The Department of Politics and International Studies has achieved the Athena Swan Silver award, a prestigious UK charter mark that recognises the advancement of gender equality in higher education. This is an important acknowledgement of the ongoing dedication and progress of the department in promoting gender equality for staff and students.

We are delighted to announce that the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) at the University of Warwick has moved up to joint 2^nd place out of 79 UK Politics Departments in The Times/The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2023. This prestigious league table continues to place us 1st in the Russell Group for both ‘teaching quality’ and ‘student experience’.

Dr Victor Agboga has successfully defended his PhD thesis, passing with minor corrections. His thesis, "Where Do Your Loyalties Lie? Party Switching and Voters' Response in Nigeria," was examined by Adrienne LeBas from American University, Washington DC, and Jessica Di Salvatore from PAIS, Warwick. Supervised by Gabrielle Lynch and Andreas Murr, Victor is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

This article analyses the social construction of climate change mitigation as a policy issue at the hands of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). IPCC models and scenarios, play a key role in constructing and legitimising political visions of pathways towards Net Zero. IPCC scenarios have important and real socio-ecological consequences that are crucial for the politics of tackling climate change, profoundly shaping what are seen as viable futures and mitigation policy options. We problematise five key assumptions that are fed into modelling, showing why and how they matter politically. These contestable assumptions built into IPCC IAMs undermine their credibility and usefulness for planning mitigation strategies. We find that, ironically, although IPCC efforts stress just how urgent political action is, their models and scenarios undervalue today’s actionable mitigation policies, leaving us prisoners of our climate polluting past.

A team of political scientists from VUB and the University of Warwick has won the Frank Cass Prize for the best article of 2023. Kamil Bernaerts, affiliated both with the Department of Political Science of the VUB and of the University of Warwick wrote the article “Institutional design and polarization. Do consensus democracies fare better in fighting polarization than majoritarian democracies?” together with Benjamin Blanckaert (VUB) and Didier Caluwaerts (VUB). The article was published in the leading journal Democratization and has made an important contribution to understanding democratisation and political polarisation.