Political demand and policy advice: a framework for analysis

ABSTRACT

In the policy advice literature, there has been two main “waves” of research focus. In the first wave, the focus of scholarly attention tended to focus on single policy advice actors. A key innovation was offered by Halligan, who sought to frame policy advice within a policy advisory system, with a focus on government control and location. In later research, Craft and Wilder called for a “second wave” of research which also sought to integrate factors such as policy content, context, ideational compatibility but also reflect the increasingly polycentric advice landscape. This article contributes to the second wave drawing attention to a key element of the institutional dynamics of policy advice systems, namely the issue of political “demand”. A core argument offered in this article is that the dynamics of demand need to be interrogated more fully, and be given greater prominence in current understandings of PAS dynamics. The net effect of marginalizing “demand” factors is that it can de-politicize the extent and nature of advice-giving, and reduce it to a seeming technocratic exchange. To expand our understanding of demand, this paper offers a framework for understanding the dynamics of demand within policy advice systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Political demand
• policy advice
• policy advisory systems
• governance
• public value
• politicisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rob Manwaring is a Senior Lecturer at the College of Government, Business and Law, Flinders University, Adelaide. His research interest includes public policy, political parties and social democratic and labour politics. His latest edited volume (with Paul Kennedy) is Why the Left Loses: The Decline of the Centre-left in Comparative Perspective (Policy Press, 2018).

ORCID

Rob Manwaring http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3853-9250