Ben was interviewed by Mark Blyth for the Rhodes Centre Podcast about the myth of banishing politics through technocratic governance, as explored in his recent OBR book published with OUP.

A new article co-authored by Ben Clift and former PAIS Professor Ben Rosamond is just published in New Political Economy. Entitled ‘Technocratic reason in hard times: the mobilisation of economic knowledge and the discursive politics of BrexitLink opens in a new window’, it explores why credentialed economic expertise did not enjoy a privileged position within the Brexit debate.

While at CIDE in Mexico, Andreas Murr has been developing election forecasts for the upcoming Mexican presidential election on 2 June. In two blog posts written together with Mike Lewis-Beck he describes what citizens as well as other approaches forecast.

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.