Search results

Abstract
This article draws on rich qualitative data from two national parliaments—the UK House of Commons and the German Bundestag—to examine knowledge practices in political institutions. This is an important topic, not only because parliaments play a significant role in democratic decision-making, but because it sheds light on debates about how such decision-making is based on and interacts with knowledge and evidence. By adopting an interpretive analytical approach, I analyze the ways in which those practices are shaped by the beliefs and values of parliamentary actors. Indeed, in better understanding everyday practices, beliefs, and ideational traditions, it also contributes to better explaining how components of political and parliamentary cultures contribute to knowledge use more broadly. In the House of Commons, MPs draw on a highly trusted and independent parliamentary administration; meanwhile, committees have become fruitful avenues for MPs to develop policy expertise and engage with knowledge and evidence in a non-partisan way. In the German Bundestag, MPs also develop policy expertise—in fact, they interpret their role as specialists in a "working" parliament—but their knowledge practices are more openly partisan through the structuring role of parliamentary party groups and the skepticism of "neutral" advice from research services. Consequently, committees tend to be sites of political bargaining and conflict, rather than evidence-gathering. In both cases, parliaments' knowledge practices are shaped by wider webs of beliefs about the role of MPs within the institutions. This suggests that knowledge use in political and policy settings is shaped by broader cultural factors.

While this volume contributes to the expansion of knowledge about the criminalization of migration, this article seeks to build on collected contributions by identifying gaps that can impede uptake of this knowledge, particularly by policymakers and practitioners. I argue that a key challenge is not necessarily a lack of scientific evidence and information, but limits to the use or uptake of research. These limits are characterized as being linked to more general challenges of "post-normal" science when facts and values can at times be uncertain and contested while the stakes are very high and the need for decisions is seen as being urgent.

Over the last decade, at a time when funding for services intended to support families has been dramatically curtailed, successive governments in England and Wales have sought to increase the numbers of children being adopted from care. In light of the central role that children's social workers play in progressing plans for adoption, this research seeks to investigate 15 practitioners' experiences of operating within the current context. Evidence of significant tensions in social workers' accounts of planning for adoption and post-adoption contact under austerity is presented, and Evetts' distinction between organisational and occupational professionalism is drawn upon to understand the influence of the wider political context on decisions made by practitioners in working with children who go on to be adopted.