UCL Uncovering Politics

It’s sometimes said that we’re living through an epidemic of taking offence. We have become hyper-sensitive, the story goes, to any slight against our sense of self-worth. And a generation of so-called ‘snowflakes’ are told they just need to relax a little. But what does it actually mean to take offence? How does feeling offended fit in alongside all the other emotions that our social interactions might invoke, such as anger, indignation, or contempt? Is taking offence really such a bad thing – or might it, at least in some circumstances, actually have positive value?Well the person who has thought about such questions more deeply than anyone else is Dr Emily McTernan, Associate Professor in Political Theory in the UCL Department of Political Science. Emily is currently finishing a book to be published by Oxford University Press called On Taking Offence, and last year a version of the first chapter was published in article form in one of the top political philosophy journals.Mentioned in this episode:Taking offense: An emotion reconsideredWhy taking offence is good: small acts of resistance  UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.

Ethnic voting means voting on the basis of ethnic identity, rather than, say, policy preferences or how well or badly you think the incumbents have governed. Ethnic and other forms of communal voting are found in many parts of the world – think, for example, of very different voting patterns between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. But ethnic voting is often thought particularly to be a feature of politics in many African countries.And such voting is also often seen as rather problematic for healthy democracy, because it can shield those in power from accountability if they govern poorly.Well a new study published last year sheds fresh light on ethnic voting in Africa. It focuses particularly on the fact that increasingly many marriages in many African countries now cross ethnic lines. And it explores the impact of such marriages on voting. One of its authors is Dr Adam Harris, Associate Professor in Development Politics in the UCL Department of Political Science and an expert on the politics of sub-Saharan Africa and he joins us for this episode.Mentioned in this episode:Electoral Preferences Among Multiethnic Voters in Africa  UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.

Now, no one would claim that the subject of contracts between governments and private sector suppliers is all that sexy. But the last two years of the Covid crisis have certainly revealed its importance. In the earliest weeks of the pandemic back in 2020, governments around the world scrambled to secure enough PPE, hospital ventilators, and Covid tests. Then there was the race to buy up vaccines. In recent weeks, shortages of testing kits have been back in the headlines. Here in the UK, vaccine purchasing is held up as exemplary, while contracting for PPE remains mired in allegations of cronyism.But controversies over government contracting are far from new. Debates about the merits – or otherwise – of the contracting out of public services and of public–private partnerships have been running for decades. And scandals over nepotism and revolving doors between the public and private sectors have been familiar for a lot longer than that. On the other hand, of course, many would say that close cooperation between governments and private sector suppliers has brought innumerable benefits.We are joined today by Dr Eleanor Woodhouse who is a Lecturer in Public Policy in the UCL Department of Political Science and an expert in, among other things, public–private partnerships. In 2021, she published (with colleagues) a book with Cambridge University Press, called Partnership Communities: Public–Private Partnerships and Non-Market Infrastructure Development Around the World.We are also joined by Alice Moore who is a PhD student in the UCL Department of Political Science. Her research investigates the role of trust and relationships in the delivery of outsourced public services and the effects on competition for public contracts and on the quality of the services provided. She’s also a Research Officer at the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the London School of Economics.  UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.

Few issues in public policy are as important as the size of the state. How much should the state spend? How much, therefore, should it raise in taxes? And what exactly should it spend this money on?In a democracy, we expect policymakers to be responsive to public opinion in answering such questions. But what do the public actually want? Indeed, to what extent do most of us even have meaningful preferences that take account of unavoidable trade-offs between different priorities?Such questions have long challenged political scientists. But a new paper just published by three colleagues here in the UCL Department of Political Science offers a new approach to measuring such preferences, and some intriguing answers on what people want.Those colleagues are Lucy Barnes, Jack Blumenau, and Ben Lauderdale. And we are delighted to be joined by Dr Lucy Barnes, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics and our Deputy Head of Department, and Ben Lauderdale, Professor of Political Science and Head of Department in the UCL Department of Political Science.Mentioned in this episode: Measuring Attitudes toward Public Spending Using a Multivariate Tax Summary Experiment  UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.

Today we’re looking at a brand new article, Against Online Public Shaming: Ethical Problems with Mass Social Media, by Guy Aitchison (Loughborough University) and Dr Saladin Meckled-Garcia (UCL). Online Public Shaming (OPS) is a form of norm enforcement that involves collectively imposing reputational costs on a person for having a certain kind of moral character. OPS actions aim to disqualify her from public discussion and certain normal human relations. In the article, the authors argue that this constitutes an informal collective punishment that it is presumptively wrong to impose (or seek to impose) on others. OPS functions as a form of ostracism that fails to show equal basic respect to its targets. Additionally, in seeking to mobilise unconstrained collective power with potentially serious punitive consequences, OPS is incompatible with due process values.In this episode, host Professor Jennifer Hudson is joined by Saladin, Associate Professor of Human Rights and Political Theory here in the Department of Political Science to explore online public shaming, its consequences, the ethics, and more.  UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.

Northern Ireland experienced three decades of violence from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. Thousands of people were killed, injured, or bereaved. The so-called Troubles were brought to an end by the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement of 1998, an accord between the British and Irish governments and most of the main political parties in Northern Ireland that established new governing arrangements for Northern Ireland within the UK and set out how Northern Ireland might in future leave the UK and become part of a united Ireland, if majorities both north and south of the border wanted it.In many ways, the 1998 Agreement is a model peace settlement. Power-sharing government sputters, but survives. Everyday lives have been transformed. Violence between the communities has almost ended. Yet many legacies of the past live on. Today, we are focusing on one of those – namely, violence within communities, and, in particular, punishment attacks meted out by paramilitary groups against people whom they accuse of criminal or anti-social behaviour.What explains the persistence of such attacks? And does that carry lessons for peace-building processes elsewhere? Two colleagues at the Department have just published a study exploring just these questions and they join us for this episode...Kristin Bakke is Professor of Political Science and International Relations here in the UCL Department of Political Science and leads our Conflict and Change research cluster. She is also affiliated with the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. And she will be a familiar voice to regular podcast listeners. Kit Rickard, meanwhile, is a PhD student in the department, as well as a Research Associate and Teaching Assistant and again a member of the Conflict and Change research cluster. He is just about to submit his doctoral thesis on how external states affect civil wars.Mentioned in this episode:Legacies of Wartime Order: Punishment Attacks and Social Control in Northern Ireland  UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.

Today we’re taking a retrospective look at the outcomes of the COP-26 conference that was held in Glasgow earlier this month. COP – or Conference of the Parties – is the annual UN climate change conference. A key aim of the conference was to ‘keep 1.5°C alive’ – but was enough progress made on cutting emissions to reach this goal? Have rich countries stepped up to the plate by agreeing to pay for loss and damage in poorer countries? And, are we making progress fast enough?We have three leading experts on these matters here at UCL, and they join me now. Jared Finnegan is Lecturer in Public Policy. Before joining UCL he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley and Princeton University. His research investigates how governments, voters, and business understand and address long-term societal challenges, particularly climate changeFergus Green is Lecturer in Political Theory and Public Policy. His research normative analysis of public policy and on processes of political change, especially concerning climate change and decarbonisation.Lisa Vanhala is Professor of Political Science and the Principal Investigator of the ERC funded Climate Change Loss and Damage research project.  UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.

We’re focusing today on the regulation of the internet. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen argues that her former employer persistently puts profit above prevention of harm. Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg himself argues that greater regulation of internet companies is needed – that rules for what is and isn’t allowed should be made through democratic means. And the UK – among other countries – is in the process of preparing legislation with just that goal.So what exactly are the problems that the current wild west of the worldwide web gives rise to? What principles should guide any new legislation? And where do those principles take us in terms of concrete policy?In this episode we are joined by two leading experts on these matters here at UCL. Dr Jeff Howard is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the UCL Department of Political Science. Regular listeners to the podcast will already be familiar with his work on regulating dangerous political speech. He is currently writing a book on the ethical limits of free speech. And he was recently awarded a highly prestigious UK Research & Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship to lead a major new multidisciplinary project on the governance of online speech. Dr Melanie Garson is Lecturer in International Conflict Resolution & International Security in the UCL Department of Political Science. She is also the Internet Policy Lead for Europe, Israel, and the Middle East in the Technology and Public Policy Department of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, where she focuses on cybersecurity policy as well as the intersection of technology and foreign policy.  UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.

Today our focus is on what politicians say – and on processes for analysing what politicians say. Politicians’ speech is, of course, a fundamental part of politics. We can think of it as a product of – and therefore a window into – deeper political forces. And in itself it also helps to constitute the political realm and how we think of all the parts of that realm. Analysis of what politicians say – and, indeed, of what others say, but we’re focusing today on politicians – is a tool that many political scientists use to explore a whole range of different aspects of politics. Many approaches are used in doing so. And these include increasingly sophisticated techniques for analysing vast bodies of speech systematically. We’re showcasing the work of some of our PhD students here on the podcast at the moment and this week our host Professor Alan Renwick welcomes Lotte Hargrave, who is looking at whether female and male MPs speak differently from each other and and Markus Kollberg, who is examining how parliamentarians use populist rhetoric.  UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.

COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and is the annual UN climate change conference. The conference will be attended by the countries that signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – a treaty that came into force in 1994. More than 190 world leaders are expected to arrive in Scotland. Together with tens of thousands of negotiators, government representatives, businesses and citizens for twelve days of talks. Among academics, campaigners, environmentalists and policymakers, COP26 is seen as a critical event: it's the moment at which countries must set out more ambitious goals for climate action five years on from the Paris Agreement. It also comes on the back of even more severe extreme weather events, evidence of rising global CO2 emissions, and continued biodiversity loss.Under the Paris Agreement, countries committed to bring forward national plans setting out how much they would reduce their emissions - known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or ‘NDCs’. They agreed that every five years they would come back with an updated plan that would reflect their highest possible ambition at that time. For this episode, host Professor Jennifer Hudson is joined by Lisa Vanhala, Professor of Political Science and the Principal Investigator of the ERC funded Climate Change Loss and Damage research project, Dr Elisa Calliari, Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science, and Anjelica Johannson, PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science.Mentioned in this episode:Climate Change Loss and Damage ERC project  UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.