One of the most remarkable transformations over recent decades has been the growing acceptance and celebration of LGBT+ rights. Here in the UK, for example, the proportion of respondents to the British Social Attitudes survey saying that same-sex relationships are not wrong at all has risen from just 11 per cent in 1987 to 67 per cent a generation later in 2022.

Yet recent years have seen a backlash against such advances. Self-styled ‘family values’ movements have campaigned against the so-called ‘gay lobby’ or ‘gender ideology’ in many countries, often claiming threats not just to the family, but to the nation as a whole. In the UK and elsewhere, a backlash against trans rights has been especially prominent. 

We are joined by Phillip Ayoub, Professor of International Relations here in the UCL Department of Political Science. As well as marking LGBT+ History Month, this is a special inaugural episode for Prof Ayoub touching on his career journey and research influences. 

Mentioned in this episode:

• Phillip M. Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl. The Global Fight Against LGBTI Rights: How Transnational Conservative Networks Target Sexual and Gender Minorities
• Phillip Ayoub. When States Come Out. Europe's Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility

How parliaments hold ministers (particularly prime ministers) to account is a fundamental part of parliamentary democracy. And one of those mechanisms of accountability involves asking questions. 

We take a good hard look at how – and how effectively – parliaments question prime ministers.

We are joined by Dr Ruxandra Serban, Associate Lecturer in Democratic and Authoritarian Politics here in the UCL Department of Political Science. Her research focusess directly on parliamentary questioning processes.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ruxandra Serban. Conflictual behaviour in legislatures: Exploring and explaining adversarial remarks in oral questions to prime ministers. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations.
• Ruxandra Serban. Is confrontational questioning bad for parliaments and democratic politics? The Constitution Unit Blog.

Peace in Northern Ireland is widely recognised as one of the leading achievements of politics in recent decades.  The Good Friday, or Belfast Agreement, reached in 1998 by the British and Irish governments and most of the main Northern Ireland political parties brought an end to thirty years of violent conflict in which over three and a half thousand people were killed.

It did so in part by establishing a system of power-sharing government.  A new Northern Ireland Assembly would be elected by proportional representation, so no one group could dominate. Within the new Northern Ireland Executive, representatives of Northern Ireland’s two political traditions would have to work together.

Over the years since the Agreement was reached, the power-sharing institutions have worked well some of the time. But for others they have worked badly or not at all. Since February 2022 their functioning has once again been suspended. Public anger at this situation is intense. Negotiations for restoring the institutions are ongoing. But, as yet, there has been no breakthrough.

Indeed, the situation has become so grave that many think the future viability of power-sharing government is now in doubt. And there are suggestions that the settlement reached in 1998 may need to be revisited.

In this episode we’re joined by two experts:

Alan Whysall is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Constitution Unit here within the UCL Department of Political Science. He was previously a senior civil servant in the Northern Ireland Office, where he worked for many years on the Northern Ireland peace process – including the talks that led to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

Conor Kelly is a Research Assistant at the Constitution where he has worked on multiple projects relating to Northern Ireland, most recently examining perceptions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement among politicians and the public in Northern Ireland. 

Mentioned in this episode:

• Alan Whysall’s reports: 'Report 1: Northern Ireland's Political Future' and 'Report 2: The Agreement at 25' https://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/northern-irelands-political-future
• Conor Kelly and Alan Renwick, Perspectives on the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement 

The quality of public services – whether health, education, water supply, or sewage disposal – has a big impact on all of our lives. How to enhance that quality is therefore one of the big questions for political studies.

Professor Marc Esteve is one of the leading experts on exactly that issue. We have recorded this special episode of our podcast to coincide with his inaugural lecture as Professor of Public Management here in the UCL Department of Political Science. 

Mentioned in this episode:

• Assessing the Effects of User Accountability in Contracting Out, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.
• Determinants Of Network Outcomes: The Impact Of Management Strategies. Public Administration.
• The Political Hourglass: Opportunistic Behavior in Local Government Policy Decisions. International Public Management Journal

You can watch Marc's inaugural lecture on our YouTube channel, where it will be uploaded in January 2023.

Analysts of Russia’s war in Ukraine have often – since its inception in 2014 – highlighted a seeming contradiction. On the one hand, Russia is violating the sovereignty of a neighbouring state in pursuit of its own interests. On the other, Russia simultaneously condemns Western interventions in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya, as well as Serbia back in 1999, on the basis that they breach the principle of non-interference in other states.

So are Russian leaders just being inconsistent? Or is there more going on? 

Dr Kalina Zhekova, Lecturer in Political Science here in the UCL Department of Political Science, joins us for this week's episode. A specialist in Russian approaches to military intervention and state sovereignty, Kalina’s latest paper looks at elite-level Russian discourse during the 2014 Ukraine crisis. 

Mentioned in this episode:

• Kalina Zhekova (2023) The West in Russian Discourses of Sovereignty During the 2014 Ukraine Crisis: Between ‘Compatriot Protection’ and ‘Non-Interference’. Europe-Asia Studies.

Political science is centrally concerned with understanding how politics works. It’s a discipline of the present tense, and the bulk of our research focuses on gathering evidence in the here and now. But sometimes political scientists also dig into the past. From time to time, you’ll even find one of us trawling through the records in a dusty archive. 

We are discussing one particular ongoing example of historical research in political science - at prisoner-of-war camps in the UK in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. 

We are joined by:

Zeynep Bulutgil,Professor in International Relations. Regular listeners may remember in episode we did with her back in 2022 on the origins of the secular state.

Sam Erkiletian, a final-year PhD student who’s just about to submit his dissertation on patterns of socialization in groups of combatants.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Bulutgil, H. Zeynep, The Origins of Secular Institutions: Ideas, Timing, and Organization.

Our guest today is Professor Lisa Vanhala. A Professor in Political Science here at UCL and an expert on the politics of climate change. Lisa recently gave her inaugural lecture: Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage, offering a fascinating insight into the way that UN meetings and negotiations over climate change get framed, and how they proceed, informed by the ideas of Goffman and Bourdieu. 

She also examines the ways that civil society organisations engage with the law to shape policy and social change both around climate change and around equality and human rights, including in her award-winning first monograph, Making Rights a Reality? Disability Rights Activists and Legal Mobilization.

Lisa joins us this week to talk about a comparative politics of climate change loss and damage.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Lisa Vanhala, Cecilie Hestbaek. Framing Climate Change Loss and Damage in UNFCCC Negotiations. Global Environmental Politics.
• Lisa Vanhala, Angelica Johansson, Frances Butler. Deploying an Ethnographic Sensibility to Understand Climate Change Governance: Hanging Out, Around, In, and Back. Global Environmental Politics.
• Lisa Vanhala. COP28: a year on from climate change funding breakthrough, poor countries eye disappointment at Dubai summit. The Conversation.
• Lisa's Inaugural Lecture.

Today we are examining speech acts and uptake. A central contribution from J. L. Austin has been the idea that our speech sometimes doesn’t only say things – sometimes it does things. When we speak, we don’t only convey content or information. We sometimes also - for instance - promise, name, refuse, or order: in short, our speech sometimes acts.

And that has prompted a great deal of philosophical debate over when speech acts are successfully performed, and whether that depends on the effects on the audience. This might sound like an esoteric matter, but philosophers think that thinking about how – and when- speech does things has implications for what we should think of pornography, and for when people really consent to sex. 

Our guest today is Dr Sarah Fisher, a Research Fellow here in the department of political science on a cross-disciplinary project on the ethics of content moderation on social media and the future of free speech online, funded by UKRI. 

Mentioned in this episode:

• Sarah A. Fisher, Kathryn B. Francis & Leo Townsend (2023) An empirical investigation of intuitions about uptake, Inquiry, DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2023.2220359
• Langton, Rae. “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts.” Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 22, no. 4, 1993, pp. 293–330. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265469

Some references suggested by Sarah for further reading: 

• Townsend, L. and Townsend, D.L. (2020). Consultation, Consent, and the Silencing of Indigenous Communities. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 37: 781-798. DOI: 10.1111/japp.12438
• Townsend, L. and Lupin, D. (2021). Representation and Epistemic Violence. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 29(4): 577-594. DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2021.1997398
• Francis, K. B., Beaman, P., & Hansen, N. (2019). Stakes, scales, and skepticism. Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy. DOI: 10.3998/ergo.12405314.0006.016

The book that we’re discussing in this episode suggests that IMF funding becomes a resource held by local leaders, which those leaders can use to benefit their own supporters to the detriment of the rest of the population.

The book – called IMF Lending: Partisanship, Punishment, and Protest – has two authors, and we are joined by both of them.

- Dr Rod Abouharb is Associate Professor in International Relations here in the UCL Department of Political Science.

- Dr Bernhard Reinsberg is Reader in Politics and International Relations at the University of Glasgow and also a Research Associate in Political Economy at the Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge.

Mentioned in this episode:

• IMF Lending: Partisanship, Punishment, and Protest

Immigration is a hot political issue in many countries. Its economic and social costs and benefits are widely debated. The people who are most directly involved in it or affected by it are often highly vulnerable, meaning that policy debate ought to proceed with care and caution. Yet it’s often used as a political tool by one or other side, as campaigners fuel fears or animosities for their own ends.

Our Migration Research Cluster is seeking to coordinate and promote evidence based work on the politics of migration and migration policy. To mark the Migration cluster’s foundation, we are joined by three of its members. 

Dr Alex Hartman is Associate Professor in Qualitative Research Methods. Her research focuses on the political economy of institutions in fragile states, with one strand looking particularly at the politics of forced displacement.

Dr Moritz Marbach is Associate Professor in Data Science & Public Policy. He is particularly interested in how policies regulating migration affect migrants, voters and politicians.

And Dr Judith Spirig is Lecturer in Political Science. Among other things, she examines the determinants and the consequences of anti-immigrant attitudes.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Immigration and inequality: the role of politics and policies. Dominic Hangartner and Judith Spirig.