British public policymaking

Introduction The mechanisms of British policymaking can be considered within ideological, theoretical and realist frameworks. The theoretical approaches have been more overtly influenced by anglophone countries – the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – rather than elsewhere in Europe (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000). These approaches have been focused on the development and adoption of New Public Management ideologies (Hood, 1995, 1998; Newman, 2001), networked/relational schools (Bevir and Rhodes, 2003) and, more recently, choice-based architectures (Greener, 2008; Dowding and John, 2009) and behavioural insight (Halpern, 2009; Dolan et al, 2010). These have all drawn from policy experiences that have been influenced by international exchanges of staff and cross-country learning (Margetts et al, 2012). This has been primarily driven at the political level by the Labour Party. Before 1997, it drew on Clinton's experience in the US (Cole, 1998; Freeden, 1999; Deacon, 2000) and this was then passed on to the Labor Party in Australia (Frankel, 1997; Deacon, 2000). Both Canada and New Zealand had also been engaged in public sector reform experiments, particularly focused on integrated working, which were also used as exemplars (Hewison, 2001; McLain and McMillan, 2003). The ideological dominance of a neoliberal economic model, with its focus on efficient welfarism, has been antithetical to some EU states, which have regarded the UK as being too strongly influenced by the US (Cerney and Evans, 2004; Clarke, 2004). However, the focus on realist performance management, which has been a dominant feature of British public policy since 1997 (Newman, 2001; Cutler and Waine, 2002; Harrison, 2002; Hood, 2002), has also been influenced by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) benchmarking practices (OECD, 1996; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000; van Thiel and Leeuw, 2002). This comparative approach based on external evaluation of performance and outcomes has spread into Europe, although not as New Public Management. Rather, it has been influential in the role of OECD country reviews and the development of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), which has been developed as a soft governance method within the EU since 1999 (CEC, 2001; Heritier, 2001a; Radaelli, 2003; Haahr, 2004). Setting British public policy agendas UK policymaking agendas are characterised as being responsive, flexible and short-term, rather than strategic. The dominant process of central policymaking in Britain is episodic.

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