Podcast - Political Science Matters

In this instalment of our Seminar Series on the European Union, Gilles Pittoors addresses the role of political parties as organisational foundations for EU democracy.

In this instalment of our Seminar Series from the Standing Group on the European Union, Mai’a K. Davis Cross (Northeastern University) presents her book manuscript with the working title, 'International Cooperation in the Ultrasocial World'. She is joined by discussant Ana Juncos (University of Bristol).

This seminar proposes an analytical framework to account for the enduring features of EU immigration and asylum policy, including its efforts to delegate immigration control to third countries. From the initial venue shopping of security bureaucracies to the increased polarisation within and between member states that comfort certain narratives over others, EU immigration is a case of 'policy drift', inertia or deadlock despite ineffectiveness or in the face of new developments.

Polarisation or accommodation? Explaining the discourse-vote choice gap in the European Parliament. The strengthening of Eurosceptic voices in its ranks has put pressure on the European Parliament (EP), increasing the salience of the pro-/anti-EU cleavage. Taking EU enlargement as a test case, this seminar examines how the changed composition of the EP has affected the structure of political conflict in the EP.

In this seminar, our speakers examine how far and under what conditions experimentalist governance (XG), defined as a recursive process of provisional goal setting and revision, based on comparative review of implementation in different local contexts, may be an effective and legitimate means of responding to diversity among EU member states, in comparison both to conventional uniform regulation (UR) and to differentiated integration (DI).

This seminar presents a paper that analyses, based on survey and survey experiment data in Ukraine, how citizens’ assessments of improvements of public services and processes, affect support for government and trust in institutions in Ukraine’s transitional setting.

Watch Robbie Shilliam (John Hopkins University) deliver the Stein Rokkan Lecture from the University of Edinburgh. Titled 'The Academic Legacies of British Empire: Social Anthropology and International Relations', his talk addresses the contemporary moral panic over 'wokeness', its supposed infiltration into academic spaces and its purported degeneration of the ethos of higher education.

In this instalment of our Seminar Series from the Standing Group on Migration & Ethnicity, Eva Østergaard-Nielsen (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) presents the question: Do political attitudes and behaviour change in migration?

In this instalment of our Seminar Series from the Standing Group on the European Union, Amie Kreppel (University of Florida) and Michael Webb (University of Florida) discuss how political actors are expected to behave amid a growing lack of transparency in the EU’s legislative process. They are joined by discussant Joseph Dunne who is the Director of the European Parliament Liaison Office in Washington DC.