page_title: Ken Young
section_title: Academic career in public policy
hierarchical_section_title: Ken Young / Academic career in public policy
caption_attribution_description: English: British political scientist and historian Ken Young, Professor of Public Policy at King's College London, as seen in 2013.
context_page_description: Kenneth George Young FAcSS FRHistS was a British political scientist and historian who was Professor of Public Policy at King's College London in its Department of War Studies. Earlier he was instrumental in the creation of the Department of Political Economy at KCL in 2010, and was its founding Head of Department.
  Educated at the London School of Economics, Young was a research officer with the influential Greater London Group during his time there. Young taught at several institutions prior to coming to KCL, including the University of Kent at Canterbury; the University of Bristol, where he was a founding editor of the interdisciplinary-oriented journal Policy & Politics and where the annual Ken Young Best Paper Prize is named after him; the University of Birmingham, where he was Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies; and at Queen Mary and Westfield College of the University of London, where he was Head of the Department of Politics and Vice-Principal. Young is most known for his work in urban studies and policy studies, specially with regard to local government in England.
context_section_description: In 1974, Young became a research fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury.  In the same year he became co-editor with Bleddyn Davies of the academic journal Policy & Politics, which the two of them had been instrumental in forming two years earlier while at LSE. The goal of the journal was to provide an interdisciplinary approach to the study of local government. Young's networking skills were crucial in recruiting academics from around the world, including future Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, to publish articles for the new journal.
  Young's first book, a revised version of his dissertation, was published as Local politics and the rise of party: the London municipal society and the conservative intervention in local elections, 1894-1963 by Leicester University Press in 1975.
  By the late 1970s he had moved to the University of Bristol, where he was affiliated with that institution's School for Advanced Urban Studies. Under Young's guidance, Policy & Politics found a permanent home at Bristol, in what eventually became the Policy Press. He remained Managing Editor of the journal until 1980. Young also joined the Policy Studies Institute in 1980, where he was a Senior Fellow.
  Young then became Professor at the University of Birmingham in 1987, where he was also Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies. Much of Young's research during the 1980s focused how local governments could realise equal opportunity policies. One such effort was a joint conference and study project with American sociologist Nathan Glazer, that sought to compare British and American approaches towards that goal. An evaluation in American Political Science Review of the resulting book of conference papers assessed the British contributions as superior to the American ones and criticised Glazer's portrayal of U.S. racial history in particular.
  In 1990, Young was named as Professor of Politics and Head of the Department of Politics at Queen Mary and Westfield College of the University of London. He was appointed Vice-Principal there in 1992, a position he held for six years. He was also involved in publicising research on authoritarianism to a general audience. Of his 1997 book Local Government since 1945, written with Nirmala Rao, one popular text included it in a bibliography as a "useful postwar review" of the subject.
  In connection with the movement for evidence-based policy, from 2000 to 2005 Young was director of the Economic and Social Research Council's UK Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice.  The centre was located at first within Queen Mary and then within King's College London. Additionally, Young was a founding editor in 2005 of Evidence & Policy, an interdisciplinary journal covering the relationship between research evidence and public policy.
  In 2005, Young himself went to KCL as Professor of Public Policy. His charge was to bring into being postgraduate programmes in public policy, which included establishment of a master's in the subject as well as the creation of the Institute for the Study of Public Policy. That institute eventually transformed into the Department of Political Economy in 2010; Young remained its head until January 2013.
  Young was known for his teaching, which he did over a span of 50 years. He did not focus his attentions so much on superior students, but rather sought to assist and engage those who were struggling for one reason or another.
  Young was on the staff of the University of Bolton's Centre for Opposition Studies.
  Young's work in public policy has been influential and frequently cited. Policy & Politics journal awards an annual Ken Young Best Paper Prize, in recognition of Young's "innovative ideas and determination to put interdisciplinary analysis of and for policy firmly on the academic map in the UK and beyond." The bibliography of Gerry Stoker's 1991 textbook The Politics of Local Government has ten separate listings for Young's books, articles, and reports. The 2002 journal article "Social science and the evidence-based policy movement", of which Young was the lead author 
caption: Ken Young in 2013
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