All politics and policy issues involve the accumulation of data about problems and solutions in context of social interactions. Drawing on these data, policy actors acquire, translate, and disseminate new information and knowledge toward achieving political endeavors and for revising or strengthening their policy-related beliefs over time. 'Policy learning' is a concept that refers to this cognitive and social dynamic. Articles in this special issue examine the relationship between policy learning and policy change from different theoretical perspectives. In this introduction to the special issue, we describe the current approaches that structure the field and gaps in knowledge separating policy learning and policy change. We introduce a refined conceptual framework to outline and compare the articles in the issue. These articles point to several facets of the learning phenomenon. First, the articles focus on the nature and consequences of learning by specific groups of society, such as advocacy coalitions, epistemic communities, citizens, street-level bureaucrats, and policy brokers. Second, they present learning processes in which information and experience are used to acquire new knowledge on policy objectives to substantiate and legitimize them or to change or form beliefs. Third, they identify several cognitive and social processes to strengthen the connection between policy learning and policy change. Finally, the articles point to several psychological, social, and institutional factors fostering or impeding these cognitive and social processes. This introduction concludes with avenues for future research.

Using the PRISMA approach, we conducted a systematic review of 58 public administration studies of organizational socialization. Organizational socialization is the process of mutual adaptation between an organization and its new members. Our findings demonstrate a growing but geographically disparate interest in this issue. Public administration studies contribute to this research area with novel insights into the determinants of organizational socialization and its effects on employees' public service motivation, Eurocrats' support of supranational institutions, person-organization fit and differences in the socialization of male and female public employees. The review also shows that the effects of organizational socialization on the homogenization of employees' attitudes should not be exaggerated, especially relative to other homogenizing factors such as attraction or selection effects. The reviewed articles are methodologically eclectic, with a recent but growing interest in longitudinal designs. There are also weaknesses in the operationalization of organizational socialization. We conclude with an agenda for future studies on organizational socialization in public administration research.

Policy actors involved in decision-making processes interact and gradually accumulate evidence about policy problems and solutions. As a result, they update their policy beliefs and preferences over time. This process of policy learning is consistent if policy preferences are aligned with any adaptations in beliefs about policy outcomes-a crucial condition of learning-induced policy changes. This article examines whether and when policy learning is consistent based on regression analyses conducted on data from a 2012 survey of 293 Belgian actors involved in the European liberalization policy process for the rail and electricity sectors. In line with the advocacy coalition framework, existing research has suggested that motivated modes of reasoning, such as selective exposure and biased assimilation, influence policy actors' attitudes and behaviours. This study isolates the effect of biased assimilation on policy learning by demonstrating that when policy actors adapt their beliefs about policy outcomes, they do not necessarily align their policy preferences with those adaptations. Furthermore, biased assimilation is higher among politically curious actors, but their degree of commitment to the policy process does not appear to play a role. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Learning is decisive for successful problem solving in governance networks: it is by acquiring, interpreting and diffusing information that public and private actors build joint action and innovative policy solutions. Yet, little is ORCID Cécile Riche

No abstract

When individual actors are involved in a policy process, do they assess and revise their policy preferences according to their interests or are they open to other forms of arguments over time? This study examines the effect of policy actors' interests on policy learning. It is based on a survey conducted in 2012 among 376 Belgian actors (from 38 organizations) involved in the European liberalization policy process of two network industries: the rail and electricity sectors. Borrowing from organizational research and behavioral economics, several hypotheses are drawn from a model of the individual shared by various policy approaches, such as the advocacy coalition framework. A ''simple gain scores'' approach to the measurement of policy learning is introduced. Regression analyses show that policy actors align their policy preferences with the impacts of policies on their own material well-being (personal interests) and the material prosperity of their organization (organizational interests). This tendency is independent of the importance that policy actors give to their interests in their everyday lives. This suggests that policy actors experience a sort of ''interest shift'' when they assess their policy preferences over time. This shift, however, exerts a limited influence on policy learning. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Policy learning designates the cognitive and social dynamic leading policy actors to revise or strengthen their policy beliefs and preferences over time. In this chapter, we propose a synthesis of existing research on policy learning. We distinguish three main sets of approachesnamely, the 'managerialist' approaches, 'diffusion and convergence' approaches, as well as 'social learning' approachesbefore pointing to their common characteristics: a consideration for the long run; a focus on the role of state but also non-state actors in policy processes; and a recognition that policy actors' rationality is 'bounded'. Then, we discuss three challenges of future research: deepening our knowledge on the behavioural aspects of policy learning; recognizing and studying the multiple outcomes of policy learning; and looking for settings and practices fostering or impeding policy learning.

Street-level bureaucrats play a key role in the delivery of public services to the citizens with whom they interact. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses approach, we rely on a street-level perspective to report a systematic review of 46 studies about officer-offender interactions in prisons and probation services. In doing so, we examine how correctional officers articulate state-agencywhereby they focus on the implementation of rules and policiesand citizen-agency