The second in our PoPP group’s series of blog posts reflecting on the connections between established political science/ policy theory insights and a renewed focus on learning from success.
Positive public policy – or ‘walking on the bright side’– focuses attention on the benefits of studying policy success as well as failure.
This endeavour prompts a simple question – what does success look like? – but many competing answers.
Indeed, key policy success scholars – including McConnell and Compton and ‘t Hart – would say that this scope for interpretation and contestation is what makes policy success research so essential: policy success is in the eye of the beholder, and the declaration of success needs a good story as much as good evidence.
Here, we add to this debate by highlighting the scope for two valuable – top-down versus bottom-up – interpretations of policy success and the need to understand how one might dominate at the expense of another.
A Top-Down Perspective
The top-down perspective identifies success through a lens which aligns with the worldview of central government ministers and the governing logic (or story) of the Westminster Model. Here, the policy success framework offers government ministers, civil servants and advisers three simple questions with which to measuring success:
- Political success: will it make us more or less popular?
- Process success: can we secure legitimacy or ownership of this policy?
- Programmatic success: will it achieve our objectives or intended outcomes when implemented?
In other words, it is a guide to getting from an initial policy aim to an enduring policy outcome while keeping key players on board, and making sure that there are no adverse electoral consequences. If the UK’s Westminster story encourages power-hoarding national government, in a ‘winner-takes-all’ political system, the UK government will use processes to overcome opposition and seek to maintain popularity with the aid of an image of strong central control (in other words, here the ‘us’ may mean UK government ministers).
A Bottom-Up Perspective
A very different answer emerges from a bottom-up perspective. This approach recognises the practical limits to policymaker power and complexity of policymaking, and seeks to adapt to – or indeed encourage – the diffuse nature of power in political systems. In other words, centralised top-down control is not possible and – for advocates of a bottom-up approach – not desirable.
This is an approach borne from many studies of collaborative policymaking, systems leadership, street-level bureaucrats and the search for integration and policy coherence across and between levels of policymaking. Success relates to an ability to form partnerships, build trust, cooperate to overcome silos, facilitate others, empower communities, produce a common vision, and learn and adapt to a rapidly changing context. Crucially, its advocates are not naïve to political reality: any process that is founded on compromise and the reconciliation of opposing positions and demands is to some extent ‘destined to disappoint’, and democratic governance cannot make ‘all sad hearts glad’. In other words, it cannot succeed in any simple sense because there will always be winners and losers.
So What?
This comparison shows that contested perspectives inform debates on policy success. One emphasises success in terms of the faithful delivery of central government aims and a close link between government aims and policy outcomes. Another emphasises the benefits of greater autonomy to collaborate and adapt to local contexts.
It also helps to examine why some interpretations of policy success win at the expense of others even when they co-exist. For example, top-down perspectives often dominate political debate, producing a tendency to examine policy success in terms of the short-term process and electoral impact of individual policy solutions, and insufficient respect for the skills and resources required to collaborate for the long-term. Hence, this valuable focus on policy success should be informed by political analysis of whose success matters.
See also: Positive Public Policy and Pathways to Positive Public Administration
These posts take forward work by our Positive Public Policy – PoPP – group in the UK. We address the existence of a dominant and intense negativity-bias – which is well-furrowed scholarly terrain for economists, psychologists and students of media and communication studies – ensures that policy failures are identified, discussed and very often amplified; our structures for success-signalling, however, remain weak to the point of being almost non-existent. This explains why the then Minister for the Cabinet Office, Pat McFadden, recently suggested: ‘Let’s take some encouragement from some things that have gone right.’ PoPP takes the same argument into academe by noting the existence of a vast literature on the avoidance of blame (strategies, tactics, tools) but the absence of any linked or comparable seam of scholarship on credit claiming.
PoPP matters because populist pressures are building on the basis of nihilist narratives that ‘nothing works’ and that ‘Britain is broken’. This ‘politics of pessimism’ risks creating a self-sustaining ‘doom loop’ that deflates public confidence and saps the energy of those who have dedicated their lives to public service. And yet there are very different and less pessimistic ways of thinking about and designing effective public policies.
This is not an argument for replacing ‘the politics of pessimism’ with a ‘Pollyannaish’ naivety about the scale or complexity of the challenges facing modern Britain. But it is to suggest that some policies are successful and that by being better able to identify and learn from examples of policy success at different levels of government may provide innovative insights with which to both improve public services and challenge overly-simplistic populist positions.
See also the 500, 750, 1000 Word and UK series, including:
Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Success and Failure (Evaluation) (podcast download)
Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Multi-centric Policymaking (podcast download) (book)
Chapter 2. Perspectives on Policy and Policymaking
See also: There aren’t any levers
Facts Only
The PoPP (Positive Public Policy) group is a UK-based academic collective focusing on policy success.
Key scholars in policy success research include McConnell, Compton, and ‘t Hart.
Top-down policy success is measured by political popularity, process legitimacy, and achievement of government objectives.
The Westminster Model encourages centralized control and power-hoarding by national government.
Bottom-up policy success emphasizes collaboration, trust-building, and adaptability to local contexts.
Bottom-up approaches acknowledge that policymaking involves compromise and cannot satisfy all stakeholders.
The UK government often prioritizes short-term electoral impacts over long-term collaborative solutions.
Pat McFadden, former UK Minister for the Cabinet Office, advocated for recognizing policy successes.
Populist narratives often emphasize policy failures, contributing to a "politics of pessimism."
The PoPP group argues that studying policy success can counter overly negative perceptions of governance.
The article references related works on policy concepts, including evaluations and multi-centric policymaking.
Executive Summary
Full Take
This analysis of policy success frameworks reveals a deeper tension between centralized control and decentralized collaboration—a paradigm that echoes historical debates about governance and power distribution. The top-down perspective, rooted in the Westminster Model, prioritizes electoral survival and centralized authority, while the bottom-up approach champions adaptability and local agency. The strongest version of this narrative is its call to balance these perspectives, recognizing that both have merits and limitations. However, the dominance of top-down thinking in political discourse risks overshadowing the value of bottom-up innovation, particularly in complex, rapidly changing environments.
The article’s focus on "positive public policy" serves as a counter-narrative to the prevalent "negativity-bias," where failures are amplified and successes overlooked. This aligns with broader patterns of media and political communication that exploit pessimism for engagement or ideological gain. The PoPP group’s work is a constructive response, but it also raises questions: How can success be measured without ignoring structural inequities? Who gets to define "success" in a pluralistic society? And how might a focus on success be weaponized to dismiss legitimate critiques of policy failures?
If this narrative were part of a coordinated influence campaign, the playbook might involve framing policy success as a binary choice—either centralized efficiency or chaotic decentralization—to polarize debate. However, the actual content resists this simplification, instead advocating for a nuanced understanding of both approaches. The real challenge lies in ensuring that the pursuit of "positive" policy does not become a tool for sanitizing systemic issues or suppressing dissent.
**Patterns detected: none**
Sentinel — Human
The article exhibits strong human signals, including idiosyncratic phrasing, nuanced argumentation, and context-specific references, with no significant indicators of synthetic origin.