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.
Contemporary politics has become increasingly reliant on scientific knowledge. In evidence-based policymaking, science is invoked to address complex, ‘wicked’ problems. Yet, policymakers do not necessarily base decisions on the best-available evidence, and models of knowledge used in policymaking have long been criticised as simplistic.
Therefore, collaboration with non-scientific actors (so called ‘stakeholders’) has emerged as a possible way forward. The increasing emphasis on prolonged and formalised engagement of stakeholders in research projects is subjected to public expenditure justifications, improvement of the input, throughput and output of funded research to inform policymaking processes and address societal challenges. It also reflects the view that an effective response to these challenges requires multi-partner collaborations between academic experts and various interests and perspectives.
On both sides of the policy–science nexus, collaborative interactions are extended to include stakeholders to improve the impact (i.e. the usability and applicability) of knowledge. And while stakeholder involvement often follows this overarching justification, the question of stakeholder rationales for participating in these processes has previously received little scholarly attention. The scarce literature that does exist largely focuses on improving the transfer of knowledge outcomes of collaborative innovation, and knowledge production, rather than the involved actors’ interactions.
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 