This book addresses one of the enduring questions of democratic government: why do governments choose some public policies but not others? Political executives focus on a range of policy issues, such as the economy, social policy, and foreign policy, but they shift their priorities over time. Despite an extensive literature, it has proven surprisingly hard to explain policy prioritisation. To remedy this gap, this book offers a new approach called public policy investment: governments enhance their chances of getting re-elected by managing a portfolio of public policies and paying attention to the risks involved. In this way, government is like an investor making choices about risk to yield returns on its investments of political capital. The public provides signals about expected political capital returns for government policies, or policy assets, that can be captured through expressed opinion in public polls. Governments can anticipate these signals in the choices they make. Statecraft is the ability political leaders have to consider risk and return in their policy portfolios and do so amidst uncertainty in the public's policy valuation. Such actions represent the public's views conditionally because not every opinion change is a price signal. It then outlines a quantitative method for measuring risk and return, applying it to the case of Britain between 1971 and 2000 and offers case studies illustrating statecraft by prime ministers, such as Edward Heath or Margaret Thatcher. The book challenges comparative scholars to apply public policy investment to countries that have separation of powers, multiparty government, and decentralization.

Public Policy Investment: Priority-Setting and Conditional Representation In British Statecraft

JOHN, PETER

Bertelli, Anthony

Legal Theory & Systems

Oxford University Press

Making Policy Work (Routledge Textbooks in Policy Studies)

Many tools are on offer to politicians and other policy-makers when they seek to change policy outcomes. Often they choose to concentrate on one set of tools, but fail to see the costs as well as the benefits – and may not consider the available evidence regarding their effectiveness. This innovative new textbook clearly sets out the main tools of government, and provides an analysis of their efficacy when applied to public problems. Each chapter examines the relative benefits and costs of using a key tool that is available to improve policy outcomes, drawing on a diverse literature, a large number of empirical studies and a range of contexts. Areas covered include: <ul>
<li>governments and policy outcomes</li> <li>law and regulation </li> <li>public spending and taxation </li> <li>bureaucracy and public management </li> <li>institutions</li> <li>information, persuasion and deliberation </li> <li>networks and governance.</li>
</ul>
Offering a clear and comprehensive evaluation, and highlighting the set of powerful tools commonly available, this text encourages students to consider the most effective combination in order to manage key issues successfully. Including a useful glossary of key terms, this book will be of great interest to all students of public policy, administration and management.

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Routledge

Social Sciences

Improving Classroom Learning with ICT (Improving Learning)

Improving Classroom Learning with ICT examines the ways in which ICT can be used in the classroom to enhance teaching and learning in different settings and across different subjects.   Weaving together evidence of teachers’ and learners’ experiences of ICT, the authors:    explain why the process of integrating ICT is not straightforward;   discuss whether hardware and infrastructure alone are sufficient to ensure full integration and exploitation of ICT investment;   emphasise the pivotal role that teachers play in supporting learning with ICT across the curriculum;   argue that teachers need a greater understanding of how to put ICT to use in teaching and learning;    highlight that out-of-school use of ICT has an impact on in-school learning;   consider what kinds of professional development are most effective in supporting teachers to use technologies creatively and productively.    Case studies are used to illustrate key issues and to elaborate a range of theoretical ideas that can be used in the classroom.  This book will be of interest to all those concerned with maximising the benefits of ICT in the classroom.

Education & Teaching

Robertson, Susan

Sutherland, Rosamund

Schools & Teaching

Computers & Technology

Software

Analyzing Public Policy (Routledge Textbooks in Policy Studies)

The fully revised and updated new edition of this textbook continues to provide the most accessible overview of the main approaches in the study of public policy. It seeks to review the most common and widely used frameworks in the study of policy analysis: <ul>
<li>institutions</li> <li>groups and networks</li> <li>society and the economy</li> <li>individual interests</li> <li>ideas.</li> </ul>
The book explains each one, offers constructive criticisms and explores their claims in the light of a variety of American, British and European examples. Arguing that no one framework offers a comprehensive explanation of public policy; John suggests a synthesis based on different aspects of the approaches, introducing concepts/approaches of advocacy coalitions, punctuated equilibrium and evolution as more effective ways to understand public policy. Combining both a clear summary of debates in public policy and a new and original approach to the subject, this book remains essential reading for students of public policy and policy analysis.

How social media is giving rise to a chaotic new form of politics
As people spend increasing proportions of their daily lives using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, they are being invited to support myriad political causes by sharing, liking, endorsing, or downloading. Chain reactions caused by these tiny acts of participation form a growing part of collective action today, from neighborhood campaigns to global political movements. Political Turbulence reveals that, in fact, most attempts at collective action online do not succeed, but some give rise to huge mobilizations―even revolutions.
Drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events, this book shows how mobilizations that succeed are unpredictable, unstable, and often unsustainable. To better understand this unruly new force in the political world, the authors use experiments that test how social media influence citizens deciding whether or not to participate. They show how different personality types react to social influences and identify which types of people are willing to participate at an early stage in a mobilization when there are few supporters or signals of viability. The authors argue that pluralism is the model of democracy that is emerging in the social media age―not the ordered, organized vision of early pluralists, but a chaotic, turbulent form of politics.
This book demonstrates how data science and experimentation with social data can provide a methodological toolkit for understanding, shaping, and perhaps even predicting the outcomes of this democratic turbulence.

Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action

Margetts, Helen

Hale, Scott

Yasseri, Taha

Princeton University Press

Analysing Public Policy (Critical Political Studies)

An accessible review of the main approaches in the study of public policy, this text argues that most writers who seek to explain how policy varies and changes use one of the five frameworks: institutional, group/network, socio-economic, rational choice and ideas-based. It describes these methods in detail, offers constructive criticisms and explores their claims in the light of American, British and French examples.

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Books by JOHN, PETER