Constitutional Law (Books and Journals)
- Bringing Justice Home. The Road to Final Appellate and Regional Court Establishment by: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2008
- Top Tips for Academics Engaging with the Media
- A Sea Change in British Politics?
- How to Make Friends in Politics and Influence Policymakers
- How the Electoral Map of England and Wales has been Redrawn
- Democratic Subversion in the United States, the Trump Party and the Constitution’s Partisan Bias
- The Wilson Legacy for Starmer’s Labour
- In Focus: Zero Action on Net Zero? UK Political Shifts on Climate Commitments
- Russia’s Descent into Totalitarianism
- The Politics of Artificial Intelligence: Rhetoric vs Reality
- Conservatism After the Flood: Old Wine, New Bottles?
- Last Word: Crisis in Local Government
- Welfare Standards Around the World
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Political Communication as a Tragedy of the Commons
In this article, we argue that many contemporary challenges to democracy can be traced back to how political organizations compete for attention. We begin with the idea that these organizations appeal for attention both by mobilizing their own members, and also through media that reaches a wider audience, such as social media and mass media. But since many organizations are competing for the...
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Narrative Counterspeech
The proliferation of conspiracy theories poses a significant threat to democratic decision-making. To counter this threat, many political theorists advocate countering conspiracy theories with ‘more speech’ (or ‘counterspeech’). Yet conspiracy theories are notoriously resistant to counterspeech. This article aims to conceptualise and defend a novel form of counterspeech – narrative counterspeech –
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Compelled Turnout and Democratic Turnout: Why They Are Different
One strategy in defence of compulsory voting is based on what I call the non-instrumental value of high turnout: the idea that almost-universal participation in elections is valuable per se. This article argues that we do not have democratic reasons to value compelled turnout. First, thanks to an original analysis of the practice of voting, I identify three constitutive rules that make the...
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Scaling Up? Unpacking the Effect of Deliberative Mini-Publics on Legitimacy Perceptions
Deliberative mini-publics are increasingly used to try to tackle public discontent with the functioning of democracy. However, the ability of mini-publics to increase perceptions of legitimate decision-making among citizens at large remains unclear, given especially that existing studies have not considered the potentially damaging effects of mini-public recommendations not being followed. We...
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Middle England’s empire: Social reproduction in the colonial global economy
This article brings feminist critiques of capitalism into conversation with race-conscious International Political Economy to highlight the place of social reproduction in the colonial global economy. It does so by taking a provincial perspective, using Royal Leamington Spa as a case study to reveal how the provision of care for the elderly and the ill sustained colonial elites across the life...
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Governed bodies, discarded bodies: Notes for an analysis of contemporary migrations during Covid-19
This article presents the results of an ethnographic research conducted in the northern border of Mexico from 2019 to 2021, specifically in the city of Tijuana. The objective of this article is to analyse the role of bodies in border and migration management with special emphasis on the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. To do so, I focus on three situations. First is the case of migrants whose...
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What Is French Liberalism?
It has become commonplace to argue that Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville form a distinct French liberal tradition going back to Montesquieu. Yet Tocqueville showed little interest in Constant, and early nineteenth-century French liberals did not recognize Montesquieu as the father of French liberalism. Based on these observations, this essay demonstrates that the French liberal...
- Commissioned Book Review: Matthew Smith, The First Resort: A History of Social Psychiatry in the United States
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Juggling identities: Identification, collective memory, and practices of self-presentation in the United Nations General Debate
The concept of collective memory receives increasing attention in international relations. This burgeoning scholarship, however, mainly centres on its role as a strategic tool in foreign policy, binding it to national context. This research uses collective memory as an analytical framework to gauge identification processes at the international level. Specifically, we examine how states self-presen
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Do Parties Matter for Environmental Policy Stringency? Exploring the Program-to-Policy Link for Environmental Issues in 28 Countries 1990–2015
Political parties are crucial in crafting effective national climate policies in democratic states. At the same time, there is a practical and academic debate of whether political parties matter for policy output. This article speaks to this debate by investigating the link between what parties say and what parties do with respect to environmental issues. More concretely, it analyzes whether...
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It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over: Interest-Group Influence in Policy Implementation
Current research on interest-group influence in the European Union tends to focus on just one stage of the policy cycle, being agenda setting, the legislative process or (some aspects) of the implementation stage. We argue that this bifurcation of the research agenda is a serious shortcoming, as lobby dynamics may vary throughout different consecutive policymaking stages. As a consequence, lobby...
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Conflictual behaviour in legislatures: Exploring and explaining adversarial remarks in oral questions to prime ministers
Questioning mechanisms such as Prime Minister’s Questions in the United Kingdom and Question Time in Australia are notoriously adversarial. Much less is known about whether and how questioning facilitates conflict in other legislatures. This question is particularly important given the criticism that excessive adversarialism may hinder the performance of accountability, and hence may be...
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After the epistemological turn: A framework for studying populism as a knowledge phenomenon
The recent epistemological turn in populism studies has produced many valuable insights pertaining to populist knowledge practices, conspiracy theories, information bubbles, and cognitive biases. However, various elements of populist epistemology are still studied separately, and there are no common theoretical assumptions that would arrange them into a comprehensive epistemic theory of populism.
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Young Citizens’ Party Support: The “When” and “Who” of Political Influence within Families
Decades of evidence point to the vital role of parents in shaping their children’s partisan leanings, particularly concerning mainstream parties. And yet the contours of intergenerational influence remain quite obscured. For instance, scholars disagree on when social learning in the household occurs (childhood vs adolescence) and about who is the dominant socializer (mother vs father). Data from...
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Testing Causal Inference Between Social Media News Reliance and (Dis)trust of EU Institutions with an Instrumental Variable Approach: Lessons From a Null-Hypothesis Case
Given the well-documented negativity bias and attitudinal entrenchment associated with sharing and debating news in social media, a reasonable and already substantially investigated assumption is that those getting news about the European Union (EU) mostly from social media would be more sceptical of its institutions than others. Empirical research on this topic has thus far largely deployed...
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Failing women and girls during Covid-19: The limits of regional gender norms in Africa
How do we account for the ability or otherwise of regional organisations in the global South to enable equitable and inclusive responses to the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question with a focus on Africa and in relation to the rights of women and girls. Drawing on theoretical insights from Feminist Global Health Security and from data on the African Union, other regional organisations in...
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Ignore, Rebut or Embrace: Political Elite Responses to Conspiracy Theories
The attention to and concerns about conspiracy theories have increased in recent years, fuelled by a surge in conspiratorial discourse during the Donald Trump presidency in the United States. Responding to this development, the scholarship on how democracies should deal with conspiracy theories has focused on what new regulations and institutions ought to be introduced to tackle its threats to...
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More than a memento mori? Assessing the participation of former Prime Ministers in the House of Commons
The successes and failures of political leaders and their rise and fall from power are well analysed by academic studies. The roles played by former leaders however are more obscure, particularly if they continue to maintain an institutional presence. This article explores the backbench behaviour of 12 former UK prime ministers following their departure from Downing Street. We find that...