by Sarah Brown

This edition of our quarterly highlights collection focuses on the role of evidence in policymaking. It’s a theme we’ve curated collections around regularly, but our readership figures for these articles remind us time and again how important our community find this topic.

So, our first article on this theme by authors Clementine Hill O’Connor, Katherine Smith, and Ellen Stewart explores the question of how to balance evidence with public preferences.

How can policy organisations deal with competing (and sometimes conflicting) imperatives to strengthen the role of evidence in policy, with simultaneous calls to better engage diverse publics? Academic research has much to say about both the value of evidence for policymaking to increase (or improve) the policymakers’ engagement with evidence AND investigating a wide range of methods through which publics can be involved in policymaking. Perhaps surprisingly, these contributions are rarely connected. This disconnect is the focus of Integrating Evidence and Public Engagement in Policy Work: An empirical examination of three UK policy organisations.

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