LIST OF PANELS

Once upon a time they may have lived in the dark, but in recent years political advisers – variously described as special advisers, ministerial advisers or exempt staff – have attracted a good deal of academic attention. However, the connections between the work being done on political advisers and proximate policy theories remain substantially under-articulated. In this panel we wish to make those linkages explicit by firmly locating the empirical and theoretical study of political advisers in a context set by extant literatures concerning policy work and theory. These include but are not limited to policy advisory activity, the construction and management of policy agendas, formulation, and decision-making and implementation studies. In that context, this panel calls for papers that explicitly connect an empirical, methodological and/or theoretical focus on political advisers with theories of the wider policy process. Papers are also welcome that seek to reappraise and refine existing policy process theory through the lens of political advisers, or examine related policy dynamics including policy learning and change, policy failure, and the interplay between different kinds of policy actors – administrative, political, and non-governmental – in the context of the policy process. In the interests of deepening and broadening the foundations of our field, we also welcome new empirical contributions, and papers elaborating methodological or theoretical means of understanding the immediacy of life on the ground for political advisers.

Once upon a time they may have lived in the dark, but in recent years political advisers – variously described as special advisers, ministerial advisers or exempt staff – have attracted a good deal of academic attention. The first generation of research focused predominantly on empirical matters; these descriptively rich explorations of life on the ground for political advisers have since been complemented by a more explicit theoretical turn in the field. Accordingly, researchers with empirical and/or theoretical interests in political advisers are contributing new insights to and helping to ‘thicken’ understandings generated by more established policy literatures. However, the connections between the work being done on advisers and those proximate policy theories remain substantially under-articulated. In this panel we wish to make those linkages explicit by firmly locating the empirical and theoretical study of political advisers in a context set by extant theories of the policy process (writ large). We seek to forge ties between the scholarship on political advisers and, for instance, those concerning various forms of policy work and theory. These include but are not limited to policy advisory activity, the construction and management of policy agendas, formulation, and decision-making and implementation studies. Papers are also welcome that seek to reappraise and refine existing policy process theory through the lens of political advisers, or examine related policy dynamics including policy learning and change, policy failure, and the interplay between different kinds of policy actors – administrative, political, and non-governmental – in the context of the policy process. By bringing scholars from these proximate fields together we hope to build on the work begun by a successful panel held at the inaugural ICCP Conference in 2013 (papers from which are shortly to appear in a special edition of the International Journal of Public Administration). We anticipate that this panel will make at least two scholarly contributions. First, the fruitful collision of different perspectives will produce ‘layering’ effects. Specifically, the study of political advisers will be enhanced by virtue of standing in closer proximity to established policy theories; equally, those theories will be strengthened through the addition of the insights generated by the study of political advisers. Secondly, by using the policy process as the lens through which the policy work of advisers is viewed contributions will be encouraged from researchers focused on a range of political/administrative systems, including but not confined to those of the Westminster kind, and will help lay the foundations of a genuinely comparative literature on political advisers.