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This exploratory article examines the contemporary state of formal government policy staff in Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, contributing to the ongoing research seeking to understand the policy capacity of governments. It analyzes the size, composition, and distribution of the countries' formal policy staff across government units. Comparative analysis reveals significant differences in the basic organizing approaches used to categorize policy staff as well as important differences in their numbers, composition, and distribution across government units. While uneven distributions characterize all four cases, there is significant variance in where staff work, their seniority, and functional classifications as "analysts" or "managers". The analysis provides fresh insights into the nature and availability of policy analytical capacity within these governments. It also underscores major gaps in how governments collect and make available basic data on their policy staff, which raises questions about their ability to effectively manage and deploy those staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a decade of administrative data from the Government of Canada, we provide fresh analysis of the composition and distribution of staff most formally associated with policy work, the Economics and Social Science (EC) classification. Comparative analysis across unit levels including "ministerial departments" and central agencies, as well as non‐standard organizations support but clarify the nature of the uneven distribution of policy analytical capacity across government. We demonstrate a dramatic increase in not only the overall complement of EC staff over time, particularly since 2017, but also significant growth at senior levels while junior EC staff have remained stable or declined. The findings also point to new dynamics related to the pace, orientation, and distribution of policy analytical capacity as governments gain, lose, and exercise that capacity often in the face of tough choices about how, where, and when to deploy policy resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design thinking has become a popular approach for governments around the world seeking to address complex governance challenges. It offers novel techniques and speaks to broader questions of who governs, how they govern, and the limits of rational instrumentalism in policy making. Juxtaposing design thinking with an older tradition of policy design, this article offers the first critical analysis of the application of design thinking to policy making. It argues that design thinking does not sufficiently account for the political and organizational contexts of policy work. Design thinking also errs in universally privileging one particular policy style over others, and fails to account for the reality of policy mixes. Despite these deficiencies, it is argued that design thinking can inform and enrich governance by helping policy designers produce more adaptable designs, better appreciate the behavioral dynamics of public sector design, and leverage networked approaches to social problem solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing body of literature on digital governance, and policy advisory systems, often neglects the perspective of elected decision makers. What types of policy advice do ministers need in the digital governance era? Is digitization of government and policymaking reshaping supply and demand dynamics, the content of policy advice, or how advice is used within the policy process? This article borrows existing theoretical frames on digital governance to examine these and other questions from the perspective of ministers. The digital governance era will undoubtedly introduce novel disruptions and dilemmas, but it will also intensify longstanding tensions inherent in advisory work linked to questions of influence, capacity, and how well advisory systems adapt to serve ministers. We use information processing dynamics, policy entrepreneurship, and control and coordination to ground analysis of ministers' advisory demand in the digital governance era. We highlight unique considerations that apply to ministers as well as reflection on their place within the broader context of advisory work. We employ vignettes from the perspective of ministers throughout the article as a useful way to personalize the digital era disruptions and dilemmas particular to ministers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the opportunities, challenges and expectations that the digital context of design and new digital era policy instruments, such as open data, big data, robotics and crowdsourcing, present to policy designers operating in today's governments. Adopting an instruments perspective, the article identifies four characteristics of digital era policy design before detailing three issues that must be addressed to ascertain the promise and pitfalls of digital era policy design. First, we argue that scholars and practitioners alike must investigate how traditional constraints on the ideal of rational, evidence-driven policy design-long acknowledged in the 'analogue design' literature-will fade or be exacerbated in the digital age. The article next confronts the reality that new digital designs and instruments will rarely emerge in a policy vacuum, but rather will be layered onto existing policy designs and complex policy mixes with sticky legacies that will be more or less amenable to digital design approaches. Finally, the article argues that while scholars and practitioners have been quick to presume that the digital age will foster a more collaborative model of state-to-non-state cooperation, digital era policy design may ultimately marginalize or eliminate citizens altogether from the design process, raising important questions about the as of yet little understood democratic implications of digital era policy design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the 30th anniversary of the policy advisory systems concept on the horizon, it is an appropriate time to reflect further on the concept's utility, particularly in helping to understand the dynamics of system change and their implications for policy-making. This article provides diachronic analysis of the policy advisory systems in the classic Anglo-Saxon 'Westminster' family (Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand). Analysis focuses on five advisory units: the public service and central agencies, partisan ministerial advisers, external consultants, commissions of inquiry, and select special advisory bodies. The principle research aim is to compare these cases to shed light on advisory system dynamics through identification and analysis of shared and country-specific patterns of PAS change. We argue that the leading dynamics of politicization and externalization often used to characterize how advisory systems change masks idiosyncratic country patterns. We argue that differences in the tempo, intensity, and sequencing of advisory unit (de)institutionalization are clear in these cases and that attention to these dimensions of advisory system change add precision to understanding the organization, operation, and evolution of these systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing corpus of empirical findings suggests that appointed partisan advisers are established and influential policy actors within the executive. Their policy work has long attracted concerted attention with respect to issues of accountability and politicization. Less attention however has been cast to concept and theory building, to link empirical findings with extant policy theory. This article presents careful analysis of the leading conceptual approaches to the study of these policy workers. It offers a critique of these approaches but suggests they share common logic and identify common attributes that can usefully be synthesized into a new framework. A framework is then advanced through the elaboration of four key concepts: buffering, bridging, moving, and shaping to focus on the substantive and procedural nature of partisan advisers' policy work. Combined with additional criteria, these are used to develop two subsidiary frameworks focusing on partisan advisers' policy advisory and policy process participation. The study of these actors is argued to not only benefit from improved linkages with policy theory, but that policy theory itself may be improved through focused study of these unique, politically appointed, policy workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues appointed political staffs are important, yet understudied, mechanisms for core executive policy coordination. It suggests revisions to update core executive theory to better accommodate the increasingly systematic use of political staffs throughout core executives. An analytical framework for political staffs’ core executive policy coordination is set out to specify important distinctions related to the type, and nature, of their likely policy coordination. The article concludes by returning to six established modes of executive politics to update them by integrating the policy coordination functions of political staffs in each variant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of policy formulation focus on the nature and kind of advice provided to decision-makers and think of this as originating from a system of interacting elements: a “policy advisory system”. Policy influence in such models has historically been viewed as based on considerations of the proximate location of policy advisors vis à vis the government, linked to related factors such as the extent to which governments are able to control sources of advice. While not explicitly stated, this approach typically presents the content of policy advice as either partisan “political” or administratively “technical” in nature. This article assesses the merits of these locational models against evidence of shifts in governance arrangements that have blurred both the inside vs outside and technical vs political dimensions of policy formulation environments. It argues that the growing plurality of advisory sources and the polycentrism associated with these governance shifts challenge the utility of both the implied content and locational dimensions of traditional models of policy advice systems. A revised approach is advanced that sees influence more as a product of content than location. The article concludes by raising several hypotheses for future research linking advisory system behaviour to governance arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]