Social Movements and Social Policy: New Research Horizons

Across the globe, movements are confronting states and elites, challenging inequalities and mobilising for greater justice, a stronger voice, and progressive policy changes. In this article, I bridge the divide between Social Policy and the interdisciplinary field of Social Movement Studies. I examine how and why social movements, as actors in policy fields and social movement theories, matter for social policy. I argue that research on social movements as actors and engagement with social movement theories can open new horizons in Social Policy research by advancing our understanding of the politics of policy from a global perspective and strengthening our analytical and explanatory frameworks of agency, ideas, and power in the study of continuity and change of policy.

British counterterrorism, the international prohibition of torture, and the multiple streams framework

After years of violating the basic principles of human rights in the name of counterterrorism, western democracies have begun to implement extraterritorial safeguards that extend protections under the Convention against Torture to foreigners abroad. The case of the UK and the development of the ‘Principles’ in 2019, however, presents a particular puzzle to policymaking research, as it challenges traditional hypotheses regarding the opening of problem windows within the multiple streams framework. Accordingly, the UK presents an interesting case in which a powerful state willingly engaged in self-restraint, despite little electoral pressure to do so and a persistently high terrorist threat. Drawing on theory-building process-tracing, this article addresses this gap using data from semi-structured interviews with British policy experts to present a refined hypothesis, which can also be applied to policy fields of little public interest and processes of foreign policymaking.

I Am Woke

This praxis-based chapter explores advocacy in the English language teaching (ELT) field. The chapter introduces a new conceptualization of advocacy, the Critical Advocacy Framework, informed by Freire's critical consciousness (conscientização), Fanon's race (Black) consciousness, and Crenshaw's intersectionality paradigms. For critical advocacy praxis, this chapter integrates the “iron triangle” model from the American politics and public policy fields to highlight patron-client relationships between multilingual learners (MLs) advocates and stakeholders. This chapter highlights how the racially mixed author, a trained political scientist and newcomer to the ELT field, leveraged her Blackness, experiential and organizational knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) in a Machiavellian sense, to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) throughout a TESOL state affiliate. The chapter provides evidence-based practices and learning activities for MATESOL program administrators, pre-service, and in-service English teachers.

Truth and Post-Truth in Public Policy

The phenomenon of post-truth poses a problem for the public policy-oriented sciences, including policy analysis. Along with “fake news,” the post-truth denial of facts constitutes a major concern for numerous policy fields. Whereas a standard response is to call for more and better factual information, this Element shows that the effort to understand this phenomenon has to go beyond the emphasis on facts to include an understanding of the social meanings that get attached to facts in the political world of public policy. The challenge is thus seen to be as much about a politics of meaning as it is about epistemology. The analysis here supplements the examination of facts with an interpretive policy-analytic approach to gain a fuller understanding of post-truth. The importance of the interpretive perspective is illustrated by examining the policy arguments that have shaped policy controversies related to climate change and coronavirus denial.

How to make sense of citizen expertise in participatory projects?

This article proposes a pragmatist theorising of different repertoires of valuation as an analytical grid to understand how actors of participatory projects assess the value of citizen expert participation. It conducts justification analysis on interview data from 21 projects that engage citizens as lay experts in Finland to illustrate how this analytical approach helps explain the contradicting meanings assigned to the concept as well as the resulting possibilities for participation. The article identifies two main conflicts in which different justifications for citizen expertise become explicit: debates over who can be a citizen expert and what the scope of their participation should be. Our results show how in the Finnish context, industrial justifications are often used to bolster claims for the right to participate. However, the industrial value-base is also the most reoccurring object of critique, suggested to create a narrow and above-defined role of a citizen-engineer for the citizen experts. The article illustrates how the diverse justifications might lead to contradicting constructions of citizen expertise, contributing to conflicting expectations, ambiguous and tokenistic participation, and feelings of exclusion among policy actors. It argues for justification analysis as a tool to identify and compare these undergirding valuations across policy fields and contexts.

Populism as Communication: Political Campaigning on Facebook

We adopt the notion of populism as a communication phenomenon that includes typical elements of content and of style, moving away from actor-centered approaches towards a content-centered approach. Empirically, our study measures populism to varying degrees and forms in 3564 Facebook postings of political parties in France, Germany and the United Kingdom during the 2014 EU elections campaigns, the 2017 national parliamentary election campaigns, and a non-electoral period in 2018 in each country. The results show that populism is not a marginal phenomenon, but that it is present in about one fourth of all postings in some form; that there is variance between countries, party types, policy fields, and over time. While radical parties are very exclusionary towards out-groups on the radical right and very anti-elitist on the radical left and the radical right, this observation provides only a partial view of the multifaceted phenomenon of populism.

Meta-analysis of Collaboration and Performance: Moderating Tests of Sectoral Differences in Collaborative Performance

Over the past few decades, collaboration has flourished in the public administration and policy fields as a rational means to solve complex issues and improve public service performance. Through a meta-analysis of 26 studies with 251 effect sizes, this investigation provides novel perspectives for understanding the effects of different collaborative partnerships on performance. To test these mechanisms, we applied various social science theories, such as institutional theory, resource dependence theory, a resource-based view, and transaction cost theories. Our findings indicate that the overall effect of collaborative performance is positive and significant. Moreover, meta-regression results show that public–public collaboration results in better performance than public–nonprofit or public–business collaboration, while involving all three entity types in collaborative efforts yields similar outcomes to public–public collaboration. Several implications of these findings are outlined for researchers and practitioners.

Differentiated integration in the EU: What does Croatia want?

This article presents empirically substantiated answers on the salience of differentiated integration (DI) from the perspective of Croatian governments between 2004 and 2020. Considering DI’s relevance for the future of EU integration as well as the fact that DI was de facto adopted by the Croatian governments in order to maintain a healthy relationship with the EU, the main assumption is that DI – as a broad and multifaceted integration phenomenon – appears prominently in the domestic political discourse. By employing text mining and sentiment analysis on a corpus of 376 various governmental documents we answer, do governments talk about DI and specific DI mechanisms at a conceptual level? Which differentiated policy fields do they talk about most often? Our results show that DI has been – and remains – a low salience issue for Croatian governments over the last 15 years, which is surprising considering that over this period, Croatia consolidated its position in the EU in the shadow of the ‘polycrisis’, also thanks to DI.