For decades, the study of British politics has been defined by an extreme negativity bias, focusing almost exclusively on policy blunders, failures, fiascos, disasters and crises. Although this criticality is crucial to academic analysis it does create the risk that successful policies might be overlooked or ignored that, in turn, risks producing a skewed account of how the UK is actually governed. Even if most policies fail (which they don’t) the analysis of those rare policies that achieved their objectives would provide valuable insights as to the combination of factors that facilitated success.
The simple argument of ‘Beyond Blunders’ is that the dominant failure-focus risks creating a form of ‘intellectual path dependency’ where the repetition of narratives of failure, crisis and decline risk inadvertently fueling public disillusionment and providing oxygen to populist movements.
The argument is not that social scientists should not focus on failure or be critical. It is simply that a more balanced analytical approach that focuses on both policy failures and policy successes is likely to produce a more accurate account of governing competence. As work by the Institute for Government has shown, to talk in terms of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ is too simplistic. Policies tend to evolve and are implemented in ways that produce elements of failure alongside elements of success.
This paper is part of a broader international research network on positive public policy (PoPP) or what has become known as ‘walking on the bright side’ - with recent books focusing on policy success in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and many other parts of the world. This Beyond Blunders paper is the first attempt to introduce POPP to the UK and, more specifically, to set out a new methodology and framework for studying policy success. PoPP asks what makes a policy successful across four dimensions:
- Programmatic: Did it achieve its goals?
- Process: Was it implemented fairly and efficiently?
- Political: Did it sustain support from the public and stakeholders?
- Temporal: Did it last over time?
By applying this ‘beyond blunders’ approach, the researchers suggest that the UK government may actually perform better than the standard narrative suggests. It also outlines the need to focus on local, regional and devolved government as critical areas of policy experimentation and success.
POPP is not ‘Pollyannaish’. It is not blindly naive or optimistic. And yet "[I]t is time to move beyond the study of catastrophes," the authors conclude, "and develop a toolkit that can make sense of the complex reality of successful public policy."
Read the full open-access paper in Sage Journals: Beyond blunders: British political studies and successful public policy.
Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Sheffield and is Vice Chair of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom. In April 2026 he was awarded the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize.
