The Department of Politics and International Studies (University of Warwick) are hosting an expert preview of the upcoming UK general election. Our panel, made up of academics and polling experts, will analyse the election campaign, answer your questions and discuss what to look out for on election night.

Professor Heath-Kelly will be joined by speakers from Amnesty, Open Rights Group, Preventwatch and Healing Justice London to launch the new MedAct report: 'Unhealthy Liaisons: NHS Collaboration with the Counter Terrorism Clinical Consultancy Service'.

The launch will take place from 18:30 on the 10th July, at Amnesty's offices in Shoreditch. The event will be hybrid and registrations can be made here: https://www.medact.org/event/briefing-launch-unhealthy-liaisonsLink opens in a new window

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.

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.