In a recent article published in Policy & Politics, Georg Wenzelburger explores how a landmark criminal justice reform in Virginia during the 1990s combined apparently contradictory approaches to sentencing—and why that matters today.
The reform in question abolished parole and sharply increased sentences for violent offenders—hallmarks of a “tough on crime” agenda. But, surprisingly, it also introduced data-driven risk assessments to help divert non-violent offenders away from prison. This mix of punitive and preventative measures was unusual for the time and has since played a key role in the rise of more measured, evidence-informed criminal justice reforms in the United States.
New research highlights the subtle but persistent role of stigma in shaping public support for welfare benefits.
Public support for welfare benefits often hinges on perceptions of who is “deserving.” Are recipients viewed as victims of circumstance—or as somehow responsible for their own misfortune? A new Policy & Politics article by Kaila Witkowski and Stephen R. Neely asks how HIV stigma may influence these judgements, with important implications for social policy.
Policy actors often clash during policy processes, especially in contentious areas like climate change, gun control, and healthcare reform. These actors—including government agencies, private companies, and interest groups—frequently vie for influence, and political rivalries can lead to gridlock or policy failure. Understanding the drivers of these conflicts and how to manage them is crucial in order to propose strategies that can mitigate their effects, and enhance network coordination.
In our recent article published in Policy & Politics, we explore the causes of political competition and propose strategies for reducing it, using the case of local fracking policy processes in New York as an example. The fracking debate involves a wide range of actors, such as landowners, media organisations, oil and gas associations, environmental groups, city agencies, local governments, and legal organisations—all competing over whether fracking should be permitted in the state. But what drives these actors to clash so intensely? We explore the underlying reasons for these clashes, investigating whether competition arises from shared struggles for scarce resources, similar structural positions in resource-sharing relationships, differing policy beliefs or all three.
Why do interest groups mobilise to change the design of international institutions? The existing research on this topic expects moments when there is a peak in political action, but generally does not consider how such peaks might impact future mobilisations. To fill this gap, my recent article published in Policy & Politics entitled Policy feedback and the politics of trade agreements, seeks to provide an explanation for the conditions under which interest groups mobilise around trade policies using a policy feedback framework.
In particular, I argue that interest groups are more likely to mobilise around polarising (aspects of) trade policy when they have had bad experiences with them before. In other words—organisations are more likely to take action when they have reason to believe that a particular policy will harm their constituents or goals because they have engaged in political learning.
In our recent article published in Policy & Politics, entitled “Critical Race Theory, Policy Ambiguity, & Implementation: A Multiple Streams Framework Analysis,” we examine how the United States’ first state-level ban on Critical Race Theory in public education (HB 377 passed in April 2020 by the Idaho state legislature) rose to the agenda, was passed into law, and then impacted universities during implementation. This analysis looks at both the negative but often intangible impacts of this type of legislation on institutions of higher education, as well as at the policy process and how problem framing early on impacts implementation later.
We argue that HB 377 was motivated by a perceived and likely fabricated “indoctrination” problem, which is an outcropping of American culture wars that have placed higher education in the center of a debate about how cultural values and beliefs are propagated in society and the responsibilities of institutions in shaping them. Critics of higher education manufactured a moral panic around liberal “indoctrination” that relied on spurious evidence, such as unverified anecdotes and a hoax event. This was enough to push a ban on Critical Race Theory on to the legislation agenda in Idaho with enough momentum for it to become law. However, that problem framing began to unravel by the time university faculty were set to implement it, especially as it became clear that the alleged evidence of indoctrination did not actually exist. This, coupled with the fact that faculty never really accepted that indoctrination was occurring on campuses to begin with, ultimately left them without a clear understanding of what the purpose of the new law was or how to respond to it. Unsurprisingly, divergent interpretations and divergent behaviors emerged as individuals were left to “figure it out” on their own. The fallout from the law’s passing also led to the sowing of distrust among faculty and administrators as many faculty felt they were left on the front-lines of a frightening culture war without adequate support from leadership.
Special issue blog series on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis
Peter Aagaard, Sevasti Chatzopoulou, and Birgitte Poulsen
Crisis seems to be everywhere these days. Where there is crisis, there is crisis management. And where there is crisis management, there are experts that advise politicians in decision-making. However, how does this sustained pressure from crises affect relationships between experts and politicians? Has expertise increasingly become politicised? Or do we see more scientisation of politics? And do relationships between experts and politicians vary across different political systems? These are all central questions addressed in our recently published article on Analysing expert advice on political decisions in times of crisis. They are important questions, because they deal with the legitimacy of decision-making and public sense-making in the era of recurring crises.
In our article, we study how a crisis, like COVID-19, affected expert–politician relationships in Denmark, Greece, and the United States. Despite their differences, there were traces of the politicisation of expertise in all three cases. However, experts did not hold sway over elected politicians in any of the countries. In all three countries politicians relied on science selectively (also as partisan expertise) to publicly legitimise their strategies and decisions. The frontstage influence of experts played a minor but significant part across all three cases. Experts were aware of their role in the media during the crisis, often feeling a need to defend their science, perhaps even in opposition to their own government. (Perhaps you remember Fauci?)
Studies have shown that racial prejudice in the United States have led to lower levels of public support for redistribution. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased public attention on the essential role of low-income workers in society. During the pandemic, many low-income workers such as janitors were classified as essential to the basic functioning of American society, and they continued to carry out on-site jobs, putting their health at risk. Media outlets have hailed low-wage essential workers as heroes, celebrating them for their selflessness in the midst of a crisis. Has this increased attention on low-income workers fostered public support for redistribution?
In our recent article in Policy & Politics, our study examines whether the increased awareness of low-income workers’ societal contributions increases public support for redistribution. We further investigate whether this increased awareness mitigates racial bias known to inhibit broad public support for redistribution. In order to study this, we conducted two survey experiments in which we varied the information about a hypothetical low-income worker. In particular, we varied the emphasis on the worker’s essential role and the race of the worker to see whether these variations change the way Americans evaluate how deserving this individual is of benefits from various welfare programmes.
Our findings demonstrate that portraying a worker as an essential worker increases survey respondents’ appreciation of the worker’s contribution to society and their support for pandemic-related benefits. However, it did not increase overall support for redistribution. In addition, while we found negative effects of a Latino cue, particularly among white respondents, this effect weakened when information about the workers’ work ethic and other characteristics was provided. Additionally, contrary to well-established findings of the negative impact caused by stereotyping of Black individuals, we found that portraying a worker as Black did not decrease support for redistribution.
Our research makes an important contribution to understanding public support for redistribution. While some evidence suggests the weaker role of social affinity in structuring public support for welfare programmes during the pandemic, our results show that racial considerations are still central to welfare policy preferences, even when welfare beneficiaries were portrayed as essential workers, although the effect varies across different racial groups. Additionally, this study has important implications for public communication about government social welfare programmes, showing that emphasising the characteristics of welfare recipients to highlight their work ethic can be effective in increasing public support for redistribution.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at Hyun Kim, J., Kuk, J., & Kweon, Y. (2024). Did low-income essential workers during COVID-19 increase public support for redistribution?. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2024). Retrieved Jan 11, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000008
If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested to read: Calderaro, C. (2023). The racialisation of sexism: how race frames shape anti-street harassment policies in Britain and France. Policy & Politics, 51(3), 413-438. Retrieved Jan 11, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16832763188290
Ramírez, V., & Velázquez Leyer, R. (2023). The impact of self-reinforcing and self-undermining policy feedback on Mexican social policy: the end of the conditional cash transfer programme. Policy & Politics, 51(3), 508-529 from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16813697853773
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.
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 