Australian Policy Online highlights CASS policy influence

Research database Australian Policy Online has given high rankings to four publications from the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS) in 2013.

The College’s strengths in Indigenous research and politics research were recently highlighted, with two major research publications from each category in the top ten of their respective fields.

The nod from Policy Online underscores the policy focussed nature of research produced by the College.

Director of the Research School of Social Sciences and Professor of Public Policy, Adam Graycar, says it’s no surprise to see CASS research helping to inform public policy.

“We are fortunate in CASS to have social scientists of such high quality and with great national and international reputations, and who can create and communicate knowledge with great authority,” he says.

“Social scientists help unravel the complexities of our everyday life, and do so with good data and skilful value adding analysis.” 

In politics, Graycar’s research on Perceptions of corruption in Victoria looking at community and public servants’ perceptions of corruption in the state was in the top ten most read research papers for the year.

Well-timed for an election year, Ian McAllister and Juliet Pietsch’s work also made the top ten, looking at decades of political trends in Trends in Australian political opinion: results from the Australian election study, 1987-2010.

In Indigenous research, two CASS publications were in the top five in this field, including The geographic distribution of Indigenous disability by Nicholas Biddle, Matthew Gray and Mandy Yap from the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR).

The CAEPR research showed that the rate of disability in the Indigenous population is substantially higher than for the Australian population as a whole, and provided an overview of the geographic distribution of disability in the Indigenous population.

Peter Yu, also from CAEPR, had a publication in the top five; The power of data in Aboriginal hands, exploring the critical role that data can play in development scenarios when Aboriginal people are in control of collecting, managing and interpreting data.

Australian Policy Online is a research database and alert service providing free access to full text research reports and papers, statistics and other resources essential for public policy development and implementation in Australia and New Zealand.