LSE School of Public Policy’s Post

🚨 My new edited book with Anthony Seldon and CUP is out on the 27th June 🚨 The Conservative Effect 2010-24: 14 Wasted Years? With a general election on the horizon, this is the authoritative guide to the last fourteen successive years: • Unrivalled near-universal coverage of the entire governing program in each policy and political area. • Chapters by the top academics and commentators on UK politics and policy areas. • The first contemporary take on the entire period and capturing the distinct moment in historical and political discourse. What has changed for the better or worse during fourteen years of Conservative government? Anthony Seldon and I, with our team of top academics, explore the ‘Conservative Effect’, analysing the ultimate impact of their leadership on the UK and answering our key question: Was it really fourteen wasted years? 📕 Pre-Order now: https://lnkd.in/evAzGp26 https://lnkd.in/eaZTXm-p

If you are interested in electoral volatility, the emergence of new political movements and EU politics, read the research I have published in the Journal of Contemporary European Studies on the responsiveness of the European mainstream parties to socio-economic transformations. The e-print of the article is (temporarily) available open-access by clicking the image below

how do youth manage conflicting impulses like fitting in or standing out, and what does this have to do with far right attitudes? Find out in a recently published chapter that I co-authored with Cynthia Miller-Idriss. https://lnkd.in/e783AjMY

It will be time to vote here in the UK in just over a month. Based on what I have seen, neither of the two leading parties has a clear manifesto (with measurable impact) or a budget to accompany its bid. Labour has a few more distinct areas than the Conservatives, where it is thinking about the future and looking to address long-term failures in our current system (energy, environment, education). Still, it seems weak on the NHS front. The Conservatives, on the other hand, judging by their website, are just looking to beat Labour. Their NHS plans are something we could measure against, but apart from that, popularity politics shouts from the webpage (e.g. Stop the Boats). https://lnkd.in/dkw7HPEB https://lnkd.in/djYGGBb8 Do any leading media players carry out a policy-by-policy cross-party comparison that the public can decide for themselves? If so, does it include a scale of measurability (policy and ability to measure impact) and one for popularity rhetoric? (fear-mongering to get people to vote for them). UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) theguardian.org The Telegraph The Times TheEconomist Newspaper Limited Goalhanger Podcasts Anthropy UK

🎈 It's publication day for my new article on the Politics of Disruption during the Home Rule crisis! I'm also quite pleased that if anyone ever cites it, it will be as 'Shut Up! Sit Down!', like a mardy hokey cokey. As well as tracing extra-parliamentary political engagement, the article ponders where we look for political culture and how we move nineteenth-century political history forward as a field. Published in Parliamentary History, the article was Proxime Accessit in the journal's Essay Prize for early career researchers. https://lnkd.in/ehqMT6j3

As the pro-EU mainstream parties have just lost their monopoly over the EU project, an embryonic form of ‘EU politics’ is eventually emerging. Despite the absence of an EU-wide electoral competition, we’re witnessing a qualitative transformation of the EU political space. Watch this space as the old paradigm and logics lost their explanatory power My analysis for ⁦‪POLITICO Europe https://lnkd.in/dMWD7xUH

“In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth,”“the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. Excerpt From The U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, Amendments, Federalist Papers and More! Mark Hallaq https://lnkd.in/gPqUfh4J This material may be protected by copyright.

This counter-factual question has nagged me over the past couple of years: was I right to be upset that my late father’s publisher rejected a book he wrote in the 1980s, about how Ancient Greece's real original democracy could be adapted to modern times? Or was it blessing in disguise that the manuscript lay forgotten on his library shelf for three decades?   The book was eventually published in March as 'The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power'. In a new review, Dr Joanna Podgórska-Rykala argues that the book is actually being helped by the long years during which the bound bundle of dot-matrix printouts was gathering dust. A professor of political science from Poland, she suggests that if it had been published back in the 1980s, the ideas would have been ignored and overlooked. “At the time Pope proposed random selection, Eastern and Central Europe was facing a serious challenge to return to the democratic path. At this point, could the idea of a random selection of politicians be taken seriously? Could it be successfully integrated into the new democratic reality? Would it be possible to convince people fighting for democratic values against communist power that randomly selected citizens would best carry out the democratic mission? I fear not. However, when the shortcomings of representative democracy become all too apparent and begin to trouble both established and post-communist countries, it becomes clear that the changes Pope wrote about must come.” Dr Podgórska-Rykala, speaking in Belfast during a panel to debate 'The Keys to Democracy' at the annual conference of the Political Studies Association of Ireland on 20-22 October, found much else to commend. The book manages a “perfect balancing act between an idea and its practical incarnations”, she said, and comes to “brilliant conclusions”.   Dr Podgórska-Rykala's own forthcoming book, 'Deliberative Democracy, Public Policy, and Local Government', due out with Routledge in 2024, tells the uplifting story of nine randomly selected citizens’ assemblies in seven independent-minded Polish cities. It is partly based on interviews with participants of these assemblies, who praised them as fair, inclusive and reasonable, and members of the existing councils, whose members cheerfully denounced their elected city halls as plagued by ignorance, brawls and chaos. “I hope citizens’ assemblies will grow in cities … but the problem is implementation of the citizens’ assemblies’ decisions,” Dr Podgórska-Rykala told the #PSAI conference. “Only one person I interviewed thought that deliberative democracy could replace the current system … there is a defence of the status quo, a fear of instability. It is very difficult to take power from someone.” Dr Podgórska-Rykala's full review is here: https://lnkd.in/g-4nufcg #sortition #letpeopledecide

British politician and philosopher, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is largely credited with using the term “Fourth Estate” in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening up of press reporting of the House of Commons of Great Britain. He is reported to have said that there were Three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. The “Three Estates” referred to the traditional divisions of European society: the clergy (First Estate), the nobility (Second Estate), and the commoners (Third Estate). By dubbing the press the Fourth Estate, Burke was acknowledging the power of the press to act as a guardian of the public interest and a watchdog against the abuse of power. What we are witnessing in the 21st Century is the systematic dismantling of the Fourth Estate. We should ask why politicians not only sit by and watch this happen, but have created and reinforce the policy settings that allow it to happen, with the annihilation of regional public radio newsrooms and stations for example, starting with the 4th Labour Government in the 1980s. The private sector was supposed to fill the gap, but look at how that’s working out. We must be cynical and question whether the Second Estate and their political puppets actively want to get rid of the Fourth Estate, which has held them to account so well, for so long. No doubt much to their annoyance. #journalism #fourthestate