The fortieth anniversary of the Malvinas/Falklands War of 1982 is coming up in just a few weeks’ time. There will no doubt be many retrospectives, which, here in the UK, will focus on the actions of the British government, and whether the UK’s response would be different if anything similar took place today.But what about Argentine perspectives on the war? Why did the then Argentine government invade the islands? How was the conflict perceived in Argentina at the time, and how is it seen today? In understanding the thinking of Argentina’s rulers in 1982, can we gain insights into the calculations of authoritarian leaders who might be contemplating military action today – not least, of course, President Vladimir Putin of Russia?Host Professor Jennifer Hudson is joined by Dr Luis Schenoni, Lecturer in International Relations. His research explores the determinants of international conflict and its effects on the dynamics of state formation, particularly in Latin America. Mentioned in this episode:Was the Malvinas/Falklands a Diversionary War? A Prospect-Theory Reinterpretation of Argentina’s Decline  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.

How should we teach about politics? How – if at all – should teaching politics be different from teaching hard sciences, such as physics, or arts and humanities subjects, such as History or English, or indeed other social sciences, such as Economics or Sociology? The territory of politics is inherently contested, so should we embrace that contestation in our teaching or should we stick to known facts?These and many other questions are explored by a new centre within the UCL Department of Political Science called the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics. And we are delighted to be joined by two of its founders and Co-Directors in this episode.Dr Cathy Elliott is Associate Professor (Teaching) in Qualitative Methods and the Politics of Nature in the UCL Department of Political Science, as well as our Graduate Tutor.And Dr J-P Salter is Lecturer (Teaching) in Public Policy – again, in the UCL Department of Political Science – and also our Deputy Director of EducationMentioned in this episode:Poverty at the UCL Art Museum: Situated Learning in a World of ImagesUCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics twitter account  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.

How can you best deliver effective public services? Is it better to exert top-down control over the work of bureaucrats on the ground – through targets, monitoring, and prescribed procedures – so that slacking or corruption or inconsistency can be prevented? Or can more be achieved if you free up bureaucrats to work out their own approaches, utilizing their practical knowledge and allowing their desire to do a good job to flourish?Our colleague Dr Dan Honig, who is Associate Professor of Public Policy here in the UCL Department of Political Science, argues that we have tended to get the balance wrong, with too much top-down control and not enough freedom on the ground. In two books – one of them published in 2018 by Oxford University Press and the other on its way – Dan sets out the case for a new approach.And his work is making waves not just in academia. At the end of 2021 he was announced by Apolitical as one of its hundred most influential academics in government in the world. Mentioned in this article:Navigation by Judgment. Why and When Top-Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn't WorkDr Dan Honig is named as one of 100 most influential academics in government by Apolitical  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.

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.