Introduction: JCPA 20th Anniversary Issue

This Special Issue of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis marks its 20th anniversary. To celebrate the event and to stimulate discussion, we invited leading scholars in the field to reflect on comparative policy analysis, its theory and its practice, its faults and its possibilities, its past and its future. Their articles speak for themselves, and so we have chosen an unconventional format for this introductory essay. Rather than merely summarize the articles, we will engage with them, test and stretch some of their conclusions about comparative policy analysis. Then, as befits an academic journal in a reflective mood, we will outline our thoughts about what JCPA should avoid in the next 20 years, and what it might embrace. This is not an editorial statement or manifesto. Rather, it is a glance back at our infant and teenage years (and those of the field), with hopeful anticipation of the challenges and prospects of maturity. We also indulge in some reminiscence, the rare privilege of such anniversary celebrations (see articles by Geva-May and by Lynn).

The explicit rationale for including the particular articles selected for this Special Issue has been to encompass some of the main aspects of the comparative policy analysis domain. First, we identify the need for, and related trajectory of, comparative policy analysis in the last two decades (Geva-May et al.), then in Lynn and Malinowska we provide an illustration of different levels of comparison: international between nations, between policies – immigration and education ‒ and the application of comparative research methods and tools for a comparative policy analytic study. The four following articles seek to identify and address the past roots of comparative public policy and the present interconnections with political science (Guy Peters), public administration (Van de Walle and Brans) and public policy (Radin and Weimer; Howlett). Finally, Engeli, Rothmayer Allison and Montpetit look into the future promise of comparative policy analytic studies.

The Field of Comparative Policy Analysis: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Geva-May, Hoffman and Muhleisen, “20 Years of Comparative Policy Analysis: A Survey of the Field, and a Discussion of Topics and Methods in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis”

In 2018, the comparative analysis of public policy seems routine and even obvious. It is a fixture of the academic landscape, and is regularly reflected in papers, panels and sections of all of the leading international scholarly associations that even touch on the field, and certainly those that are dedicated to it (e.g. the International Comparative Policy Analysis Forum, International Public Policy Association and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, as well as comparative research groups at American Political Science Association (APSA), International Political Science Association (IPSA), Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) and others.) But let’s step back to 1998, the year that JCPA was founded. A young scholar hungry for comparative analysis, consulting the three leading policy journals at the time (Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Policy Sciences and Policy Studies Journal), could find only 12 articles out of a total of 83 published that year, or 14.5 per cent, that had even a remotely comparative angle.¹ This is consistent with the historical portrait presented by Geva-May et al. of the emergence of comparative politics and comparative public administration, supported by data from the EBSCO Database and Google Analytics. The heart of their article is a content analysis of JCPA articles (n = 356) and the EBSCO Academic Search Complete for 1976–2016 (n = 144), using the search terms “comparative policy analysis” and “comparative public policy”. Results are compared for both datasets in terms of (1) policy areas, (2) countries studied and (3) methodology and theory. One happy overall finding is that JCPA remains central to the field as the only journal dedicated to comparative policy analysis, even as the field itself has grown.

In its concluding section, the article draws on the results of its content analysis to suggest new or reinforced directions of the Journal. We’ll reflect on just three. The first is on methods, and the dearth of work that employs interviews or ethnographic methods. This speaks to a deeper issue in the field – its actual connection to what goes on among policy actors and in policy processes, or, more bluntly, in practice. The Journal of course has made efforts to engage practitioners and solicit contributions from them, but this sails against the wind of academic publishing, with its premium on high theory. The JCPA has introduced a Section titled Policy Innovation, which looks into such policies at field level. The International Comparative Policy Analysis Forum affiliated with the JCPA has recently started an effort to formally engage practitioners, but the results are obviously still unknown. The other solution is to have academic researchers interview practitioners in some systematic fashion, and incorporate this more qualitative data into their work. But there is a logistical problem with this, at least for the more conventional comparative policy analysis of multiple jurisdictions, and this how to get access to enough interviews to help make sense of a range of comparative experiences. Ethnographic methods go one step further in suggesting actual observations of practice, of some kind of “embeddedness” that mirrors the anthropologist’s stratagem of living among remote tribes. There have been some fine examples of this,² but it is still comparatively rare in comparative policy studies. Again, logistical and organizational barriers (governments are skittish) make this difficult, but more work that tries to come closer to practice should be encouraged – that was one of the founding objectives of JCPA, to be a journal of research and practice. It has probably fared less well on this front than the research one.

The second conclusion (unsurprising) is that the Journal (and the EBSCO sample) have a country focus on Europe and North America (NA). This conclusion is revisited in Engeli, Rothmayr Allison and Montpetit’s article based on a case study of three key journals. Again, efforts have been made to expand the scope to include more articles treating the Middle East, Africa, South America and Asia. But is the geographical location of cases that interesting? Do the countries of Africa or of Asia have something in common that make them distinct categories for analysis? Clearly not – Singapore is not Sri Lanka, and Kazakhstan is not Korea. There is the crude distinction between developed (Europe and North America, with other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries thrown in) and developing, but that does not get us very far. What about regime types? We think that this is a more interesting and potentially fruitful categorization, one that overlays the spatial one and has tended to create a mirage of geographical concentration, when in fact the Journal’s country concentration has been on regime type ‒ that is, predominantly liberal-democratic and developed welfare states. The policy sciences were nourished on the analysis of these types of states (the US in particular, as the Geva-May et al. article makes clear), and indeed when we think about the conceptual apparatus of the study of public policy, it presumes a “policy process” with the usual cast of characters in the state, political and nongovernmental sectors, and the usual plumbing of democratic (or democratic-ish) institutions. But it is a depressing reality that liberal democracy may be in retreat, and we may need to pay much more attention to non-liberal forms of government (from authoritarian democracy to Islamic monarchies), and understand their policy dynamics. Encouraging more of this type of analysis would automatically broaden the geographic scope of articles in JCPA, and also provide a test of how well our concepts can travel.

A third conclusion is the call for more articles on under-represented policy fields, particularly foreign and military policy, and human rights. We think a qualification is in order here. The Journal has a focus on policy, and whether for good or bad reasons, foreign policy, the national security apparatus and policing have not typically been part of what is considered “public policy”, as defined by most of the journals in the field. As Geva-May et al. show, the JCPA has traditionally focused on economic and financial policy, welfare states and social subsidies, the environment, education, health care and immigration. We think that foreign policy in its conventional definition as the conduct of international affairs would take JCPA too far afield, but there is a subset of foreign policy objectives around governance promotion and policy transfer of governance practices that makes sense for this Journal, and, as far as we know, has fallen through the research cracks. The same would be true of human rights – studying not legal and constitutional aspects, but, for example, how rights discourse folds into policy debate.

Laurence E. Lynn and Aleksandra Malinowska, “How are Patterns of Public Governance Changing in the US and the EU? It’s Complicated”

This article is an illustration of the application of the policy analysis comparative method to policy issues and social units. The key question this article poses is: “Are the boundaries among the state, the market sector and civil society in advanced industrial democracies being redrawn in favor of greater involvement by market and civil society actors in establishing and implementing societal priorities?” Many scholars claim that the answer is yes, but in examining immigrant education, migrant education and bilingual education in the United States and countries in the European Union, Lynn and Malinowska find a more complex reality – governance patterns vary significantly across countries, and the role of state institutions is often determined by the jousting for position among the three sectors (market, government, civil society). This is a rich article, and rather than summarize it, we draw out two of its key points for reflection.

The first is the observation that immigration has been increasingly important in social, economic and political affairs in both the US and the EU. This might seem obvious with the continuing EU migrant crisis and Trumpian tweets, but it has deeper implications. Increasing human migration potentially up-ends standard assumptions about states and borders, about the logic of the welfare state and redistribution, about national norms and values. It has emerged as a contributing factor to populist movements and tectonic shifts in the postwar liberal order. It has connections to security and military policy (noted above). In other words, it is possible that migration on a global scale should be as important a policy focus as environment and climate change is at the moment.

Second, the article’s problématique is the balance among the three sectors, and the alleged greater weight being assumed by civil society. The authors develop a typology of seven distinct types of governance to capture the hybrids and mixes of tools and influence. Is it possible to stretch this further, to think about new ways in which we can conceptualize the articulation of the sectors? A simple point is that “boundaries” and “balance” are spatial/weight metaphors, grounded in a Newtonian physics. Can this capture the ways in which social actors modify their behavior in response to government actions – e.g. companies changing business practices because of tax and regulatory regimes, or non-profits because of charity law? This is not “balance”, it is something closer to Foucault’s notion of governmentality, of “capillaries of power”. How do we understand the impact of the state outside of the small cluster of countries at the top of the liberal democratic league tables, or a China or Russia for example, or indeed any of the numerous kleptocracies and authoritarian systems where the state’s penetration of markets and civil society is closer to medical models of cancerous cell co-production than it is to physical ones of “influence”?

Beryl A. Radin and David L. Weimer, “Compared to What? The Multiple Meanings of Comparative Policy Analysis”

Radin and Weimer get to the fundamentals: why compare, what to compare, and what’s the point? They acknowledge that there have been many different answers to these questions, and proceed to tackle them through, first, a historical lens on the emergence of comparative policy analysis in the US, and, second, a conceptual lens on the different things to compare and how to contribute to better public policy. The history is the familiar one of the gradual entrenchment and professionalization of policy analysis, with a bifurcation into a research/academic orientation, and one focused on the practice of policy analysis. Neither demonstrated a huge appetite for comparative research, and so when the JCPA appeared in 1998, it was (as we noted above) a “voice in the wilderness”. Just as troubling for the authors has been the blind spot among analysts about their role as advisors to clients, and hence the client’s role as both a demandeur and their incentive structures (which do not likely involve a lot of comparative analysis for its own sake).

Radin and Weimer elaborate a conceptual lens with six avenues for improving public policy, differentiated in terms of Lasswell’s knowledge of and in the policy process, and level of generality (political science; policy-relevant research/policy ideas; policy process research; policy research; policy analysis methods; policy transfer). The ultimate point is contributing to better public policy, and the authors conclude that the contribution can come through clarification of what is being compared and better information relevant to policy transfer. They recommend continued cross-national research, more comparisons across sub-national governments, and more work that recognizes the role of the policy analyst to help guide research applications so that they have the greatest impact.

The article’s point about the blind spot in policy studies on the role of the advisor and relationship to the client echoes some of the points made by Howlett and Mukherjee, but can be taken a little further. Advice, if it is accepted, is grounded in the legitimacy of the advisor and of the evidentiary base of that advice. The two are connected, of course, and the advisor is usually expected to be an expert in the evidence. As Goldhamer pointed out in The Advisor (cited in the Radin and Weimer article), this advisory function has varied significantly over time and over cultures. We expect advisors today to be technical experts in their field, masters of science and hard, empirical evidence, costs and benefits. But increasingly there is a premium placed on experiential knowledge, local knowledge and traditional knowledge (in the case of indigenous groups, for instance). What counts as “evidence” in these different epistemological frames is quite different from technical knowledge, or sometimes even from empirics as classically defined. To use a Canadian example, but one which is common in settler societies that are coming to grips with truth and reconciliation projects, the Commission on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women deliberately sought “evidence” from families of those women that was emotional, experiential and narrative-based. It was evidence about pain and suffering and loss, not about economic costs and benefits. Channeling that type of evidence into policy advice is a completely different enterprise than “gathering data”. Of course, the work on policy discourse and the argumentative turn has grappled with these issues, but we are far from understanding the epistemological challenges of advice and evidence from this perspective.

The article’s recommendation that comparative policy analysis should continue to inform policy transfer, particularly about experiences at the sub-national level, is one that of course we endorse. But we would add that there might also be more focus on policy failure, so that we can more rapidly learn about what not to do. Big mistakes – as evident from broad and popular discontent, financial unsustainability, or lack of objective impact – are the instances from which we might learn the most. We might even conjecture that there is an asymmetry to success and failure. Policy successes have an often invisible supporting infrastructure of shared assumptions and values within a society that helped the policy work in the first place. Policing without firearms “works” in Britain in a way that it never would in the US, because the UK culture supports the role and limits of police in that society. However, a policy failure (if it is recognized as such within a given society), is a failure in that society’s own terms. In other words, failure has a better potential for revealing the invisible supports – precisely because of their absence – and helping us learn what is deeply needed in public policies for them to function successfully.

Michael Howlett and Ishani Mukherjee, “The Contribution of Comparative Policy Analysis to Policy Design: Articulating Principles of Effectiveness and Clarifying Design Spaces”

A central issue in the field, and for governments, is effective policy design, and the Howlett and Mukherjee article outlines ways in which comparative policy analysis has contributed to our understanding of design principles and practices. One contribution has been modelling policy instruments, both singly and increasingly in “mixes” and “packages”. Another has been in the capacity and context required for effective formulation, or the design environment. The right environment (marked by government commitment and capacity) gives designers the ability, at least in principle, to produce sophisticated instrument mixes, and to be agile and adaptive in their designs and calibrations. To the extent that governments want to be effective in some technical sense (e.g. delivering clean water, education, economic growth), it might be presumed that they will have an appetite for best or good practices, and comparative policy research can support learning and contextualized policy transfer.

Two questions, both connected to our reflections above: what if governments don’t want to be effective, if they simply want to be in power, and what if “policy design” rests on technocratic assumptions about value consensus that are either in jeopardy or rapidly fraying? The article does acknowledge that for policy design to be effective, there has to be a government interest in effective policy design. But this interest may be quite narrow in scope – enough to keep the regime afloat and functioning, but not in any real sense responding to societal aspirations or any metric of social well-being. Understanding this may actually widen our appreciation of what gets transferred and why. For example, even authoritarian regimes will be interested in the effective design of tax systems, all the better to extract resources. They might be quite keen on the latest information technologies, at least for surveillance and monitoring. We can also appreciate how “effectiveness” can be concentrated within pockets in some state systems, for example in the Gulf States, where the petrochemical sector can be a “state within a state” and operate to international standards when the rest of the government machinery is considerably less professional. And we can also appreciate how, in some cases, the “design environment” might be defined in terms of some cultural norms, e.g. piety in the case of states operating in Muslim societies.

The fraying value consensus is another matter. Howlett and Mukherjee’s optimism about the contributions of comparative public policy analysis to effective design depends on an optimism about underlying value consensus regarding what counts as effective. A worrying trend – possibly only apparent rather than real, and possibly a mirage amplified by the intensity of current US politics, but worrying nonetheless – is the increasing stridency of “culture wars” and value conflicts. Take immigration, again. If one fundamentally believes that human beings have a right to geographically relocate as they see best to pursue their life chances, then borders and immigration policies are almost by definition a human rights violation. No amount of “effective” policy design to regulate immigration will satisfy this constituency. Multiply that conflict across a spectrum of policy issues, and pretty soon it becomes difficult to puzzle out consensual solutions. Only “powering” will work, not “puzzling”.

B. Guy Peters, “Comparative Politics and Comparative Policy Studies: Making the Linkage”

Public policy is an artefact of the state, and so the study of public policy had its earliest roots in political science. In the same way, as Guy Peters points out, comparative public policy was historically closely aligned with the discipline of comparative politics. Over time, the two have drifted apart, though Peters argues (and hopes) that they should and can still nourish each other. Comparative politics has been marked by theoretical orientations (the key ones that Peters identifies being institutionalism, interest intermediation, development studies, governance and comparative political economy) that unfortunately have not explored the policy connection. As for policy studies, Peters notes that it has often ignored political context (for example, in policy design), or simply assumed that that context is generically democratic. The frosty cohabitation of the two fields is partly due to the methodological individualism that marks comparative politics (in contrast to the emphasis on institutions and organizations in comparative public policy), and its preference for large-N studies (whereas comparative public policy analysis still leans towards qualitative, small-n case studies).

We can add two more benefits that a closer study of comparative politics and its sister disciplines could contribute to policy studies. One is the contribution that comparative politics makes to our understanding of different regime types. A theme running through the articles in this anniversary issue is that the historical roots and current preoccupations in our field have been in and about Western-styled liberal democracies. This is abundantly clear if we think only about the conventional models of the policy process – they (from cycles to multiple streams to advocacy coalitions) simply do not work unless there are civil society organizations, capacity and freedom to mobilize and lobby, and a free media. Not to mention a reasonably restrained state apparatus in terms of its security apparatus and appetite for social control. But we know that policy has to get made in China, in the Gulf monarchies, in military regimes. Trains have to run (reasonably) on time, and there has to be some level of response in fields like health and education. How does the policy process operate in these systems, without “multiple streams” or coalitions? Comparative politics can help because it knows something about non-liberal democratic and non-Western regimes. Even if that work does not have a policy focus, we can learn from it.

The other, sister discipline from which we can learn is international relations. Policy studies, to use Diane Stone’s phrase, has traditionally suffered from “methodological nationalism”. Policy analysis, as the Radin and Weimer article shows in this special issue, historically developed to serve domestic policy issues, and it retains a domestic focus (quite appropriately in most cases), even in the case of some comparative policy work, where the comparison is among domestic policies. However, we all know about globalization, and we all now appreciate global policy networks and processes that interpolate with domestic ones. Just as Peters argues that there should be more fruitful exchange with the field of comparative politics, so too should there be better connections with international relations. The work on international organizations, globalization, international political economy and global social movements, to mention only a few, has already enriched policy studies as we increasingly understand that domestic public policies are deeply influenced by global forces. To come back to the Howlett and Mukherjee article, policy advisory systems often, today, loop through international networks of organizations and commissions and think tanks, not least because of international agreements or international standards that constrain and color any domestic policy response (again, think immigration and refugees).

Steven Van de Walle and Marleen Brans, “Where Comparative Public Administration and Comparative Policy Studies Meet”

Public policy is the by-product and ultimately the raison d’être of public administration. On the other hand, as Van de Walle and Brans state, public policy needs the bureaucracy to be carried out and serve as the machinery of government. They use Comparative Public Policy (CPP) studies as an umbrella term for different approaches in understanding what governments do, why and what difference it makes, while Comparative Public Administration (CPA) looks into how and why bureaucracies do it, with what resources and capacity. An interesting distinction that the authors make vis-à-vis the two comparative domains is the problem-solving nature of CPP, and the low level of such an orientation in CPA.

While Comparative Public Administration studies, rooted in the public administration domain, have a long and flourishing history which the authors outline, CPP, based on policy sciences, has only recently emerged. The authors trace a number of interesting meeting points in their history as well as the various encounters in the policy cycle.

At another level of analysis, the authors raise the importance of connecting between policy capacity and CPA. Resources, skills, competencies and capabilities represented by CPA point to dimensions of policy capacity in order to enable policy formulation, implementation and evaluation. The article's detailed analysis provides an interesting representation of the dual dependence of CPA and CPP studies.

Both Van de Walle and Brans, much like Radin and Weimer, devote their discussion to the players involved in the public administration and public policy game, and discuss their roles within the CPA and CPP perspective.

An interesting point is that of the recognition by various disciplines – such as economics or psychology – of the importance of CPP and CPA for the understanding of their own notion of policy making.

Isabelle Engeli, Christine Rothmayr Allison and Éric Montpetit, “Beyond the Usual Suspects: New Research Themes in Comparative Public Policy”

The authors deplore the lack of a clear and broadly shared definition of comparative public policy, and seek to explore the limitations of comparative scope and country scope for the cumulative comparative public policy knowledge base.

We found of interest their literature review of the field and the various opinions set forward over the years. This is a valuable “comparative policy” database and terms of reference for comparative studies.

To map the scholarly domain of comparative public policy, like Geva-May et al., in this special issue, Engeli, Rothmayr Allison and Montpetit examine the scholarly work published in the last two decades, specifically in three main “general” policy journals, other than the JCPA, to assess the general trends in comparative policy studies. Not surprisingly, the findings regarding scope and countries involved in the comparative scholarship are similar to the findings of Geva-May et al., which reinforces the claims made by both articles. They also find, however, an “overrepresentation of Western postindustrialized countries in the published articles that adopt a comparative perspective” and try to explain the reasons behind this finding.

Finally, their conclusions suggest ways of inclusion of the “systematically left aside” countries compared in the comparative academic dialogues, and propose three avenues of enhancing this goal. They refer to the challenge of unfamiliar cases, the contribution of and to big data, and to the potential of compound designs.

Seven Deadly Sins of Academic Journal Publishing

All of the articles in this issue have recommendations on how to advance the field, and so by default have set a challenge for JCPA in supporting that effort. In order to do so, we have to take some measure of the barriers and challenges this poses for an academic journal like ours. The first step in wisdom is to reflect on the temptations that might make us stray from this path. Some of these temptations are not specific to JCPA in that they afflict all academic journal publishing. A few others are, however, given the special nature of our field.

1. Knowledge fragmentation: A scientific community is supposed to generate knowledge. Journals are a primary platform for publicizing that knowledge and exposing it to the wider scholarly community. However, the point is not simply to have debates and exchanges for their own sake, but to (hopefully) begin to accumulate a body of knowledge that has withstood critique and testing. This is especially true in a discipline like ours that purports to contribute to societal betterment through policy-relevant knowledge. Despite that general ambition, there are many other factors that encourage fragmentation rather than consolidation. The multiplication of journals, the splintering of disciplines into sub-/sub-disciplines (with their own journals and associations) is well-known. It provides more publishing opportunities for individual scholars, but can create separate silos of inquiry and research. Even within a single journal, it is tempting to simply focus on “what is the latest” rather than “what are we learning?”

2. Hyper-theoreticalism: Theory is important for all the obvious and well-known reasons, and we agree with the adage that sometimes there is nothing more practical than a good theory. However, even good theories can become abstruse theories, metastasizing into elaborate and complex frameworks that have an aching beauty to them, but of no earthly application. Practice can never be the only benchmark for scholarly research, but the history of the policy sciences and of comparative policy analysis in particular (as echoed by the calls for practical application in all the articles in this anniversary issue) shows that application in some sense has always been our lodestar. A journal like JCPA should invite the best theory, but also encourage reflection on whether and how that theory would make a difference in the real world of policy making.

3. Geographical bias: As the articles by Geva-May et al. and by Engeli, Rothmayr Allison and Montpetit point out, JCPA has published articles disproportionately from and about North America and Europe. The EBSCO analysis in the Geva-May et al. article shows that this is also true of all of the other journals in the field, and this makes sense in terms of the concentration of scholars and programs around the world, at least in the past. That is changing (and the International Conference on Public Policy in Singapore in 2017 was emblematic of that change), and needs to be reflected in the Journal. We need not only to encourage more work from scholars around the world, as Engeli, Rothmayr Allison and Montpetit urge, but also to publish more work about policy making in different types of regimes beyond the ones familiar in the West. And, of course, we need to generalize more about these comparative cases, so that we can learn about the dynamics of other systems as they might eventually (presently?) be evincing themselves in Western-style policy regimes. This of course is in conflict with another wider sin in the publishing domain: citations and ranking. Less well-known scholars from regions outside the NA‒EU circle may be less cited in English by fellow scholars in their region, hence affecting ranking. The language barrier requires additional language editing which affects, at first review, the standing of the paper and its fortunes in being cited.

4. Tortured prose: There is a reason that academic writing is often held up for ridicule – in the effort to adopt a “scientific” tone, and sometimes simply because of the complexity of the subject matter, many academic articles are virtually unreadable outside a select community. This makes sense in some fields, but not ours; again because we aim to contribute to practice, research should be comprehensible to policy makers themselves as well as to broader publics. The recent emphasis among journals and granting agencies on “knowledge mobilization” may go too far (summarizing a scientific article in 140 characters), but crisp, clear writing is something that few journals demand forcefully enough.

5. Echo chambers: Modern communications have made this less of a problem, but there is always the temptation for journal authors and editors to be mostly having a conversation among themselves. Some sensible “knowledge mobilization” should be an objective in a journal like ours, both reaching out to a wider scholarly community in related fields and a wider range of policy disciplines, and to the public (and decision makers) more widely. The JCPA has, through a new website and its continued outreach and supportive activities, been working hard at this, but it remains a challenge.

6. Editorial drift: Every journal has a vision and mission statement, at least at the beginning. But every journal is also subject to some drift after visions have been articulated. Aside from special issues and special efforts, most journals are hostages to their submissions, and over time can lose focus. The JCPA has done reasonably well in keeping its eye on comparative public policy, on methods and (less so) practice. The Geva-May et al. and Radin and Weimer articles in this issue show that there have been foci and key policy fields (and regions) across the 20-year JCPA history. The question is how to sustain this focus, and even sharpen it. A JCPA section titled Policy Innovation, led by Aidan Vining and Anthony Boardman, was designed to achieve this particular goal, but it had trouble in the long run to sustain submissions. The same seems to be the case with another new section on Comparative Policy Syllabi, where our associate editor, Marleen Brans, has successfully brought to publication a number of articles.

7. Traditional publication model: As readers well know, the traditional model of academic journal publishing has come under withering criticism in recent years. Scholars submit their work (and serve as peer reviewers) for free to journal publishers, who then charge high fees for access and/or subscriptions. The open access movement is challenging that model, but usually on the basis that authors themselves (or their universities) pay an up-front fee. Beyond the details of the debate lies the larger point that scientific research paid for by the public should be accessible to the public ‒ again, a point with particular force in our field, where we write and research for public policy. The accessibility and circulation of research and knowledge has to be a prime and ultimate directive for any academic journal.

Any academic journal that surrenders to these seven sins will suffer. It will generate piles of issues without consolidated findings or progress; it will wheeze with theory and ever more sophisticated models; it will be blinkered, foggy, self-referential, adrift and inaccessible except within the cloister. We aim for the opposite: a Journal that tries to build both theory and research towards the ends of clear thinking and good practice, global in scope and reach, written well and persuasively, and attracting audiences both within academe and outside it, from the public and from decision makers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Iris Geva-May

Iris Geva-May is the Founding Editor of the “Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis” and the Founding President of the International Comparative Policy Analysis Forum scholarly society. She is Professor Emerita, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada,Visiting Professor, The Wagner School, NYU, New York, USA, and Honorary Research Professor, SPPA, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Leslie A. Pal

Leslie A. Pal is Executive Editor of the JCPA. He is Chancellor’s Professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, and Visiting Professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

Notes

1. The volume number and proportion of comparative articles (excluding reviews, editor’s introductions, etc.) in question are: Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, vol. 17 (articles: 5/31); Policy Sciences, vol. 31 (articles: 3/19); and Policy Studies Journal, vol. 26 (articles: 4/33). We adopted a generous interpretation of “comparative analysis” to include articles that explicitly compared two or more social units, as well as a few single-country studies outside of the US or UK. However, as Radin and Weimer point out in their article in this issue, Policy Sciences did publish an issue on comparative policy analysis in 1975! Alas, this has not been taken up and pursued.

2. One is Rhodes et al. (2007).