Note from the Editors

Abstract

Welcome to the first issue of volume 51 of Politics & Policy (P&P)! This February our excellent articles cover a wide variety of topics in public policy, comparative international politics, democratic inclusion, and voting behavior. The first piece adds to the journal's previous outstanding articles on Latin American politics and policy (see e.g., Basabe-Serrano, 2012; Moreno & Witmer, 2015; Nohlen, 2009). Aguiar-Aguilar's (2023) insightful perspective on democratic backsliding shows how the judiciary has become a “chess queen” after the transition to democracy in many countries in the region. The author's systematic description of how incumbents capture the courts and then use them to subvert democracy collates regionwide comparative data before moving to in-depth illustrations of public attacks on the judiciary in Brazil and Mexico, purges in the judiciary in Bolivia and El Salvador, and court packing in Nicaragua. This excellent study underscores the role of high courts in democratic erosion, emphasizing the interactive pathway incumbents take in their quest to manipulate the courts and hoard democracy for themselves. In our second article this February, Vince (2023) uses the Multiple Streams Framework to examine how the crisis conditions underpinning the COVID-19 pandemic provided a window of opportunity for decision makers to reprioritize plastic pollution issues. She also shows that the crisis likewise created space for those against reducing plastic consumption (industrial stakeholders and policy entrepreneurs) to influence policy makers to alter their stance on plastic-related matters—even if only temporarily in some cases. Given the transboundary nature of plastic pollution, this study is timely indeed and provides a powerful addition to P&P's already full list of articles on environmental politics, policy, and its relation to crisis and response (see e.g., Gerlach et al., 2013; Neill & Morris, 2012). Next, we move to evaluating public health interventions where Atkin and others (2023) entreat the policy and academic communities to rethink quality-of-life perspectives concerning the experiences of disabled persons. In their exploration of how disability is represented by tools informing evaluative public health research, the authors argue that the customary quality-of-life measures used to evaluate health interventions are not straightforward heuristic devices. In fact, for the authors they express “technologies of epistemic power” that can be deeply exclusory. The article concludes with suggestions that could create more inclusive practices able to confront, and in some cases overcome, inequalities and discrimination. Our fourth article joins P&P's long and distinguished collection of studies on partisanship and voting behavior in the United States and beyond (see e.g., Grossmann, 2014; Reilly & Hedberg, 2022; Saeki, 2019). Reilly and Hunting (2023) contribute to literature on the independent voter, emphasizing that Independents' voting patterns are more volatile in terms of party loyalty, are decidedly unpredictable, and are more distinct from that of partisans than previously thought. Their findings confirm that, when tracked over multiple elections, independent voters in the United States move in and out of independent status. Next, Zimmermann and Kenter (2023) tackle democratic decision making and participative strategy development with a focus on contemporary environmental concerns (see also Brant et al., 2017; Bryson et al., 2008). Using the case of the England Peat Action Plan, the authors contend that tensions can appear between the initial framing of intended change, the persistence of stakeholders' different framings of it, and participants' perceptions of lacking knowledge, guidance, and control. The article contributes a new explanation of the difficulties in achieving major change through multi-stakeholder participation. And that explanation is especially relevant for confronting the complexities of contemporary environmental challenges. The last two articles this time focus empirically on development and different forms of inclusion across sub-Saharan Africa. Agoba and others (2023) explore how differences in literacy levels and political institutional quality can determine the impact of central bank independence (CBI) on financial inclusion. They find that, while CBI does not promote financial inclusion in Africa, financial literacy and political institutions do—which has important policy implications for price stability, employment, and economic growth. And finally, Nchofoung and others (2023) show empirically that gender political inclusion clearly enhances the quality of democracy in Africa—a finding the authors demonstrate is robust not only across alternative specifications of political inclusion and democracy but also when controlling for colonization and internal conflicts. Their arguments concerning the policy implications of the study suggest that gender quotas in every country in the region—whether imposed nationally or via signing a regional convention—would constitute an important aid toward more sustainable democracy promotion in Africa. We hope you enjoy the excellent original research articles in this issue of P&P and, as always, we look forward to your continued article submissions at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/polpol.