Politics news

Dr Kamil Zwolski becomes a National Teaching Fellows

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Emily Flore St Denny is awarded the Anniversary fellowship

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Emily Flore St Denny is awarded the Anniversary fellowship

Will Jennings, Lawrence McKay and Gerry Stoker win the Bernard Crick Prize for best article

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Dr. Valgarðsson, Dr. Clarke, Prof. Jennings and Prof. Stoker win the Harrison Prize

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Dr Smith hosts a Conversation with Helen Clark on Environment and Peace

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0100

6th UK Political Psychology Conference

This in-person event took place on the 20th and 21st June 2024 and was a great opportunity to connect with fellow political psychology scholars and experts in the field.

The conference was organised by Dr Tereza Capelos (��ɫ��Ƶ), Dr Ben Seyd (University of Kent), Dr Jac Larner (Cardiff University), Dr Tabitha Baker (Bournemouth University), Professor Catherine Lido (University of Glasgow), and Dr Ashley Weinberg (University of Salford).

The conference brought together three Political Psychology groups which co-sponsored and co-organised the event.

The Political Psychology group of the Political Studies Association
The Political Psychology Standing Group of the European Consortium of Political Research
The Political Psychology group of the British Psychological Society

The event was free to join and was open to academic staff researchers, postgraduate researchers, and students of Politics, Psychology, and related disciplines. The programme included 13 panel discussions in total.

The keynote speaker of the event was Professor David Redlawsk, from the University of Delaware, who gave a talk about Exploring Voter Responses to Politicians Moral Violations Summary. This talk discussed a series of studies Dr Annemarie Walter and Professor Redlawsk have carried out to investigate how voters respond to violations of moral values by political actors. Professor Redlawsk reviewed several studies and discussed the next steps in understanding the degree to which moral violations may not be as important to voters as we might expect.

For more information about this event, please contact Dr Tereza Capelos.

Professor Jonathan Havercroft’s project Just and Unjust Riots

His project Just and Unjust Riots: A Normative Analysis of Militant Protest, argues that political rioting, or violent disruptive protest, might be justified under a limited set of conditions: when a politically marginalised group is resisting an unjust form of oppression and means of ending this oppression is systematically blocked by a ruling elite.

Having spent much of his career studying warfare, including teaching Just War Theory – which looks at what might justify the use of armed warfare in conflicts between states – he questioned why there is no equivalent theory in political science against which to consider riots.

Just Riots Theory

Unlike in war, riots are usually spontaneous eruptions of anger. Jonathan argues that a ‘just riot theory’ could help governments to determine an appropriate response to a riot.

“At a minimum, we need such a theory to distinguish between riots after a sports team wins and those protesting police murders of unarmed citizens,” explained Professor Jonathan Havercroft. “Treating all riots as illegitimate unfairly dismisses the grievances of the unheard, and potentially denies some of the most marginalised members of society the ability to voice their concerns.”

Developing a theory of just riots, Jonathan suggests, would allow us to make judgements about whether particular riots were justified, how the authorities should respond to the rioters’ grievances, and how individual rioters should be punished (or excused).

Supported by Public Policy ��ɫ��Ƶ, Jonathan shared his findings with police officers, parliamentarians, activists and NGOs.

Just and unjust riots was made possible by a British academy mid-career fellowship.

Professor Roderick Rhodes unveils the dark arts of British politics in new book

Court politics is about who in British government did what to whom, when, how, why, and with what consequences. Professor Rhodes' latest book provides a thorough depiction of the court politics of the Conservative governments of the twenty-first century. It analyses the everyday practice of the dark arts by the British political and administrative elite.

It shows that court politics matter because there are personal, electoral, and governmental consequences. It concludes that British government has a new Establishment skilled in knavery.
The heart of the book is its account of the courts of David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson. For each court, there is a description of its knavery; of the ways in which each practices the black arts. The specific topics include the courtiers; the prime minister’s craft; narratives, reshuffles, resignations and leadership challenges, the political games of barons and parliament, Cabinet and executive networks, and the feuds in the court between ministers, advisers, and civil servants. Knavery is everywhere. There is much evidence of betrayal, revenge, lying, scandals, and bullying with such machinations oiled by gossip, humour, alcohol and leavened with harassment in its several guises. Each chapter has a short case study of the court in action; namely, the education wars, the 2018 election, and the Covid-19 crisis. Each case illustrates the personal, electoral, and governmental consequences of court politics.
There are fewer and fewer ‘good chaps’ in government. There are more and more knaves. Decency is in decline. British government needs ‘rules for rulers’. The book identifies several. Above all, it cautions citizens – beware, here be dragons.

Professors book publication

1 of just 3 books on the shortlist, the prestigious award will be announced on the 6th of November, with a prize fund of £20,000.

The book follows Professor Armstrong's 2022 book, A Blue New Deal, which won the American Political Science Association's Lynton Caldwell Award for best book in environmental politics and policy (2023) and was a New Statesman Book of the Year.

The award is testament to Professor Armstrong's pathbreaking work in this area and showcases PAIR's strength in political philosophy.

ReGHID project awarded the 2024 Vice Chancellor’s Research Impact prize

ReGHID is led by Pia Riggirozzi (PAIR) and co-investigators David Owen (PAIR), Natalia Cintra (PAIR), Amos Channon and Sarah Neal (SSD). The consortium brings together research institutions in Central and South America (Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, and Colombia), University of York (UK) and intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations including the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

A significant impactful outcome has been the development and implementation of the AGAPE Guide. This guide addresses key barriers to SRH services, such as legal status, language, poverty, and discrimination, providing a comprehensive framework for assessing needs, accessing services, and ensuring protection. In collaboration with the University of Los Andes and the ProCrear Foundation in Colombia, the team worked directly with displaced women through workshops and focus groups. This effort led to peer training programmes that empower migrant women in Bogotá to advocate for their health rights. The AGAPE guide gained further international recognition, adopted by the International IOM in El Salvador and integrated into its broader regional strategy for Central America. Its influence extends to Brazil, where it is being replicated in Manaus, supported with funds from a Parliamentary Commission on Human Rights, demonstrating the wide-reaching impact of the ReGHID project across Latin America.

The Vice Chancellor’s Award recognises that the ��ɫ��Ƶ addresses global challenges and supports work redressing gender inequalities.

Call for Papers Reimagining Democratic Politics in the Contemporary

What our conjuncture calls for, then, is a reimagination of democratic politics in ways that make it possible to respond to the challenges it faces. This work is underway; wherever democratic politics is threatened, we also find practices of radical democratic imagination and enactment that refuse to fold, backslide, or collapse. Practices that refuse authoritarian rigidity and order in favour of a pluralising and diversifying suppleness. Against this background, the present symposium aims to bring together scholars and practitioners from across disciplinary boundaries to reflect on – and learn from – these practices of democratic enactment and imagination. Over two days, the discussion seeks to build dialogues between practices of democratic imagination and practices of democratic enactment or prefiguration – without presupposing, however, the necessity or givenness of any rigid binary.

We thus invite contributions that respond to the ongoing crises of democratic politics. We encourage interdisciplinarity, and welcome contributions from the heterogenous sites, problematisations and questions concerned with reimagining democratic politics, broadly construed. The symposium is organised around four over-arching thematic ‘scenes’, though contributions reaching across and beyond these are also welcome:

· Fugitivity and the politics of refusal

· Anticolonial imaginaries and politics

· Artistic practice and performance

· Democratic innovations

Contributions may be theoretical, empirical, artistic, literary, or experimental. Please submit an abstract, proposal, or outline of your intended contribution of up to 300 words to T.Gandhi@soton.ac.uk by the 4th of April, 2025. Please do share your proposal in another format (video, images, audio, etc.) if text is inappropriate or unsuitable.

Due to limited funding, we will unfortunately not be able to provide participants with support for travel or accommodation for this event. Please write to Tanay Gandhi at T.Gandhi@soton.ac.uk or Vanissa Wanick at vwv1n12@esc.soton.ac.uk with any questions.

Call for Papers: GAIN Hosts Women and Politics Annual Conference

Overview

The backlash against gender equality can be found in public opinion, public policy and recent election results across the globe. Conservative movements, populist politics, and media representation have coalesced to push back against gender equity gains, meaning gender equality actors are forced to resist and contest this backsliding. The rise of anti-feminist rhetoric and the erosion of reproductive rights are symptomatic of a broader political climate that seeks to reassert traditional gender norms and undermine the feminist agenda. Yet, alongside these challenges, feminist activism and scholarship continue to pushback, developing strategies to counteract and resist the roll back of hard-won feminist gains. Amid these struggles, there are also signs of hope, with some countries continuing to advance equality, enshrining protections in policies, legislation, and constitutions – progress that deserves recognition and celebration.

Welcoming papers from across time and space, this conference analyses the causes and impact of equality backlash and backsliding while centring gender politics scholarship and activism that resist these trends.

We invite paper submissions that explore a wide range of topics related to gender and politics emphasising the contemporary challenges and opportunities for social change in troubled times.

Submissions

We welcome papers and panels on topics including, but not limited to:

Feminist and anti-feminist movements
The intersection of gender, race, disability and class in politics
Gender and electoral politics
The impact of digital media and technology on gender politics
Gender in political theory and discourse
Gender-based violence and policy responses
Gender and climate change: environmental justice and activism
Transnational feminist politics and global justice
Gender and policy-making
Gender and the politics of health and reproductive rights and justice

Submission: Please send 250 word abstracts to psa.women.politics@googlemail.com by Friday 11th April 2025, 5pm.

Registration

Early bird registration opens on Monday 28th April 2025. Registration fees will be £20. Detailed information on registration fees, travel grants, and conference accommodations will be available on the PSA Women and Politics Specialist Group. For further information, please contact psa.women.politics@googlemail.com

PAIR Methods Summer School 2025

June 23 and 24, Boldrewood Campus, ��ɫ��Ƶ

The department of Politics and International Relations at the ��ɫ��Ƶ is proud to launch our first Methods Summer School. In recent times, the department has heavily invested in faculty with cutting-edge skills in quantitative and qualitative methods. We are hoping to attract the best and brightest PhD researchers and ECRs working in Politics and IR with whom we can share and grow that expertise.

The event will be pitched at intermediate-to-advanced level, with a mix of instructor-led ‘masterclasses’ and more collaborative sessions aimed at helping participants think through dilemmas, questions and problems in their current projects. Training will centre 4 elements that speak to key areas of methodological strength in PAIR. All centre around the core theme of better understanding and addressing decline the health of contemporary political institutions. They include:

The cutting-edge design of surveys, trust measures, and longitudinal studies in diagnosing the symptoms of democratic decline in advanced liberal democracies, and within regional and global institutions (ie public opinion, trust, legitimacy, representation, disengagement)
Ethnographic approaches to probe deeper into the underlying causes of these forms of decline, especially in relation to understudied inequalities and challenges (especially in the Global South)
Experimental approaches, spanning field, lab and survey experiments that can administer and assess the efficacy of ‘treatments’ for democratic ill-health in diverse settings
The theory and practice of participatory governance models (eg citizens assemblies, participatory budgeting) to plot the course for democratic recovery

The two-day course is free to attend (including refreshments and lunch for all participants). There are also a limited number of bursaries available to support travel and accommodation for those who cannot access adequate funding at their home institutions.

The event will include two full days on June 23 and 24. We want to ensure a high value experience so space at the event is limited. Please register on or before Monday June 2 to be considered. Register on MS Forms here. If you have any questions, please contact John Boswell (j.c.boswell@soton.ac.uk).

CPE Talks in Political Ethnography

🍷 The talk will be followed by informal drinks and light refreshments.

📝 Please register on Eventbrite to confirm in-person attendance.

CPE Ethnography at the Sea Series

Lunch will be provided
Please register on Eventbrite to confirm in-person attendance.

Short Course: Political Ethnography

🔗 More details and registration here

Short Course: Political Ethnography

🔗 More details and registration here

Rage, Dreams, and Insubordination: How the Far Right and Social Media Mobilize the Working Class

The lecture is part of the CPE’s annual workshop on interpretive and ethnographic methods in politics.

Political Ethnography - Online

For more information and to register, please visit this link.

Accessibility, Populism and Democracy: Unearthing the Value of Spontaneous Face-to-Face Interactions

👉 Join via Teams here

Join the C-BEAR Summer School on Experimental Methods

The summer school offers an intensive, hands-on introduction to experimental research design and implementation across the social sciences. Participants will explore laboratory, field and survey experiments, with practical sessions covering experimental design, ethics, recruitment, randomisation, data collection, and analysis. The programme will also introduce participants to tools such as Qualtrics, R, Stata and z-Tree, alongside emerging workflows involving generative and agentic AI for research design and implementation.

The course is designed for PhD students, early-career researchers, academic staff, and professionals interested in using experimental methods to study behaviour, decision-making, policy, politics, public administration, and organisational processes. No prior experience with experimental methods is required, although participants with some background in quantitative methods will also benefit from the applied format.

Across five days, participants will learn how to move from a research question to a feasible experimental design, how to anticipate common implementation challenges, and how to interpret and communicate experimental findings. The summer school combines lectures, practical workshops, group exercises and opportunities to receive feedback on participants’ own research ideas.

Dates: 29 June–3 July 2026

Location: ��ɫ��Ƶ, Highfield Campus

Further information and registration details are available via NCRM.

Democratic Innovations, Democratic Futures: Looking Beyond the Institution

Conference reflections from Deborah Timoni, PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations

The Democratic Innovations, Democratic Futures 2026 conference took place at the ��ɫ��Ƶ on 7–8 July. By the end of two days, I found myself thinking less about democratic innovations themselves and more about the futures they invite us to imagine.

The conference brought together scholars working on citizens' assemblies, sortition, civic technologies, artificial intelligence, advisory councils and participatory institutions from across different parts of the world. On paper, these looked like very different conversations. In practice, they all seemed to circle back to the same question: what kind of democracy are we trying to build?

That question quietly unfolded across the conference. It appeared in discussions about inclusion, resurfaced in debates about technology, and became impossible to ignore during Graham Smith's keynote, which challenged us to think beyond the dominant ways we currently imagine democratic innovations. Rather than asking whether citizens' assemblies "work", he invited us to consider the different democratic futures they represent. Most assemblies today are organised by the state, yet alternative models are emerging from civil society, activist movements and permanent democratic infrastructures. If democratic innovations are becoming part of our political landscape, then perhaps our task as scholars is not simply to evaluate them but also to pay attention to the different political imaginaries they embody.

That invitation stayed with me throughout the conference.

The first day opened with discussions questioning one of the assumptions often made in debates about democratic innovation: that creating new participatory spaces automatically produces a more inclusive democracy. Presentations on democratic innovations and inclusion explored growing support for alternatives to electoral politics, including citizens' assemblies, referendums and sortition. The starting point was familiar: representative democracy remains important, but many citizens increasingly want opportunities to participate between elections.

Yet what followed was not a celebration of these innovations.

One presentation challenged the increasingly popular assumption that sortition is inherently fair simply because everyone has an equal chance of being selected. Random selection, we were reminded, does not erase structural inequalities. People do not enter democratic spaces with equal confidence, equal resources or equal recognition. If some groups have historically been excluded, randomly inviting them into a room does not necessarily remove the barriers that prevented their participation in the first place. The conversation therefore shifted from cognitive diversity towards justice, asking not only who enters the room but also whose experiences, identities and knowledge are recognised once they are there.

That thread continued throughout the discussions. Repeatedly, presenters and discussants resisted easy answers. Inclusion was shown to be more than recruitment. Representation was more than demographic balance. Expertise, legitimacy and participation were treated not as settled concepts but as ongoing democratic questions. One of the strengths of the conference was that papers were not simply presented; they were collectively interrogated. Discussants consistently asked presenters to make explicit the assumptions underpinning their work: What do we mean by inclusion? Whose knowledge counts? What trade-offs are hidden inside our preferred democratic innovations?

By the afternoon, the focus had shifted from citizens' assemblies to local democratic innovations, but the underlying questions remained remarkably similar. A comparative study of advisory councils in Mexico illustrated that institutional design alone cannot explain democratic success. Two councils could appear similar on paper yet produce very different outcomes because of the political environments in which they operated. Where one council became little more than a mechanism for managing participation, another generated meaningful policy advice because government actors were genuinely willing to deliberate and collaborate. The lesson was difficult to ignore: democratic innovation depends as much on political will as institutional architecture. Institutions matter, but so too do the relationships, incentives and cultures that surround them.

If the first day encouraged us to rethink institutions, the second encouraged us to rethink technology.

The sessions on digital democratic innovations could easily have become discussions about artificial intelligence or online participation platforms. Instead, they became conversations about people.

One presentation explored what happens when a humanoid robot, Pepper, joins a deliberative discussion. The question was not whether robots should replace human decision-makers but how people themselves respond when AI becomes personified. Participants described Pepper as both a machine and a social actor. Some spoke to the robot almost as they would another participant; others consciously resisted doing so. They overwhelmingly rejected the idea that robots should possess democratic rights, yet many still imagined constructive roles for AI as facilitators, experts, critics or advocates helping people deliberate more effectively. The experiment ultimately revealed less about artificial intelligence than about ourselves: how easily we attribute social meaning to technology and how democratic agency increasingly requires us to navigate relationships with non-human actors.

A second paper shifted attention from AI itself to the political economy underpinning civic technologies. Looking behind the platforms used for public participation, it questioned who builds these technologies, who owns them and whose democratic ambitions they ultimately serve. Some organisations approached participation as a democratic project grounded in explicit theories of democracy, while others viewed themselves simply as software providers responding to market demand. What initially appeared to be a discussion about technology gradually became a discussion about power, ownership and democratic imagination. As one presenter reflected, perhaps too many civic technologies continue to treat the state as the sole site of democratisation when democratic change may also require transforming other parts of social and political life.

Looking back, what I found most striking was not the diversity of innovations discussed but the consistency of the questions they generated.

Whether the conversation centred on sortition, advisory councils, AI or digital participation, speakers repeatedly returned to issues of power, legitimacy, trust and inclusion. Democratic innovations were never presented as neutral tools waiting to be implemented. They were understood as political choices, shaped by visions of democracy and by assumptions about whose voices matter.

Perhaps that is the most valuable insight I took away from the conference.

Democratic innovation is often presented as a search for better institutions. These two days suggested something more demanding. They reminded us that every innovation also carries an imagination of democracy itself. Our task is not simply to ask whether these innovations work, but to ask what kinds of democratic futures they make possible and whose futures they leave behind.

Politics news

Dr Kamil Zwolski becomes a National Teaching Fellows

Emily Flore St Denny is awarded the Anniversary fellowship

Will Jennings, Lawrence McKay and Gerry Stoker win the Bernard Crick Prize for best article

Dr. Valgarðsson, Dr. Clarke, Prof. Jennings and Prof. Stoker win the Harrison Prize

Dr Smith hosts a Conversation with Helen Clark on Environment and Peace

6th UK Political Psychology Conference

Professor Jonathan Havercroft’s project Just and Unjust Riots

Just Riots Theory

Professor Roderick Rhodes unveils the dark arts of British politics in new book

Professors book publication

ReGHID project awarded the 2024 Vice Chancellor’s Research Impact prize

Call for Papers Reimagining Democratic Politics in the Contemporary

Call for Papers: GAIN Hosts Women and Politics Annual Conference

Overview

Submissions

Registration

PAIR Methods Summer School 2025

June 23 and 24, Boldrewood Campus, ��ɫ��Ƶ

CPE Talks in Political Ethnography

CPE Ethnography at the Sea Series

Short Course: Political Ethnography

Short Course: Political Ethnography

Rage&comma; Dreams&comma; and Insubordination: How the Far Right and Social Media Mobilize the Working Class

Political Ethnography - Online

Accessibility&comma; Populism and Democracy: Unearthing the Value of Spontaneous Face-to-Face Interactions

Join the C-BEAR Summer School on Experimental Methods

Democratic Innovations&comma; Democratic Futures: Looking Beyond the Institution

Conference reflections from Deborah Timoni, PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations

Rage, Dreams, and Insubordination: How the Far Right and Social Media Mobilize the Working Class

Accessibility, Populism and Democracy: Unearthing the Value of Spontaneous Face-to-Face Interactions

Democratic Innovations, Democratic Futures: Looking Beyond the Institution