Raising the Bar: Core Executive Studies, Public Value and a Changing World

type="main"> Core executive studies is now the dominant lens through which the distributed arrangements characteristic of the hollow state are studied; public value has emerged as a normative prescription for citizen engagement with policy making in the context of the very institutional conditions theorised by core executive studies scholars. Yet there has been surprisingly little intellectual engagement between the two. This article assesses the consequences for core executive studies – both epistemologically and analytically – of the empirical circumstances presaged by public value. It concludes that while the asymmetric power variant of core executive studies can accommodate public value, the epistemological basis of the differentiated polity model is challenged by public value's distributed decision-making arrangements. The article also finds that core executive studies needs a more nuanced empirical conception of policy making in order to account for a fully fledged public value landscape.