UCL Uncovering Politics

Political science is centrally concerned with understanding how politics works. It’s a discipline of the present tense, and the bulk of our research focuses on gathering evidence in the here and now. But sometimes political scientists also dig into the past. From time to time, you’ll even find one of us trawling through the records in a dusty archive.  We are discussing one particular ongoing exam...

Our guest today is Professor Lisa Vanhala. A Professor in Political Science here at UCL and an expert on the politics of climate change. Lisa recently gave her inaugural lecture: Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage , offering a fascinating insight into the way that UN meetings and negotiations over climate change get framed, and how they proceed, informed by the ideas o...

Today we are examining speech acts and uptake. A central contribution from J. L. Austin has been the idea that our speech sometimes doesn’t only say things – sometimes it does things. When we speak, we don’t only convey content or information. We sometimes also - for instance - promise, name, refuse, or order: in short, our speech sometimes acts . And that has prompted a great deal of philosophica...

The book that we’re discussing in this episode suggests that IMF funding becomes a resource held by local leaders, which those leaders can use to benefit their own supporters to the detriment of the rest of the population. The book – called IMF Lending: Partisanship, Punishment, and Protest – has two authors, and we are joined by both of them. - Dr Rod Abouharb is Associate Professor in Internatio...

Immigration is a hot political issue in many countries. Its economic and social costs and benefits are widely debated. The people who are most directly involved in it or affected by it are often highly vulnerable, meaning that policy debate ought to proceed with care and caution. Yet it’s often used as a political tool by one or other side, as campaigners fuel fears or animosities for their own en...

During the recent pandemic, unprecedented public spending was required to help tackle the deadly disease and minimise its economic fallout. But faced with heightened uncertainty, rapidly changing conditions, and imperfect information, fiscal transparency was perhaps not at the forefront of politicians’ minds when making important public investment and spending decisions.   Post-pandemic, in the mi...

Many people in South Africa live in very unsatisfactory so-called ‘backyard dwellings’. But few take part in collective action to improve their lot. Why not? This puzzle centres on the broader idea known to social scientists as the ‘collective action problem’, that people often struggle to work together to achieve a common goal, leading to suboptimal outcomes. This has long been explored by schola...

This week we welcome Dr Emily McTernan , co-host of this podcast, into the guest seat. Emily is talking about her new book, On Taking Offence. In it, she argues that taking offence is an important and often valuable response to affronts against our social standing, and that it deserves to be taken more seriously by scholars than it has been (and perhaps less seriously than it might be seen by some...

The soap opera of US politics rolls on. Joe Biden – the first octogenarian president – plans to run again in 2024. So too does Donald Trump, despite a series of ongoing legal cases against him Beneath this surface, serious issues are at stake, around economic and climate policies, relations between the United States and China, the future stance of the US towards the war in Ukraine, and women’s rig...

A common idea in academic theory and activism, as we start to move towards less unjust institutions, is that we need to decolonise things, from university curricula to museum collections. Following on from a brilliant event which took place last week at UCL, the UCL-Penn State Joint Conference on ‘Resisting Colonialism’, we are discussing these ideas with the three organisers. The conference range...

Our guest this week is Professor Albert Weale , Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy at UCL. Following an event honouring his career on his retirement, in this episode, we’re exploring Albert’s life and work as an academic. Over his career, Albert has published 20 books and more than 150 articles and book chapters on a diverse and impressive array of topics, from the politics o...

Governments in many countries have powers to authorize – or not authorize – planned demonstrations. So what are the effects of such decisions? We might think the main effects are going to be on whether the demonstrations happen or not, but new research suggests that the impacts can be much subtler than that: they influence whether the demonstrators gain public support, with knock-on consequences f...

In this episode we’re discussing elections, referenda, and how to fix our democracy, with none other than our long-time podcast host, Alan Renwick. In his inaugural lecture, Alan described democracy as rule for, and by, all, and suggested that the UK’s democratic system is falling short of that ideal. We discuss three suggested "fixes": electoral reform, improving citizen's access to reliable info...

This week we welcome Professor Richard Bellamy back to the podcast. Richard has appeared twice before on the following topics: ‘Does the UK Still Have a Political Constitution’ (May 2021) and ‘Checks and Balances in Democracy’ (Oct 2020) Richard is Professor of Political Science at UCL. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and, this academic year, is also Visiting Professor of Ethics and Public P...

A special episode coinciding with this week’s International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia . It’s easy to assume that LGBTQ rights are more likely to advance in democracies than in non-democracies. Democracies are generally more open to diversity, and the countries with the strongest LGBTQ rights protection are democracies. But new work by Dr Samer Anabtawi , Lecturer in Comparat...

Despite Putin’s expectation of a swift victory, over one year on from his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that country’s defenders are still fighting – and, indeed fighting back.  One important area in which Ukraine has managed to stay ahead of Russia is in military technology. A new report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change examines the role of military technology in the Russia–Ukrai...

This week we welcome a special guest who has direct experience at the sharp end of politics. Charles Dunst is a former foreign correspondent who has reported from many countries around the world, who is now deputy director of research & analytics at The Asia Group – a business advisory firm based in Washington, D.C. – and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an...

The last seven years in British politics have been tempestuous. The turmoil has had multiple causes: Covid, Putin’s attack on Ukraine, and Trussonomics among them. But the politics of much of the period has been dominated by Brexit: by a referendum on an ever so simple question, followed by years of wrangling over what the question meant and how the answer that voters gave to it should be interpre...

In 1998, after three decades of conflict, lasting peace was achieved in Northern Ireland through an accord variously known as the Good Friday Agreement or the Belfast Agreement. The 25th anniversary of that Agreement comes next month.  Though there are problems – the institutions of power-sharing government established through the Agreement are currently suspended, and pockets of paramilitary viol...

Immigration is back near the top of the political agenda, here in the UK and elsewhere. The UK government’s so-called ‘Stop the Boats Bill’, which targets those who cross the Channel in search of asylum, is one rather extreme manifestation of the idea that you can stop unwanted migration by making it unattractive. A wider expression of the same view is the concept of ‘benefit tourism’: the idea th...

This week, we have a slightly different kind of episode to normal. Rather than discussing an academic publication, we’ll be looking at the ideas and career of Professor Marc Stears.  Marc is currently the inaugural director of the UCL policy lab, set up to break down the barriers between academic researchers and broader society. His career to date has included stints in academia at Cambridge, Oxfo...

If you managed to catch our episode last week, you’ll know that we were talking about the European Court of Justice. This week we are looking at another international court –  the European Court of Human Rights.  This court has long been contentious in some circles in the UK. The Conservative Party’s election manifesto in 2015 pledged to ‘break the formal link between British courts and the Europe...

One of the chief stumbling blocks in negotiations over the Northern Ireland Protocol has concerned the role of the EU’s top court, the European Court of Justice, and parts of the Conservative Party are ever agitated by the quite separate European Court of Human Rights and its role in adjudicating on human rights disputes. So we have made two episodes looking at these institutions, starting with th...

At first blush, it might seem obvious that praise is a good thing. It involves complimenting others on what they have done; it tends to make them feel good; and it’s a way for us to communicate insights about virtuous behaviour. But dig a little deeper and things are not always as they seem. Take an example from almost three years ago. A bright moment for many people in the first Covid lockdown wa...

Two current news stories raise important questions about online speech, and how it should be regulated.  First, twitter has been taken over by Elon Musk, who has slashed staff numbers, allowed previously barred users – not least, Donald Trump – to return, and pledged a new era of free speech and less regulation. Some claim that as a result, Twitter has seen a deluge of disinformation and hate spee...