Learning in Politics and Public Policy

Although learning in politics and public policy is a prominent theme in political science, the state of the art has not much improved since the early foundational studies. The aims in this workshop are to make conceptual and empirical progress with the comparative analysis of learning in public policy, comparative politics, and diffusion theory, by bringing together a group of European and North-American scholars from political science as well as other social sciences, including cognitive psychology, political psychology, political economy, organizational theory, and international relations. The focus will be on a selection of papers with considerable potential for publication in leading journals in the profession, with three main research questions that are often wrongly conflated, that is: (a) How do we theorize learning and use theory in empirical policy research? (b) What are the (structural, discursive, strategic) conditions under which different types of learning take place? and (c) What difference does learning make to change in politics and public policy? We will seek empirically-rich papers grounded in explicit theories, and possibly multi-disciplinary approaches, covering the following aspects: micro-foundations, comparison of learning architectures for public policy, measurement and methodological issues, multi-dimensionality of learning, instrumental/strategic/symbolic types of learning, and analytical approaches to normative issues arising out of learning.