{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.027717391304347826, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01358695652173913, 'mean_word_length': 5.124792013311148, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Theory and methods in sport policy and politics research

The study of sport policy and politics is still dominated by academics working in disciplines other than political science, public administration, policy studies and International Relations (IR). In fact, there are only a handful of scholars contributing to sport policy and politics research who reside in the afore-mentioned traditional, disciplinary departments. The majority of work published in the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics is undertaken by sociologists, historians, management and tourism experts and those broadly termed ‘sports studies’ scholars. This is one of the reasons why Houlihan (2005, p. 163) suggested that ‘there is remarkably little analysis of sport policy that utilizes the major models and frameworks for analysis widely adopted in other policy areas’. Thirteen years on from this and it remains the case that there is still a lack of academic research ‘by the very people one would assume would be at the forefront of sport politics [and policy] analyses: political scientists and international relations scholars’ (Grix 2016, p. 22). It is rare, therefore, that work in the sub-field of sport policy and politics extensively or explicitly reflects on the value and use of particular mainstream theories and even rarer still for such research to contribute to the wider development of theories within policy and politics disciplines. This chimes with the aspiration to make ‘theoretical contributions to analyses of the policy process for sport which draw upon and develop current macroand meso-level theories and analytic frameworks’ (Houlihan et al. 2009, p. 2) which was the first of the initial aims outlined 10 years ago in the opening editorial of the International Journal of Sport Policy (changed in 2011 to include ‘and Politics’ to broaden the journal’s appeal; IJSPP) . It is fair to say that this aim has only partially been realised and that only a few scholars working in the area of sport policy and politics have had an impact on key developments in mainstream disciplines. The second substantial aim of the IJSPP was to encourage the development of robust, evidence-based empirical research on the impact of sport policy and the last 10 Volumes of IJSPP has gone some way to achieve this. Similar issues arise when considering methodologies utilised for the study of sport policy and politics. There has been limited application of innovative methodologies to the study of sport policy and politics and few articles have contributed to broader methodological debates. Instead, much of the research in the IJSPP has adopted well-used qualitative methods, often drawing on the paradigms of critical realism, constructivism or pragmatism. These complement the traditional quantitative research strategies that are well established, for example, in sport management studies. However, the use of mixed methods research (MMR) has been limited in both sport policy and sport management, as shown in Table 1 (De Bosscher 2018). MMR make up just over 6% of articles in IJSPP, in contrast to the mainstream journals, for example, in sociology (36%), social psychology (27%) and management and organisational behaviour (23%) (Bryman 2006). These research designs offer scope for future agenda setting in sport policy research, as MMR is useful when studying complex social phenomena because they draw from the strengths and minimise the weaknesses of both singular (quantitative or qualitative) research studies (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017). However, in the few cases where MMR is currently used, the design is often poorly legitimised (van der Roest et al. 2015).