In this post, the fourth in our series celebrating the 35th year of the journal, we look at the most cited articles published in Politics from 1996-2000. Perhaps fitting to the rise of New Labour, we find are a mixture of practice-facing explorations of advocacy and policy-making juxtaposed with assessments of the normative dimensions of politics.
- ‘Learning Lessons and Transferring Policy across Time, Space and Disciplines‘ by Diane Stone which assessed the state of policy transfer literature, identified methodological issues in studying policy transfer, and suggested new research directions.
- ‘Elite Interviewing: Approaches and Pitfalls’ by David Richard. A great introduction for researchers about to embark on elite interviewing for the very first time.
- ‘State of the art: divided by a common language: political theory and the concept of power‘ by Colin Hay which offers a critique of behavioural conceptualisations of power, a corrective for 3-D models of power, and calls for differentiation between analytic questions and normative questions in the study of power relations.
- ‘Civil Society and democracy: the gap between theory and possibility’ by Gideon Baker which outlines the attractiveness of the civil society concept in democratic thinking as well as the limits to universal claims that civil society, as a normative concept, can generate.
- ‘Epistemic communities and environmental groups’ by David Toke which examines the role of epistemic communities in the production of truth within environmental advocacy movements.
