randomly selected individuals discuss and decide upon a specific political issue on the basis of best expert knowledge and argumentation. A considerable number of studies have discussed theoretically whether deliberative bodies could fix the problems of contemporary representative democracy. Other studies have used experimental methods to examine the internal proceedings and effects of these deliberations. What has, however, almost totally been ignored by scholars are the views of policy-making elites, whose opinions on democracy eventually determine the shape of new democratic institutions. Continue reading →