LIST OF PANELS

Panel Description (360/500) {can be as short as 300}

This panel welcomes papers that engage with the theme of policy advice and its corresponding policy work. We welcome papers that explore the international, national, or local and domain specific aspects of policy advice and focus on either specific sets of actors or take systems approaches.  Within the public policy literature the role of policy advice has steadily increased over the past 25 years. This has led to a number of important practical and theoretical developments such as Policy Advisory Systems (Craft and Halligan 2020; Diamond 2020), a refinement of our understanding of styles of policy advice (Aubin and Brans 2021), the role of external advisors (Galanti and Lippi 2022; Migone et al. 2022), and the contributions of individual advisors analyzed across multiple dimensions  including experts, public servants, think tanks, consultants, and politicians and their appointed political staffs (Howlett and Walker 2012; Bertelli 2016). These multiple areas of research have contributed much to our understanding of the activities, motivations, processes and framing of policy advice across mainly countries with growing attention to a broader and more diverse array of countries, regions, and institutional models has emerged (Hustedt 2019; Howlett 2019).

Nonetheless, major questions remain about how influence is gained, lost, and exercised in these advisory systems, and if patterns of influence vary by regimes, sectors and countries. Further, much less has been done to contribute to a dynamic understanding of the way in which policy advisors, or entire advisory systems, have either changed or stayed the course in their activity. A diachronic approach to policy advice, written large to encompass the study of change and continuity in the advisory ecosystem not just at the organizational level, but also in discussing the practices, processes and relations that shape this field of knowledge production, selection, and use, promises to provide a richer and much needed understanding of the very bases through which policy advice emerges and is used. Of particular relevance to this field should be the analysis of the effects that this dynamic evolution has had on the nature of knowledge, the role of policy advisors (both within and outside of public service) and the way in which the policy work ecosystem has been structured.

Works Cited

Aubin, David, and Marleen Brans. 2021. “Styles of Policy Advice: A Typology for Comparing the Standard Operating Procedures for the Provision of Policy Advice.” In The Routledge Handbook of Policy Styles, edited by Michael Howlett and Jale Tosun, 286–300. London ; New York: Routledge.

Bertelli, Anthony M. 2016. “Who Are the Policy Workers, and What Are They Doing? Citizen’s Heuristics and Democratic Accountability in Complex Governance.” Public Performance & Management Review 40 (2): 208–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/15309576.2016.1180306.

Craft, Jonathan, and John Halligan. 2020. Advising Governments in the Westminster Tradition: Policy Advisory Systems in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108377133.

Diamond, Patrick. 2020. “Polycentric Governance and Policy Advice: Lessons from Whitehall Policy Advisory Systems.” Policy & Politics 48 (4): 563–81. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557320X15870482509817.

Galanti, Maria Tullia, and Andrea Lippi. 2022. “Government Research Institutes in the Italian Policy Advisory System.” International Review of Administrative Sciences, February, 00208523211070510. https://doi.org/10.1177/00208523211070510.

Howlett, Michael. 2019. “Comparing Policy Advisory Systems beyond the OECD: Models, Dynamics and the Second-Generation Research Agenda.” Policy Studies 40 (3–4): 241–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2018.1557626.

Howlett, Michael, and Richard M. Walker. 2012. “Public Managers in the Policy Process: More Evidence on the Missing Variable?” Policy Studies Journal 40 (2): 211–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0072.2012.00450.x.

Hustedt, Thurid. 2019. “Studying Policy Advisory Systems: Beyond the Westminster-Bias?” Policy Studies 40 (3–4): 260–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2018.1557627.

Migone, Andrea, Michael R. McGregor, Kathy Brock, and Michael Howlett. 2022. “Super-Users and Hyper-Experts in the Provision of Policy Advice: Evidence from a Survey of Canadian Academics.” European Policy Analysis n/a (n/a). https://doi.org/10.1002/epa2.1139.

The Chairs are calling for papers that will address and explore the dynamic nature of policy advice. The areas of contribution for individual papers are open but we are particularly interested in contributions that will discuss the nature of influence linked to policy advice or engage with themes of stability or change in policy advice either in terms of organizational shifts, modifications in the way in which policy advice is created, vetted, chosen and utilized, analyses of the practical trajectories that policy advisors have followed in interfacing with decision-makers, and so forth.

We welcome paper proposals at various levels of the analytical space, from theoretical contributions, to comparative analyses of different policy sectors, analyses of the same policy sector/domain across multiple jurisdictions, and case studies exploring in depth the nature of policy advice in specific policy domains.

At the same time, the panel is open to discussion of policy advice from a diverse set of perspectives, which include analyses of policy advisors in public sector, private practice, and within the political sphere. We also are open to diverse organizational structures being analyzed, such as policy labs, departments, consulting companies, NGOs and think tanks. We encourage submissions that take a policy sector or domain approach or focus on methodological and theoretical approaches to situating policy advice within public policy theories more generally

The Chairs will utilize this panel as the starting point for a special issue in a scientific journal in the discipline.