The Governance Podcast (Centre for the Study of Governance and Society)

About the Talk

In this episode of the Governance podcast, our Director Mark Pennington interviews Dr. Matthew Mitchell on the socialist reality in Estonia’s history. This episode is part of Matthew’s co-authored publication as part of the Realities of Socialism series run by the Fraser Institute.

The Guest

Matthew D. Mitchell is a Senior Fellow in the Centre for Economic Freedom. Prior to joining the Fraser Institute, Mitchell was a long-serving senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he remains an affiliated senior scholar. He is also a senior research fellow at the Knee Regulatory Research Center at West Virginia University. Mitchell received his PhD and MA in economics from George Mason University and his BA in political science and BS in economics from Arizona State University. His writing and research focuses on economic freedom, public choice economics, and the economics of government favoritism. Mitchell has testified before the U.S. Congress and several state legislatures. He has advised federal, state, and local government policymakers in the United States on both fiscal and regulatory policy. His research has been featured in numerous national media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and C-SPAN.

In the first episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast, Professor Clare Chambers (University of Cambridge) defends the ideal of the marriage free state. She argues that for reasons of justice and equality, the state should not legally recognise - and therefore, privilege - any particular form of marriage. And until it ceases to do so, we must consider its actions unjust. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Clare Chambers is Professor of Political Philosophy and a Fellow of Jesus College. She came to Jesus College and to the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Cambridge in 2006. Previously she held academic positions at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, and has twice been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

Prof Chambers is on leave from College duties from October 2018 until October 2021. During that time she has a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to work on a project titled Intact: The Political Philosophy of the Unmodified Body.

Prof Chambers is a Council member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the UK’s leading independent body informing policy and public debate about the ethical questions surrounding medical and biological innovations and research. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Res Publica, a journal of moral, legal, and political philosophy; a member of the Executive Committee of The Aristotelian Society; and the Secretary of the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought.

About the Talk

Lawmakers, activists, and academics, often, presume that enacting a law sends a (powerful) message about what is socially desirable and acceptable. At worst, it is presumed that it will stay as ink on paper and not create any change. Therefore, it is considered as a cost-less endeavor with potential for creating great change at low costs. This has led for increase in demand for legislation, even ones that may be hard to enforce and even in countries which have limited state capacity, for their ‘symbolic value’. In this workshop, we will consider this claim by understanding the social and institutional conditions under which laws can have such a symbolic power to send the right message and, more importantly, when it can send the wrong one. No individuals interact with any law in isolation. Individuals’ decision to comply with a law, their understanding of what it means and how others will respond to it are all shaped by past experiences (theirs and of those within their reference network) with the law. In fact, the strength of the claim that laws send a message, itself, relies on the fact that there is a social expectation that laws (in general) do, in fact, provide information about what is socially acceptable behavior. What happens when this social expectation is not in place? Utilizing examples of legislations prohibiting behaviors deeply rooted in social and cultural norms as well as in institutional contexts with generally low compliance and trust in state, this workshop discusses the limits and costs of legal expression. Using a dialogic approach, this workshop will explore what law can successfully communicate in different contexts.

 

About the Speaker

Shubhangi Roy is a legal academic at Universität Münster.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington, the Director at the Study of Governance and Society here at King College London, interviews Professor Terry Flew. This episode is titled "‘Too much’ and ‘too little’ content moderation", and discusses the question of content moderation on digital platforms as a case study in Foucauldian approaches to governmentality.

The Guest

Terry Flew is Professor of Digital Communication and Culture at the University of Sydney. He is the author of 16 books (seven edited), 71 book chapters, 118 refereed journal articles, and 20 reports and research monographs. His books include The Creative Industries, Culture and Policy (SAGE, 2012), Global Creative Industries (Polity, 2013), Media Economics (Palgrave, 2015), Understanding Global Media (Palgrave, 2018), Regulating Platforms (Polity, 2021), and Digital Platform Regulation: Global Perspectives on Internet Governance (Springer, 2022).

He was President of the International Communications Association (ICA) from 2019 to 2020 and is currently an Executive Board member of the ICA. He was elected an ICA Fellow in 2019. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA), elected in 2019. He has advised companies including Facebook/Meta, Cisco Systems and the Special Broadcasting Service, and government agencies in Australia and internationally, including the Australian Communication and Media Authority and the Singapore Broadcasting Authority.

He has held visiting professor roles at City University, London and George Washington University, and is currently a Distinguished Professor with Communications University of China. He currently holds two Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery grants, on Trust and Distrust in News Media, and Valuing News: Aligning Interpersonal, Institutional and Societal Perspectives, and heads the International Digital Policy Observatory, funded by the ARC in partnership with the Australian Information Industries Association.

Why are political parties important for liberal democracy? Which institutional reforms can alleviate the burdens of globalisation on the working class? Join us on this episode of the Governance Podcast for a conversation between Steven Klein (King’s College London) and Ian Shapiro (Yale) on the major governance challenges facing advanced democracies and how they might be solved. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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Read the Books

The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It by Ian Shapiro and Michael J. Graetz

Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself by Ian Shapiro and Frances McCall Rosenbluth 

The Guest

Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry. A native of South Africa, he received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his Ph.D from the Yale Political Science Department where he has taught since 1984 and served as chair from 1999 to 2004. Shapiro also served as Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies from 2004-2019.

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Shapiro is a past fellow of the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cape Town, Keio University in Tokyo, and Nuffield College, Oxford. 

His most recent books are The Real World of Democratic Theory (Princeton University Press, 2012) Politics Against Domination (Harvard University Press, 2016), and, with Frances Rosenbluth, Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself (Yale University Press, 2018). His current research concerns the relations between democracy and the distribution of income and wealth.

Skip Ahead

0:42: I wanted to begin with your 2018 book on Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself, which you co-authored with Frances McCall Rosenbluth. It’s a spirited defence of the importance of parties for democracy. Before we get into your argument, I wanted to see if you could say a little about why you think political parties are so vital for democracy, as well as why you think their value tends to be overlooked or neglected in popular debates.

5:33: This is a question of democracy bypassing elections altogether. Another issue you deal with in the book is debates about democratising political parties themselves. So some people say that political parties are necessary evils, or they have these positive effects but they can also lead to capture by elites within the party, and so what we need is good democracy within the parties. And in the book you’re also sceptical of that—could you tell us more about your worry?

9:24: This raises a really interesting puzzle which you don’t entirely address in the book, which is, if this is so harmful to parties, why do they do it?

13:30: I think another interesting aspect is the decline of the traditional sources of mobilisation for political parties. So one thing I wanted to ask is, there are two dimensions to political parties—one is the coordination function, which is bundling issues together, building those compromises, integrating various interest groups—but parties also exist to get people to vote and to mobilise their constituencies. If you look at the debate in the last two primaries in the Democratic party and in the UK, it seems like one of the issues is how you balance the coordination function while ensuring that the core constituencies of the party will viably vote. And it seems like one of the big stories has been the gradual decline of some of these reliable sources of mobilisation.    

17:57: So the book is a defence of parties and you’re trying to push back against a lot of scepticism towards political parties—you defend large scale, catch all political parties—your ideal, it seems, is the Westminster, British model where you have large catch all parties who can come into power and govern on their own. You also say some interesting things about coalitions… But there is a worry about political parties in general that I feel doesn’t come through in the book… which is that when you have this sort of system, parties have an incentive to take controversial or particularly challenging issues off the political agenda.

28:08: I’m probably slightly more sympathetic to referendums than you because there’s an interesting democratic theory puzzle that comes in—so if it’s a basic constitutional issue, what other mechanism is there for altering the debate? Would a better designed referendum worked better in the UK?

33:25: This brings us back to what you said earlier and is a theme of your new book, which is that a lot of these changes in the party system are being driven by larger structural changes in the political economy of advanced capitalist societies.

39:16: This is something you mentioned earlier but I wanted to reiterate- there is the insecurity but there is the decline of institutions that would buffer some of that insecurity like labour unions… and you have a lot of disaffected people who have an understandable distrust and distaste for politics in general… they don’t have institutions that can connect them with political parties and make them feel like their voice is represented. Then you get the elites trying to figure out how to re-engage those people and they don’t have a lot of tools.

On this week's episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington, interviews Dr Mikayla Novak from the Australian National University. This episode features her latest book Freedom in Contention: Social Movements and Liberal Political Economy, which explores social movement activities and outcomes through the lens of liberal political economy. Using historical and contemporary case studies, this book illuminates how social movements fluidly organise in often repressive environments to achieve freedom, equality, and dignity.

 

 

The Guest

 

Dr Mikayla Novak is a doctoral student in sociology at The Australian National University. Her research interests are wide-ranging, and include: classical sociology; economic and fiscal sociology; inequality and social stratification; network theory and analysis; rational-choice sociology; social movement studies; and social theory.

 

Mikayla has extensively written on matters of social thought and policy, invariably attuned to the complex intersections between sociological, economic and political phenomena. In 2018 her first book, Inequality: An Entangled Political Economy Perspective, was published by Palgrave

 

Prior to her transition into academic sociology, Mikayla was an economist with a doctorate in economics awarded at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia) and a First Class Honours economics degree at The University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia).

In the latest issue of the Governance podcast Mark Pennington interviews Prakash Kashwan of the University of Connecticut. The conversation considers the political economy foundations of the Bloomington school with in-depth discussion on the role of power, institutions, and incentives in the analysis of common pool resource problems. 

This episode explores Prof McCloskey’s criticism of the way the discipline of economics has unfortunately been separated from matters of ethics, the importance of liberal values for human progress, and her calls for a human-centered approach to economics called ‘humanomics’.

Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other.

Politics and Expertise offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists’ judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial “science court” to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies.

Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.

On this week's episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast, Professor Mark Pennington (King's College London) argues that if not quite everything, then a great many things, ought to be legally for sale. From kidneys, to drugs, to sex, to votes, how much ought the market be allowed to freely trade in?

About the Talk

In this episode of the Governance podcast, our Director Mark Pennington speaks to Prof. William Easterly from New York University on liberal vs paternalist approaches to economic development policy.

The Guest

William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University and Co-director of the NYU Development Research Institute, which won the 2009 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge in Development Cooperation Award. He is the author of three books: The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (March 2014), The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006), which won the FA Hayek Award from the Manhattan Institute, and The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001). He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed academic articles, and has written columns and reviews for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Review of Books, and Washington Post. He has served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics and as Director of the blog Aid Watch. He is a Research Associate of NBER, and senior fellow at BREAD. Foreign Policy Magazine named him among the Top 100 Global Public Intellectuals in 2008 and 2009, and Thomson Reuters listed him as one of Highly Cited Researchers of 2014. He is also the 11th most famous native of Bowling Green, Ohio.

Diana Popescu (Department of Political Economy, King's College London) joins the Counterintuitive Series of the Governance Podcast this week to argue that Universal Basic Income - the state giving money to everybody, for free, and unconditionally - is a realistic and desirable policy, one that governments around the world should take seriously. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Dr Popescu works on distributive justice, recognition theory, and the relation between the two with respect to recognition struggles, disability rights, minority discrimination and social exclusion. She received her PhD from the London School of Economics, where she worked as a Fellow in Government from 2014 until 2017. She is also interested in public policy, and has contributed to projects aimed at assessing progress in combating the social exclusion of the Romani minority within the European Union. Her current research interests include discrimination theory, post-truth, and applications of recognition struggles to social polarisation.

About the Talk

Can a moral or divine law independent of contingency accommodate the social and economic complexities of circumstance? Does a defense of custom necessarily repudiate the idea of immutable law applicable to all peoples and cultures? Is transcendent universality and spontaneous order reconcilable?

This episode explores this age-old tension with reference to the intellectual origins of liberalism and conservatism. These ideologies are often said to derive from the French Revolution, but their roots trace back even further to the tension between reason and custom in the early modern period. Thinkers and jurists such as Richard Hooker, Edward Coke, and Matthew Hale defended custom for embodying the distilled wisdom of the generations, while the social contractarian tradition placed heavy stress on universal rationality and legislative sovereignty to instantiate the principles of individual autonomy and equality in civil society based on abstract reason. During the pamphlet wars in England over the Revolution, Edmund Burke, considered to be the godfather of conservatism, expanded on such early endorsements of custom to defend the cultural inheritance of European civilization. On the other hand, Richard Price and Thomas Paine, among various adversaries of Burke, intensified the early contractarians’ emphasis on abstract reason to support the Revolution and attack Burke’s defense of custom and just prejudice.

This episode thus examines whether proto-conservatives, spanning from Hooker to Burke, and proto-liberals, spanning from Hobbes to Paine, persuasively harmonized their embrace of a universal moral law with their recognition of the complexity of social life. This inquiry will illustrate how the intellectual origins of conservatism and liberalism were premised on varying presuppositions about the sinful nature of man and the epistemological constraints of individual knowledge.

The Guest

Gregory M. Collins is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. His book on Edmund Burke’s economic thought, titled Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Greg’s scholarly and teaching interests include the history of political thought, the philosophical and ethical implications of political economy, American political development, constitutional theory and practice, and the political theory of abolition. He has published articles on Burke’s economic thought in Review of Politics; Adam Smith’s imperial political and economic thought in History of Political Thought; Burke’s and Smith’s views on Britain’s East India Company and monopoly in Journal of the History of Economic Thought; Frederick Douglass’ constitutional theory in American Political Thought; Burke’s plan for the abolition of the slave trade in Slavery & Abolition; and Burke’s intellectual relationship with Leo Strauss and the Straussian political tradition in Perspectives on Political Science.

Greg won the 2020 Novak Award, awarded annually by the Acton Institute to one young scholar who conducts research on the intersection of liberty and virtue. His current book project is a study of the idea of civil society in African-American political, social, and economic thought.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington, interviews Prof. Jennifer Murtazashvili from the University of Pittsburgh. This episode features her latest book Land, the State and War, published by Cambridge University Press. The book employs a historical narrative, extensive fieldwork and a national survey to explore how private property institutions develop, how they are maintained, and their relationship to the state and state-building within the context of Afghanistan. This episode also discusses the long running governance challenges in Afghanistan, and the recent problems associated with the actions of foreign powers.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Mark Pennington interviews Dr. Danielle Guizzo from University of Bristol. This episode is titled “Cultures of Expertise in Economics”. This episode explores the way in which the discipline of Economics has evolved over the years, the way economists achieved their status as scientific experts, and how pluralism and diversity may be promoted within the wider discipline.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington, the Director at the Study of Governance and Society here at King College London, interviews Professor Diane Coyle. This episode is titled "The data that is and that data the isn't: the pitfalls of using big data", and discusses the various uses and implications of big data in society, and the many pitfalls that may arise. 

The Conversation

‘Big Data’ fuels AI models like ChatGPT and the machine learning systems that are generating much debate about their promise – and peril – for decision-making. The impact of the technology will depend on the character of the data used. While the issue of data bias is well-understood (although not solved), less attention has been paid to other aspects such as data quality (is the data an accurate measure of the underlying object?), missing data (do we have only part of the picture?), and the meaning of data (how are the underlying concepts represented by the data constructed and interpreted)? As AI models are advancing fast enough to be deployed increasingly widely in society, there is a pressing need to reflect on the perspective on our social world created for them through the data on which they are trained and updated.

The Guest

Professor Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her latest book is ‘Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be‘ on how economics needs to change to keep pace with the twenty-first century and the digital economy. Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council. She has served in public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, of the Migration Advisory Committee and of the Natural Capital Committee. Diane was Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester until March 2018 and was awarded a CBE for her contribution to the public understanding of economics in the 2018 New Year Honours.

About the Talk

In this episode of The Governance Podcast, CSGS Director Mark Pennington discusses with Matthew Watson some key themes in Matthew’s new book False Prophets of Economics Imperialism. The discussion covers the tension in modern economic theory between mathematical modelling, axiomatic analysis, and their relevance to ‘real world’ empirical phenomena- and the key influencers in 20th Century economic thought that reflect this tension.

The Guest

Matthew Watson is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of numerous books and papers and coordinates and curates an ongoing project on ‘Rethinking the Market.’

Slums are home to 850 million people worldwide, making them prime territory for distributive politics. In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Tariq Thachil (Vanderbilt University) sits down with Irena Schneider (King’s College London) to discuss the counterintuitive ways in which governance emerges amidst poverty and informality in Indian cities. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Tariq Thachil is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on political parties and political behavior, social movements, and ethnic politics, with a regional focus on South Asia.

His first book examines how elite parties can use social services to win mass support, through a study of Hindu nationalism in India, and was published by Cambridge University Press (Studies in Comparative Politics) in 2014. This project has won numerous awards, including the 2015 Gregory Luebbert Award for best book in comparative politics, the 2015 Leon Epstein Award for best book on political parties, and 2010 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in comparative politics, all from the American Political Science Association. It also won the 2010 Sardar Patel Prize for best dissertation on modern India in the humanities and social sciences.

His current research focuses on the political consequences of urbanization, and draws on extensive qualitative and quantitative research among poor migrants in Indian cities. An article from this project, coauthored with Adam Auerbach, received the 2018 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review in the previous calendar year.

Skip Ahead

00:58: As a political scientist, what prompted you to take an interest in the politics of Indian slums?

1:53: You talk a lot about machine politics in India—It’s a core element of your book. Historically when we think about machine politics, you also mention in your book that the big examples are US democratic party machines in New York and Chicago which emerged in the 19th century by giving out material benefits to poor European immigrants in exchange for political support. We’re seeing similar trends happening across the developing world today. Masses of migrants are flooding to cities, living in slums, and end up being governed by powerful machines. But you’re observing something uniquely different about how politics emerges within Indian slums. Quite specifically, you’re noticing that the process is a lot more democratic than we thought. What have you been observing? What’s counterintuitive? 

7:56: That’s really interesting because it really has to do with this unique competitive environment. Why is it so competitive? Why is no one able to take over and become a boss in some of these Indian slums?

11:23: You argue that slum residents don’t really choose leaders on the basis of petty gifts or cash. Clientelism doesn’t boil down to something so simple. What criteria do residents really use to choose their leaders? 

14:13: The picture you’re painting is that slum residents are much more empowered to choose among competing brokers rather than being passive or manipulated rule takers. How much power do they really have over their local brokers and local politicians? Can they really hold their brokers accountable in ways that would mimic what would happen under a formal democratic institution?

18:54: One of your most interesting findings is that when people are choosing their slum leaders and brokers, they’re not necessarily using the basis of caste or ethnicity—and a lot of what really matters is things like education. Talk a little more about that. Are we seeing a crowding out of forms of choice based on old kinds of hierarchy?

23:16: I want to talk a little more about the brokers themselves. They’re intermediaries between the slum dwellers and the state. You’re finding interesting mechanisms that keep brokers honest. As intermediaries, there’s always the concern that they will take state resources for themselves rather than distributing them back to the population. You find that they’re not actually pocketing the resources. What incentive to do they have to be honest?

26:56: Do you see these informal institutions as a healthy phenomenon in Indian democracy? Are they effectively a really benign form of bottom up self-governance that fills in the vacuum of the formal state?

29:58: What does this kind of competitive local governance mean for Indian political development in the long term? Do you see political machines in the global south eventually declining in the same way they did in the US in the early 20th century? 

35:20: Tying that into questions of economic development in India, as these slums develop over time and residents, having gotten used to a somewhat deliberative process and being somewhat involved in getting public service provision, do you think that will put a long term pressure on the formal system of governance?

37:48: This is a one country example. There is often the question in social science about external generalizability. What lessons are pertinent for the study of political development and urbanization around the world? 

41:28: What are the future paths in your research program? 

43:00: On a more methodological point, you’ve been using different kinds of methods, from ethnography to experimentation and survey work. Talk a little bit about the challenges of doing that ethnographic work. What have you been finding most rewarding and challenging? Any advice for young scholars trying to do this kind of fieldwork?

About the Talk

In this episode of the podcast, Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Bruce Caldwell, one of the co-authors of this recently published book Hayek: A Life.

Few twentieth-century figures have been lionized and vilified in such equal measure as Friedrich Hayek—economist, social theorist, leader of the Austrian school of economics, and champion of classical liberalism. Hayek’s erudite arguments in support of individualism and the market economy have attracted a devout following, including many at the levers of power in business and government. Critics, meanwhile, cast Hayek as the intellectual forefather of “neoliberalism” and of all the evils they associate with that pernicious doctrine.

In Hayek: A Life, historians of economics Bruce Caldwell and Hansjörg Klausinger draw on never-before-seen archival and family material to produce an authoritative account of the influential economist’s first five decades. This includes portrayals of his early career in Vienna; his relationships in London and Cambridge; his family disputes; and definitive accounts of the creation of The Road to Serfdom and of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society.

The Guest

Bruce Caldwell is research professor of economics and the director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University.

Professor Caldwell's research focuses on the history of economic thought, with a specific interest in the life and works of the Nobel Laureate economist and social theorist F. A. Hayek. He is the author of Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2004) and since 2002 has served as the general editor of the book series The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. In 2022 he published Mont Pelerin 1947: Transcripts of the Founding Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society as well as Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950, the first of a two-volume biography that he is writing with Hansjoerg Klausinger. In 2019-2020 he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has also held research fellowships at NYU, the LSE, and Cambridge University. At Duke he is the Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy, a center whose purpose is to promote research in, and the teaching of, the history of economic thought. 

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, Dr. Steven Klein interviews Prof. Martin Weale from the Department of Political Economy at King's College London. This episode is titled “UK Pensions Crisis and Central Banking”. This episode discusses the pension funds sell-off that occurred following the UK government's mini-budget in early October 2022 and which led to the Bank of England's intervention.    The Guest Martin Weale is Professor of Economics at King's Busines School. Martin graduated in 1977 in Economics from Clare College, Cambridge. On graduating he took up an Overseas Development Institute Fellowship at the National Statistics Office in Malawi. He returned to Cambridge in 1979 to work on economic modelling projects directed by Sir Richard Stone and Professor James Meade, before becoming an Assistant Lecturer in 1987 and subsequently a Lecturer in the Faculty of Economics and Politics. He was elected a Fellow of Clare College in 1981.   Martin is an applied economist with an interest in macro-economic and micro-economic problems. Recent work includes exploring the effects of the Bank of England’s asset purchase programme and an exploration of the relationship between the education of parents and that of their children. In 2016 he joined the Office for National Statistics Panel of Economics Experts and he is currently developing work on democratic measures of economic performance. 

 

How does migration affect economic development? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Volha Charnysh (MIT) talks to Humeira Iqtidar (King's College London) about this complex relationship, drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival data on forced migration in Post-World War II Germany and Poland.

 

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The Guest

Volha Charnysh joined MIT’s Department of Political Science in the fall of 2018. In 2017-2018, she was a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University in May 2017.

Dr. Charnysh’s research focuses on historical political economy, legacies of violence, nation- and state-building, and ethnic politics. Her book project examines the long-run effects of forced migration in the aftermath of World War II in Eastern Europe, synthesizing several decades of micro-level data collected during a year of fieldwork in Poland, funded by the Social Science Research Council and Center for European Studies.

Dr. Charnysh’s work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, and the European Journal of International Relations. Her dissertation won the 2018 Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation prize, awarded by the European Politics and Society Section of the American Political Science Association, as well as the Best Dissertation Prize, awarded by the Migration & Citizenship Section. Dr. Charnysh has also contributed articles to Foreign Affairs, Monkey Cage at the Washington Post, National Interest, Transitions Online, Arms Control Today, Belarus Digest, and other media.

Skip Ahead

0:55: How did you get interested in these research themes?

2:15: One of the things that is less studied is the impact that World War II had in this particular way—Eastern Europe was transformed in a very profound manner. I saw in your research that you basically collected information at the municipality level—how easy was that? What was contained in that data?

4:47: You mentioned the Polish diaspora coming in from the USSR. I was curious, did the Polish diaspora speak Polish? Because one of the things that you talk about in terms of the composition of some of the more heterogenous municipalities later on – is there linguistic diversity as well?

6:13: Coming to your overall book project, I’m curious about the argument you’re building. What is the overall thesis and how does this microdata play into that?

8:15: So we have a picture of these different municipalities, some more heterogeneous than others, and as I understand it your argument is that in the short term, or at least initially, the more heterogeneous communities will have a deficit of social capital; certainly there’ll be less solidarity. And because of that, they are more likely to turn towards a third party for enforcement of norms—in this case, the state. But the next step is that the state actually builds capacity that at a later stage can allow for more economic development.

11:52: What does this mean, then, in terms of the development of the nation? Because we have these somewhat different communities – some that are more closely bound to each other and others that are not – how does that feed into your specific example? That is, Polish national identity and the making of the Polish nation?

13:40: Would you say that your argument now contradicts what you were saying earlier, which seems like there is a big regional difference in terms of these populations and Polish national identity is somewhat conflicted because of this division?

14:35: So you do make a distinction – depending upon the kind of state, this level of dependence upon the state may or may not lead to economic development. Do you work through different kinds of state responses to communities demanding or working closely with the state?

19:35: The larger implication that I drew from what you’re saying is that there is a more complex relationship between communities, diversity and economic development in particular than this singular notion that the more homogenous a community is, the more social capital there might be, and the more prosperity we may see there.

22:06: It’s interesting you mention the relatively small differences because the context that I work on—South Asia—one of the interesting things about South Asia is that there is just immense diversity that people contend with on a daily basis, in terms of religious, ethnic, linguistic diversity. So slightly out of scope, I was curious about the levels of homogenisation or diversity that are acceptable in the popular imagination, because it seems to me that within the European context there is greater acceptance of homogeneity whereas most other parts of the world contend with more diversity on a daily basis.

25:42: Going back to Poland, one of the questions I had was also whether you can see any patterns of support for a more homogenous Polish identity on the one side and integration with the EU on the other side?

28:46: With that I wanted to return to the question of state socialism, and I thought you said something very interesting about this idea that we see state socialism and we use it as a black box, putting a lot of things into it. With this particular example, how would you break down state socialism? What are the different stages and ve

About the Talk

In this episode of the Governance Podcast Mark Pennington discusses with Alasia Nuti the contribution of her new book Politicising Political Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) co-authored with Gabriele Badano. The conversation covers philosophical and practical aspects of how to define when it might be justifiable to limit the spread and influence of anti-democratic views in liberal democratic regimes.

The Guest

Dr Alasia Nuti joined the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York in September 2015. She works in contemporary political theory and gender studies and she has a strong interest in postcolonial theory and critical race theory. In particular, Alasia is interested in historical injustice, responsibility, structural injustice, memory, immigration and pluralism. She has recently published her first book, entitled Injustice and the Reproduction of History (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which examines why the unjust past matters from a normative perspective. The book was awarded an Honorable Mention from the ECPR Prize in Political Theory in 2021. In 2022, Alasia was awarded the Early Career Prize from the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought for excellence in research and teaching.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Associate Director Dr. Samuel DeCanio interviews historian Niall Ferguson from the Hoover Institution. This episode is titled “Counterfactual History with Niall Ferguson”.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Dr. Erwin Dekker from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

This episode is titled “Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons”, which features Erwin’s recently co-edited volume with Cambridge University Press, Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons.

The Guest

Dr. Erwin Dekker is senior fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

He has recently published Jan Tinbergen (1903-1994) and the Rise of Economic Expertise (2021) and The Viennese Students of Civilization (2016), as well as the edited volume Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons (2021) all with Cambridge University Press.

He has published in professional journals regarding history of economics, methodology of economics, cultural economics and economic sociology. He is currently working on a history of the intellectual descendants of the German Historical School as well as a project on markets at the margins of society, so-called grey zones.

He has previously worked as assistant professor of cultural economics at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

About the Talk

In this episode of the Governance Podcast, CSGS Director Mark Pennington speaks with Dr Samuel Bagg about his recent book - The Dispersal of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy, published by Oxford University Press. The book presents an in depth consideration of the problem of 'elite capture' and the possible strategies to address this. 

The Guest

Samuel Bagg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at University of South Carolina, where he teaches courses in political theory. Before moving to UofSC, he taught at the University of Oxford, McGill University, and Duke University, where he received his PhD in 2017.His research aims to ground democratic theorizing in a realistic picture of the dynamics of social inequality and political power. Among other venues, it has appeared in the American Political Science Review; the American Journal of Political Science; the Journal of Politics; Perspectives on Politics; the Journal of Political Philosophy; the European Journal of Political Theory; Philosophy, Politics, and Economics; Social Philosophy and Policy; Social Theory and Practice; and Political Research Quarterly. 

About the Talk

In this episode of the Governance Podcast Associate Director Sam DeCanio, Dr. Jonny Benson, and Professor Jason Brennan discusses the relationship between knowledge, expertise and democracy.  The conversation discusses whether democracy should be understood primarily as a system involving electoral choice, or whether democracy is a type of political system incorporating additional elements such as deliberation and the rule of law. We also discuss questions regarding voter knowledge and political accountability, democracy versus rule by knowledgeable experts or the administrative state, and the types of information markets and democracy require to function effectively.

The Guest Jonny Benson is a Lecturer at University of Manchester whose research examines democratic theory with a strong connection to the interdisciplinary tradition of politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE). He is particularly interested in contemporary challenges to democracy, including the rise of anti-democratic thought, the relationship to the market economy, and issues of voter knowledge, misinformation, and political polarization. Benson’s first book, Intelligent Democracy: Answering the New Democratic Skepticism was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. His articles have appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Political Studies, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Synthese, and Economics and Philosophy.   Jason Brennan (Ph.D., 2007, University of Arizona) is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He specializes in politics, philosophy, and economics. He is the editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Public Affairs, editor of Public Affairs Quarterly, and an associate editor of Social Philosophy and Policy.  He is the author of 17 books: Questioning Beneficence (Routledge, 2024), with Sam Arnold, Richard Yetter Chappell, and Ryan Davis; Democracy: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press, 2023), Debating Democracy, with Hélène Landemore (Oxford University Press, 2021), Business Ethics for Better Behavior, with William English, John Hasnas, and Peter Jaworski (Oxford University Press, 2021), Why It's OK to Want to Be Rich (Routledge Press 2020), Good Work if You Can Get It (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020); Injustice for All: America's Dysfunctional Criminal Justice System and How to Fix It, with Christopher Surprenant (Routledge, 2019); Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education, with Phil Magness (Oxford University Press, 2019); When All Else Fails: Resistance, Violence, and State Injustice (Princeton University Press, 2018); In Defense of Openness: Global Justice as Global Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2018), with Bas van der Vossen; Against Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2016); Markets without Limits, with Peter Jaworski (Routledge Press, 2016); Compulsory Voting: For and Against, with Lisa Hill (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Why Not Capitalism? (Routledge Press, 2014); Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012); The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press, 2011); and, with David Schmidtz, A Brief History of Liberty (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is co-editor, along with David Schmidtz and Bas Van der Vossen, of the Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism (Routledge, 2017).

Tune in to the Governance Podcast with Dr Adam Tebble on the philosophical case for open borders, the role of experimentation in poverty alleviation, the line between academics and activism, and whether the state can improve governance outcomes. A unique discussion at the intersection of philosophy, policy and development economics.

The Guest

Dr. Adam Tebble is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at King’s College London. He conducts research broadly within contemporary liberal political theory and specifically in classical liberalism, social justice and the politics of culture and identity. He is the author of Hayek (Bloomsbury) and Epistemic Liberalism, a Defence (Routledge).

Prior to joining King’s in 2011, Dr Tebble taught at the School of Public Policy, UCL. In the United States he has taught at Brown University, where he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow (2004-2006) and Lecturer (2006-2007) at the Department of Political Science.

Send us Your Questions for Adam

Send us your questions for our follow-up blog interview with Adam by June  15, 2018 at info@csgs.kcl.ac.uk, or drop us a line on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl).

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00:50: What’s new about your case for open borders?

2:23: How are people who don’t immigrate benefited by those who do?

6:10: How does the theory of knowledge behind your argument challenge our understanding of evidence and bureaucratic expertise?

10:05: You argue that people can make governance in their home countries better off when they leave. What are the empirics on this?

14:20: How do the benefits of immigration outweigh the costs of brain drain?

17:00: Advocates of open borders will react favorably to your message, but some people in power will not. Who is your audience?

22:18: What do you advise a leader who puts the interests of their electorate first but still claims they have obligations to the global poor?

26:20: Are open borders only theoretically a good idea? In practice, don’t we have good reason to close borders on the basis of national security or economic interests?

30:51: If you have an authoritarian populist who refuses to have obligations to the global poor, how can you convince them to  open borders?

34:45: Is it okay for an academic to toe the line between the academy and activism?

36:22: Are you saying that there are no hard and fast rules about how to craft immigration policy or making a bolder proposal?

38:55: How have liberal thinkers from the 20th century shaped your thinking about migration policy?

49:40: It takes a long time for “experiments of living” to play out. What if we need the state to address more urgent social challenges here and now? What role does the state play in improving governance?

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington, the Director at the Study of Governance and Society here at King College London, interviews Professor Cass R. Sunstein. This episode is titled "The Use of Algorithms in Society", and discusses the various ethical and moral dilemmas and implications of increasing AI us in society, and its impact on both social and economic factors.    The Guest

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He serves as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, “sludge” (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Michael Hulme from Cambridge University. This episode is titled “Culture, Science, and the Predicament of Climate Change”, where he suggests looking at climate change challenges as predicaments for human societies to cope with.

David Thunder (University of Navarra) argues that many modern political theorists, from Hobbes to Rawls, overstate the importance of state sovereignty. He envisions an alternative, polycentric form of social organisation that can support one’s freedom to flourish. Tune in for his argument in this episode of the Governance Podcast led by Billy Christmas (King’s College London). Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer in political and social philosophy at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra. Prior to his appointment to the University of Navarra, he held several research and teaching positions in the United States, including visiting positions at Bucknell and Villanova Universities, and a stint as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Princeton University’s James Madison Program. David earned his BA and MA in philosophy at University College Dublin, and his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently preparing two book manuscripts, tentatively entitled May I Love My Country? In Search of a Defensible Patriotism; and Sovereign Rule and the Still-Birth of Freedom: A Preface to Confederal Republicanism. 

David’s academic writings include Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Ethics of Citizenship in the 21st Century (edited volume, Springer, 2017), and numerous articles in international peer-reviewed journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, The Journal of Social Philosophy, and the Journal of Business Ethics. His writings cover a wide range of questions including the pros and cons of individualism, the ethics of financial trading, the complicity of citizens in collective injustice, the concept of moral impartiality, and the scope of duties of beneficence. He writes occasionally for The Irish Times and RTE’s Brainstorm page. For more information, see www.davidthunder.com. 

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00:59: What is sovereigntism? Why are you so critical of it?

2:18: Is your criticism of it primarily in terms of as a theory of political organisation, as an approach to justice in normative political theory? Or is it a critique of empirical reality? Is it that you think this is the system we do in fact have, and it's bad for a number of reasons?

4:06: Could you say a bit more about how this aspiration to sovereignty is so harmful to these kinds of associations? 

5:58: What do you think is worth protecting about associational life? What would you say to someone who takes the opposite approach and says that these small associations are undermining the authority of the national government and that undermines our sense of national identity, a more cosmopolitan and open ended form of human cooperation and really these associations are just old fashioned things which we can now do away with now that we have nation states.

8:47: So you start off with this tentative defense of associational life that, while any kind of associational life is not always good, it is a necessary condition that we are able to form and live in associations. And the aspiration of the sovereign state is parasitical or cannibalistic upon that. If the goal of associational life is this common flourishing, friendship and knowledge, generational solidarity, is there a need for external regulation of associational life in order to, not guarantee, but certainly regulate and offer some predictability that associational life will not go to the worst case scenario?

12:35: It sounds like you do want there to be political institutions to provide that kind of regulatory framework for associational life, but it's important that it be fragmented perhaps in a federal way. Do you see federal systems such as Switzerland, the US, Germany, I suppose also India and Nigeria, are those viable models for what you would call a polycentric polity?

15:24: You mentioned that fiscal authority is particularly important. Could you say why it has particular importance?

17:15: So the emphasis on localised fiscal authority is not necessarily a claim about entitlement to wealth-- it's not a libertarian claim. It's more based on an empirical worry that more centralised and distant authorities, when they have fiscal power, they are able to squander that money to engage in clientelism or bad forms of redistribution. Whereas at the local level, when people observe corruption or clientelism, they are able to quickly exercise some voice in the matter.

20:24: So the extent to which the polity is decentralised, it's always going to be a matter of degree- it's not the case that a state is either fully sovereign or fully polycentric. 

23:19: You want to see these units in competition with each other or engaging in some kind of bargaining or negotiation and that would be a healthy symptom of the system. 

26:03: So your image of how constitutions ought to be is that they should be open-ended in a way, open to re-negotiation and revision from sources of authority which the constitution may not recognise. I suppose the question that a constitutional theorist in the mindset of a sovereigntist imagination would say, that sounds perfectly nice but who maintains the open-endedness of the constitution? 

28:51: A good example of polycentric authority is private arbitration, which is a very common practice. Some may argue that it already takes place against the backdrop of an already monopolised legal order that says if you sign contracts where you nominate third parties and you renege after that, we will then come after you.

32:04: The reputational cost of reneging on contracts definitely induces compliance in a lot of scenarios, but typically, I think we should expect that disciplinary power of repeated dealings and reputational effects to occur with business people -- economic actors that have an interest in securing long-term cooperation to yield predictable income flows. What about in cases where you're not interested in making money, you're interested in committing genocide, say?

36:55: When we talk about polycentric governance and you mention that it's very important to localise fiscal control, an argument for that is when you shrink down the size of jurisdictions... you make exit less costly... an important part of your work previously has focused on citizenship and democratic participation which emphasizes that rather than just your ability to vote with your feet, it emphasizes the ethical importance of participation. How do you see that work speaking to your current work on the critique of the sovereign state?

40:57: You referred to your views as a form of republicanism, or consociational republicanism. In my background, contemporary political philosophy, republicanism refers usually to neo-Roman republicanism, which sees the most important goal of the polity as liberty as non-domination. I take this view to be suspicious of group life, associational life; it sees the republican state as something which liberates you from these kind of parochial forms of domination. How does your view of consociational republicanism relate to the neo-Roman republicanism of someone like Pettit?

47:40: A separate strand of your critique of the sovereign state -- I'm not sure how much of the book is dedicated to it, but you've mentioned in your talk that the notion of a sovereign state to protect freedom was a kind of deduction of the ontological or moral individualism of the Enlightenment. Could you say a little bit more about why you think ontological or moral individualism is problematic and why you think it entails the ideal of sovereignty? 

52:55: You said in your talk that you take that your case for a polycentric form of governance to be a perfectionist one; it's grounded in the ethical good of persons. You don't describe it as a liberal case and you don't make too much mention of protecting freedom. It's more about protecting valuable forms of life. Perfectionism is not a fashionable position in contemporary political philosophy- everyone goes out of their way to show that their view is a form of liberalism. Do you take your perfectionism to be illiberal or at odds with a liberal anti-perfectionism? 

Alexis de Tocqueville argued that American democracy was rooted in associational life. What role did women play in building this capacity for association? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Dr Sarah Wilford (University of the Andes) sits down with Dr Irena Schneider (King's College London) to discuss how the domestic sphere shapes free societies and stems the tide of democratic despotism.  Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Dr Sarah Wilford is an assistant professor of politics at the University of the Andes in Santiago. Her research focuses on the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville regarding family, women, and democratic conditions. Other research interests include the relationship between religion and liberty in Tocqueville, womanhood during the nineteenth century, and the use of Tocqueville in later twentieth and twenty-first-century political theory and political science. She received her PhD in Politics from King's College London in 2018.

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00:51: Tocqueville is a very popular writer to turn to nowadays, particularly when we think about modern questions of the loss of associationalism, virtuous citizenship, and community values. But we don't often think about Tocqueville in terms of gender and the domestic sphere. That's where you have been working and I wanted to ask just to get started, how did you get interested in the gender angle on Tocqueville? 

3:13: To delve into the details, what exactly is the role of womanhood and the domestic sphere in Tocqueville's work?

07:23: My first reaction is-- you talked about paternal authority and that being a prime element in democratic citizenship, and being the first school of citizenship. What about the mother and womanhood in general? How does that contribute to the raising of virtuous, democratic citizens?

9:30: To delve further into the question of authority, both maternal, paternal, and the domestic sphere, it seems almost like an oxymoron to say that respect for authority leads to more democratic norms and civil society. How does that transition play out in Tocqueville?

11:30: Tocqueville really is seen as a scholar of civil society, of associationalism. We throw around these terms but we're not often very clear by what Tocqueville meant by them. When he observed these things in American society, what was he talking about? What does governance and associationalism mean for Tocqueville in this sense?

17:21: A lot of times, when it comes to Tocqueville, we hear the term, 'the habits of the heart and mind.' A lot of the network that exist within civil society are driven by people's common acceptance or commitment to certain values or beliefs or ideas. That is a kind of glue that ties society together and is generated within the domestic sphere. Can you talk a little more about the habits of the heart and mind that a self-governing citizenry is supposed to have?

21:08: Tocqueville has been used and appropriated by many modern scholars in social science, from thinkers like Robert Putnam to Vincent Ostrom, and others. And they often use Tocqueville to address modern issues or crises of democracy. You've certainly worked a little bit on how they interpreted Tocqueville. What did they get right, and what did they get wrong?

28:04: What is your contribution on these perspectives? Are they hitting the point? Are they being accurately Tocquevillian, or are they misunderstanding parts of his argument?

37:44: I think part of the difficulty in transmitting this more 19th century perspective into the 21st is that society doesn't really look the same as when Tocqueville observed it. You talked a lot about the virtues of a self-governing society in which women take a disproportionate role in bringing up children and transmitting the virtues of citizenship, where religion plays a big role in people's lives that does constrain morality, where there is a tendency to respect authority more, where information and authority are not democratised. We live in a completely different world now. And you might say that women's empowerment is a completely positive achievement and that women shouldn't be spending the majority of their time in the domestic sphere transmitting these virtues to citizens. So there are a lot of tensions in taking the Tocquevillian example and being perfectly Tocquevillian in the 21st century. Should we be Tocquevillian nowadays given that society has completely changed?

44:44: Do you think we're in a period of democratic despotism today?

48:13: In light of this potential that we are living in a period of democratic despotism, we're more secularised, atomised, lonelier; we're lacking a lot of the social ties and mores that existed in the 19th century, especially in urban environments. We lack a lot of those central ingredients of democratic citizenship that Tocqueville was talking about. It seems like an opportune time to go back to the literature and ask, how do we replicate those mechanisms nowadays given that we've lost a lot of it in the process, and throughout history?

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Will Davies from Goldsmiths, University of London. This episode is titled “How Neo-Liberal are Contemporary Modes of Governance?”

What can early modern practices of duelling teach us about the contemporary 'culture wars' over identity politics? According to Dr Clif Mark, a lot more than you might think. Join us for this episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast.

Join us on this episode of the governance podcast between Simon Kaye and Mark Pennington for a conversation on the impact of Elinor Ostrom's work on public policy. Simon Kaye discusses his latest report for the New Local on how the ideas of self-governance and community power can transform public services in the UK. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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Read the Report

Think Big, Act Small: Elinor Ostrom's Radical Vision for Community Power

The Guest

Having been awarded a PhD in democratic theory from the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London in 2015, Simon Kaye has worked as a researcher and educator in academia and think tanks, with roles at UCL’s Constitution Unit, The Hansard Society, Queen Mary, and King’s College London. His last role was as Research Director at the Project for Modern Democracy, running projects on Whitehall reform and the rebalancing of UK economic policy.  

Simon has written and spoken on a diversity of subjects, including democracy and voting systems, localism and self-governance, political economy, historical methods, constitutions, conspiracy theories, and post-truth. He has published work in venues including History and Theory, Critical Review, European Political Science, and The Fabian Society. He has also penned articles for popular publications such as The Independent, Politics.co.uk, CityMetric, and CapX. He has contributed to several podcasts to talk about his research, presented at festivals and international conferences, participated in public lectures and panel debates, won several competitive academic fellowships, and appeared on BBC News as a political commentator. 

Simon’s research at New Local is focused around the Community Paradigm, drawing on his expertise in democracy and political economy. His major projects include work on mutual aid groups, the new working practices and relationships that emerged during the 2020 pandemic, and the landmark research of Nobel Prize-winner Elinor Ostrom into governance systems and community management of common resources. New Local’s Ostrom project is a direct development of the original Community Paradigm and forms the intellectual grounding for much of our work on public service reform and the need for more autonomous and empowered communities.  

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00:26: the New Local have recently produced a very interesting policy report which tries to apply some of the ideas of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom to look at aspects of a possible policy reform agenda in the UK and perhaps other countries. Those of you who follow our podcast will know that the Ostrom’s work is quite important at our Centre because of their focus on the relationship between formal and informal institutions of governance. So Simon, welcome to the podcast. I wonder if we could start off by you giving a bit of background on what you do at New Local.

02:25: You’ve produced with New Local what I think is an excellent report on Ostrom. I wonder if you could say more about why and how the New Local has become aware of the Ostroms' work?

06:40: If we think about some of the ideas in the report, as part of this community paradigm, you are pushing an agenda which is emphasizing this idea of decentralisation, of communities taking control of how public services are delivered, or assets are managed—the idea of communities having the space to craft their own hybrids between communities, markets and states. What would you say to the idea that in the UK people have been arguing for decentralisation for many years, there’s lots of complaints in the British government about over-centralisation, and yet the decentralisation agenda never really seems to take root. What do you think it is about the Ostrom agenda that can possibly make that happen?

11:08: So you would say, for example, that the Ostrom agenda, in its capacity to appeal to people across the political spectrum, is different from --what we heard in the late 1990s and early 2000s during the Tony Blair premiership in Britain, was a lot of talk about stakeholderism and participation—and this Ostrom agenda has aspects of that but also appeals across political groupings in a way that perhaps that agenda didn’t.

12:46: Could you say a little bit about what you think she means by the phrase “beyond markets and states”?

18:26: So it’s really an argument there that there is no fixed boundary about what kind of institutional arrangement is appropriate for particular kinds of goods—that that is constantly moving and varying according to local circumstances.

20:11: That leads me to what I think is a strange paradox about British politics, which is that on the one hand we do get people complaining (and we’ve seen this in the context of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic) that there is too much centralisation and not enough scope for community decision-making. But at the same time, the minute you start to get local variety, you have people complaining that they don’t like the fact that there are different outcomes in different places—you often get the phrase “the post-code lottery” that people want there to be a uniformity of provision of outcome while the localism agenda is pointing to something else. How do you square that circle if you’re trying to sell this idea?

23:30: If I’m understanding your argument, you’re saying there needs to be some kind of levelling mechanism in that you need some kind of minimum standard which everyone as a citizen is entitled to, but then over and above that, that’s the space where local control should come into play. What would be your view on the levelling mechanism being something like a universal basic income?

26:34: Speaking of that, the government here is talking about a “levelling up” agenda. Is there any way in which what you’re talking about can inform what that might look like? Can you give some examples of cases where community control can facilitate levelling up?

31:30: I remember very well there’s a distinction Ostrom draws between what she calls a facilitator state and a controller state.    

33:55: I was going to say, if you’re starting from a position where a state – whether at the local or national level – is actually responsible for managing assets or resources, there’s no way it can just disappear. At the very least it needs a mechanism for transferring authority, however much authority we’re talking about. This is certainly not a laissez-faire approach. Let’s move on to discuss the pandemic: arguably a problem which requires a centralised response to a large scale collective action problem. How do you think the relationship between the centre and localities plays out in the pandemic?

39:23: This feeds back to an earlier dilemma I was describing, which is: isn’t part of the reason central government has followed such a top down approach that there has been a popular demand for centralised action?

44:16: So you don’t feel that what’s happened with the pandemic is that there is a permanent setback to the ideas of decentralisation—you think this is actually an opportunity to show what can be achieved by thinking in a different way.

Can blockchain put an end to election fraud? Can it help us rebuild trust in distant institutions and companies that handle our data? How does blockchain actually work? Join us for this podcast on the inner workings and implications of blockchain for governance and society.

The Guests

Dr. Grammateia (Matoula) Kotsialou and Dr. Luke Riley are postdoctoral research associates at King’s College London working on the applications of blockchain in voting and collective decision-making domains. As computer scientists with expertise in game theory and artificial intelligence, they are here to answer all of your questions about blockchain and its future in society. For more information about their work, check out the Volt Project.

Send us Your Questions for Part II

Send us your blockchain questions for our follow-up podcast with Matoula and Luke by May 31, 2018 at info@csgs.kcl.ac.uk, or drop us a line on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl).

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0:40 What is blockchain?

1:07 How does bitcoin work?

7:38 How does blockchain help us secure our transactions with others?

8:49 How vulnerable is blockchain to hacking?

9:54 What’s stopping blockchain from taking over the world right now?

11:50 Why did the stock price of bitcoin drop?

13:52 Is blockchain just an ideology or is it the next great disruptive technology of our time?

15:07 How does blockchain voting work?

18:58 Can blockchain prevent election hacking by third parties?

20:27 What security issues do modern electronic voting systems face?

24:38 How can technology help us improve democracy?

28:14 Can we use blockchain to build trust with companies that use our data?

31:29  Can I sell rights to my data on a blockchain social media account?

On our latest episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Mark Pennington interviews Professor Frans Berkhout of King's College London on his latest book about climate governance. Tune in for a rich discussion on the limits of international coordination and how local experimentation can solve global commons dilemmas.

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The Guest

Frans Berkhout is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy and Professor of Environment, Society and Climate at King’s College London. He joined the Department of Geography at King’s in 2013.

From 2013-2015 he was Director of the Future Earth programme, based at the International Council for Science (ICSU) in Paris. Before that, Prof Berkhout directed the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the VU University Amsterdam in The Netherlands and led the Amsterdam Global Change Institute.

He has also held posts at SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research), University of Sussex, and was Director of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Global Environmental Change and Sustainable Technologies programmes.

Among other advisory roles, Professor Berkhout was a lead author in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (2014) and a member of the Social Science Panel of the Research Excellence Framework (REF2014) of the Higher Education Funding Council for England. He sits on the editorial boards of Research Policy, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Current Opinion on Environmental Sustainability, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions and The Anthropocene Review.

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 00:45: What was the motivation for your latest book?

5:15: What is experimentation in your framework? Is climate governance experimentation different from scientific experimentation?

10:15: Can you combine top down and bottom up approaches to climate governance?

15:25: Why do people at the local level take action on climate change?

19:35: How do local networks of experimentation get off the ground and get connected globally?

21:30: Some say that focusing on an experimental approach can serve as an excuse for a lack of coordination on climate change policy at the global scale. Others say global coordination is too slow and cumbersome. Can we reconcile this tension?

27:25: Do we always want local experiments to ripple out to a broader scale? Would they stop having contextual relevance?

31:45: What evidence do we have that local experiments are having a broader, more global effect?

35:00: Are we abandoning global coordination? Is there still a role for international policy?

39:17: What role does interdisciplinarity play in the study of climate change governance?

42:18: Do we have examples of networks of academic actors that experiment in social science approaches to climate governance?

45:03: What are the next research avenues for climate governance?

45:45: Are social scientists equipped to oversee the experiments? Are academics themselves complex enough to understand governance?

How do we interpret the current political moment in Britain? Is Brexit changing Britain’s unwritten constitution? Tune in to our special Brexit edition of the Governance Podcast between Andrew Blick and Vernon Bogdanor.  This episode is co-hosted by the Centre for British Politics and Government at King’s College London. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Vernon Bogdanor is a Research Professor at the Institute for Contemporary British History at King’s College London and Professor of Politics at the New College of the Humanities. He is also Emeritus Professor of Politics and Government at the University of Oxford where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Brasenose College.

Since 1966, he has been Senior Tutor (1979–85 and 1996–97), Vice-Principal, and (in 2002–2003) Acting Principal at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies.

He has been a member of Council of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Communities, Member of the Court of Essex University, adviser (as a member of the Council of Europe and American Bar Association delegations) to the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel and Slovakia on constitutional and electoral reform, member of the Academic Panel of Local Authority Associations, member of the Hansard Society Commission on the Legislative Process, member of the UK Government delegation on Democratic Institutions in Central and Eastern Europe and Conference on the Protection of Minorities, Consultant to Independent Television News (ITN) on the General Election, member of the Economic and Social Research Council’s committee administering the ‘Whitehall’ programme, special adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee on the Public Services, member of the Swedish Constitutional Reform Project, member of the Advisory Group to the High Commissioner on National Minorities, adviser to the President of Trinidad on the Constitution of Trinidad, and member of the Economic and Social Research Council’s committee administering the devolution programme.

The Book

Beyond Brexit: Towards a British Constitution was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2019.

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1:12: Why did you write this book?

2:56: What is the main thesis of this book? What is the main impact of Brexit on the British Constitution?

5:08: Turning to the referendum, which as you say has become, since the issue of being in the EU came on to the agenda, a big part of our constitution and our way of taking decisions, as you show in earlier works you’ve written, we were actually arguing about whether or not we should introduce a referendum for a long while, as far as the late 19th century… one important proponent of the referendum… wrote an important book on that in the 1920s. And one point he made was that although he was in favour a referendum… he said that “the referendum shall never be used in answer to abstract questions such as ‘are you in favour of a monarchy.’

8:09: What do you think is the reason for the political turbulence that has taken place? You could argue that two prime ministers now have seen their careers destroyed by the referendum. How do you account for that?

10:43: In your estimation do you think that David Cameron learned the lesson in 1975 and felt that he could replicate the same trick that Harold Wilson had pulled off then?

11:52: Moving on to your background, as I said in the introduction you’ve been talking about the constitution in the UK…for a long while… What first interested you in the constitution?

13:15: Who were your teachers? Who influenced you?

14:52: Would you describe yourself now as a political scientist, historian or something else?

15:36: You mentioned earlier this idea of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty – the theoretical and practical problems associated with it… and in your book you talk about the possibility that the UK will move towards a written constitution. I’m sensing you think that’s a good idea. Do you think it’s likely to happen?

18:01: In that kind of scenario, you could potentially see clashes between judges and elected politicians over who actually has the legitimacy to take these kind of decisions.

21:20: You mentioned earlier that one of the reasons for the political turbulence since the referendum was that the people … have a different view to most of the people in parliament and government.  Do you think there are ways to bring them back together?

23:45: We’re now on the brink of a new prime minister taking power. Do you see any reason to believe that, whoever that may be, will be more successful than the last two prime ministers were in managing the referendum and the European issue?

25:02: What are you working on next?

25:53: Is it fair to say that that period… the pre-first world war period, which was… a period of constitutional turbulence… is comparable to the one we’re in now?

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington, the Director at the Study of Governance and Society here at King College London, interviews Andy Haldane. This episode is titled 'Complexity and the Politics of Regulation’, and discusses the governance of financial risk in conditions where it's hard to predict how agents will respond to a given situation and the possibility of error, whether by private agents or by those who regulate their behavior.

The Guest

Andy was formerly Chief Economist at the Bank of England and a member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee. Among other positions, he is Honorary Professor at the Universities of Nottingham, Manchester and Exeter, Visiting Professor at King’s College, London, a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Social Sciences. Andrew is Founder and President of the charity Pro Bono Economics, Vice-Chair of the charity National Numeracy and Chair of the National Numeracy Leadership Council. Andrew was the Permanent Secretary for Levelling Up at the Cabinet Office from September 2021 to March 2022 and chairs the Government’s Levelling Up Advisory Council. He has authored around 200 articles and 4 books.

 

How can we produce effective regulations when governments can no longer cope with the demands of an increasingly complex and digitised world? Professor Gillian Hadfield of the University of Southern California discusses novel institutional mechanisms that can make the law more agile, inclusive and effective. Join us at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London for the first episode of the Governance Podcast.

About the Guest

Gillian K. Hadfield is the Richard L. and Antoinette Schamoi Kirtland professor of law and professor of economics at the University of Southern California. She holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. She has served as a clerk to Chief Judge Patricia Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, and is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Technology, Values, and Policy, among other leading organisations in the field of law and economics. Her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy was published by Oxford University Press in November 2016.

In this special episode of the Governance Podcast, we're partnering with Andrew Blick of the KCL Centre for British Politics and Government to discuss all things public opinion with Roger Mortimore, Professor at King's College London and Director of Political Analysis at Ipsos Mori. As a leading social scientist behind the UK general election exit poll, Professor Mortimore takes us through the origins, mechanics and surprising realities of predicting election outcomes. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Roger Mortimore is Ipsos MORI’s Director of Political Analysis, and has worked in the MORI/Ipsos MORI political team since 1993. Since 2012 he has also been Professor of Public Opinion and Political Analysis in the department of political economy at King's College London.

Roger researches political and social attitudes, especially but not exclusively related to voting and elections; and he is responsible for the Political Monitor Aggregate, a data set consisting of more than half a million interviews stretching back to 1996. He is also the best point of contact for exploring any of Ipsos MORI’s historical archive of survey data, covering records of almost every survey which MORI and Ipsos MORI have conducted, on a wide range of subjects, since MORI was founded in 1969.  

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01:20: What is an exit poll?

5:51: You said that more money is spent on the one exit poll than is spent on polling through the whole campaign, which shows that the people paying for it obviously place a high premium on this but who are the customers? Who is paying for this?

7:28: In the end there is only one exit poll, or one publicly available exit poll that we know for certain exists.

8:12: In the context of the UK and what we call the 'first past the post' electoral system, what particular challenges does that system present as opposed to a proportional system?

10:20: What is success in the context of an exit poll?

14:12: I also suspect, for instance, that in 1997, whether you were 10, 20 seats out, when Labour were going to win a huge majority and that was pretty widely expected, doesn't really matter that much. It's in an era where, for the time being, results have been very tight and winning a workable majority is much more challenging. Suddenly you're expected to produce this pin point accuracy. 

15:46: If you have unlimited time, money, etc, what might be done differently?

19:53: General elections are obviously to a large extent about parties, so I want to ask about how this figures into what you're doing. If there are one or more parties that have not contested a general election before and they are now running a significant number of candidates, how do you deal with that?

28:47: So you must get to learn a lot about the geography and profile of the United Kingdom for this job.

30:25: There are historic examples of electoral pacts between parties. The most famous one is probably the 1918 election where Lloyd George and the liberals who followed him into his government, splitting from the Asquith liberals, had an arrangement with the conservatives that in predetermined seats they would not run candidates against each other. Were this to come up again in a future general election, how might an exit poll try and model that?

32:54: Again a similar question going back to the electoral system, we have a phenomenon of tactical voting... how do you account for it?

36:06: It'd be interesting to talk about how you came to be in this post. What was your path to who you are now?

37:40: When did exit polling start?

42:21: What actually happens on the ground on election day?

47:54: A word you mentioned a lot is 'computer.' I suppose in 1970 I suspect there was a computer of some kind involved, but even in the time you've been doing it there must have been some significant changes in the technology. Has it made it easier or has it just increased people's expectations?

49:21: Can you recommend a good book on exit polling for our listeners?

That we live in an era of 'post truth politics' has become a widespread mantra since the shock of the Brexit vote and the 2016 election of Donald Trump. But Matt Sleat (University of Sheffield) believes this is a mistake: politics is no more 'post truth' now than it has ever been. To understand what has been happening, we need to look elsewhere. Join us on this episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast.

About the Talk

In this episode of the podcast, Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Adam Dixon on the contemporary relevance of the Scottish philosopher and political economist Adam Smith.

The Guest

Adam D. Dixon holds the Adam Smith Chair in Sustainable Capitalism at Adam Smith’s Panmure House, the last and final home of moral philosopher and father of economics Adam Smith. Professor Dixon is recognized as a world-leading scholar on the political economy of sovereign wealth funds, theories of state capitalism, and the intersection of markets and the state in the sustainability transition.

His books include The Specter of State Capitalism (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024), Sovereign Wealth Funds: Between the State and Markets (Agenda, 2022), The Political Economy of Geoeconomics: Europe in a Changing World (Palgrave 2022), The New Frontier Investors: How Pension Funds, Sovereign Funds, and Endowments are Changing the Business of Investment Management and Long-Term Investing (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), The New Geography of Capitalism: Firms, Finance, and Society (Oxford University Press 2014) Sovereign Wealth Funds: Legitimacy, Governance, and Global Power (Princeton University Press, 2013), and Managing Financial Risks: From Global to Local (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Trained as an economic geographer and political economist in the United States, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom, Adam brings an interdisciplinary perspective to this work. Previously, Adam worked at the University of Bristol and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where he led a large European Research Council project on sovereign wealth funds.

He holds a D.Phil. in economic geography from the University of Oxford, a Diplôme (Master) de l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, and a BA in international affairs and Spanish literature from The George Washington University in Washington, DC. 

What can social scientists tell us about the world? How do psychology and history enrich economics? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Jon Elster sits down with Mark Pennington to discuss the essential tasks and limitations of social science. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Jon Elster is the Robert K. Merton Professor of the Social Sciences at Columbia University. Before coming to Columbia, he taught in Paris, Oslo and Chicago. His publications include Ulysses and the Sirens (1979), Sour Grapes (1983), Making Sense of Marx (1985), The Cement of Society (1989), Solomonic Judgements (1989), Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (1989), Local Justice (1992) and Political Psychology (1993). His research interests include the theory of rational choice, the theory of distributive justice and the history of social thought (Marx and Tocqueville). He is currently working on a comparative study of constitution-making processes from the Federal Convention to the present and on a study of retroactive justice in countries that have recently emerged from authoritarian or totalitarian rule. Research interests include Theory of Rational Choice and the Theory of Distributive Justice.

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0:57: You’re giving a talk at our Centre called ‘Emotions in History.’ Can you explain the argument?

3:54: A lot of your work in the past has been engaged with rational choice models or economic models applied to various social phenomena in one form or another. You’re now mentioning the role of psychology. What role should psychology play in relation to the kind of rationality-oriented work you’ve done in the past?

6:04: So you’re saying that common sense rationality can play a role in understanding political institutions or economic institutions, or individual behaviour within them?

7:38: You say that about some of the Chicago-school understandings of institutions which imply that the institutions that are chosen are efficient in some sense—because if they weren’t, rational agents would change them. Then it’s hard to account for any sort of institutional change because equilibrium is built into the model.

8:50: If we don’t explain the origin of institutions through a rational choice model, or at least if that model has quite serious limitations, is there any way in which a model that focuses on the psychological dimension or the emotional dimension provides a better explanation?

10:38: Would your view of institutions be more along the kind of model that recognizes that institutions are often the products of accidents that arise from conjunctions of all kinds of eventualities that really don’t necessarily have more universal implications?

11:32: What can we say—or can we say anything—about whether certain kinds of institutions have beneficial properties relative to other kinds of institutions?

13:54: If we go back to this role of emotion: if emotion is an important factor in shaping institutions, the way they’re formed and perhaps even the way they persist, that strikes me to imply that… people, because of emotion, create certain institutional structures that could be inefficient or malfunction in various ways…

16:49: What I was wondering was whether you were working with a model where emotional choice influences the way in which institutions are originally created, but then within that set of rules, is that the level at which a more rational choice type model kicks in? Or is it emotions all the way down?

18:26: I want to come to some of what you’ve written on the role of prediction within social science… but what I take from what you’ve just said there about the importance of specific cases and not generalizing too much is that you would be against the idea that even if we recognize the role of emotions in forming institutions, we can have a notion of institutional design to deal with the effects of emotional decision making …

21:52: Would it be fair to say that we might not know necessarily what are good decisions – certainly not in some optimizing sense, but can we say about what might be bad decisions?

23:23: So the next question I wanted to ask you is, given the role of indeterminacy, can you say a bit more about what you think are the excessive ambitions of contemporary social science? This is a theme that you’ve developed in your recent work: a lot of social science is about prediction… much of what you’re saying is pushing back against that.

26:50: If prediction is limited, can we nevertheless have a model of social science which is based on understanding in very context-specific circumstances?

28:38: I think that one of the interesting things to think about regarding uncertainty is that there are different views within political economy about this. As I understand, Keynes’ view was that uncertainty was very much with us and that the role of statecraft is to manage that uncertainty in a creative way…

30:25: Can we speak a little more about the importance of history? One of the pieces that some of our students read in one of our courses on political economy has some criticisms that you made of the analytic narrative model in political economy—and that’s often an attempt to use rational choice type models to understand particular historical episodes. And the argument you made there, as I understand it, is that they are sort of retrofit models. People are picking the history to fit the rational choice type explanation.

34:46: So that sounds very much to be part of what I take of what you’re saying here, which is that there needs to be a lot more humility from various analysts about what they claim for their particular models, given the nature of the subject matter.

36:28: One of the authors we’re studying at our research centre is Elinor Ostrom and her account of common pool resource management. She is famous for challenging some of the implications that came from one simple model of rational choice: the idea that there is a commons problem—that whenever you don’t have ownership rights of some kind, you have a tragedy of the commons.

40:23: Earlier, you were reflecting on areas where you think you’ve been wrong over what’s been a very distinguished career…

42:41: One of the areas where you’ve applied this notion is giving micro-foundations to Marxist-style explanations. You’re one of the influencers behind the analytical Marxist movement. Did that turn out to be a fruitful research paradigm or not?

43:48: In what sense does the early part of Marx remain with us? What’s the residual power of the insight?

46:28: Are there any other areas you’d like to talk about where you think what you were writing about in the past wasn’t right?

47:40: What are you working on at the moment?

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Carmen Pavel from the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. This episode is titled “Sovereignty and International Law”, which features Carmen’s recently published book with Oxford University Press Law Beyond the State.

Has economic theory changed in the last 50 years? How can we incorporate notions of social justice and culture into economic thinking? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Herbert Gintis joins Professor Shaun Hargreaves Heap in a conversation about his contributions to key debates in economics since the 1970s.

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The Guest

Herbert Gintis is an American economist, behavioral scientist, and educator known for his theoretical contributions to sociobiology, especially altruism,  cooperation, epistemic game theory, gene-culture coevolution, efficiency wages, strong reciprocity, and human capital theory. Throughout his career, he has worked extensively with economist Samuel Bowles. Their landmark book, Schooling in Capitalist America, has had multiple editions in five languages since it was first published in 1976. Their most recent book, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution was published by Princeton University Press in 2011.

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1:30: How did you get into academia?

4:40: You mentioned your political engagement with the SDS and the civil rights movement. Have you maintained that engagement throughout your life?

8:00: One way we can think about Marx and Mill is perhaps that Marx was the materialist, and Mill was the idealist. Has Marx’s materialism stuck with you?

10:53: My understanding of Schooling in Capitalist America is that the book has enjoyed a kind of revival because of the work of people like Heckman, who have discovered that education isn’t important in the traditional ‘human capital’ sense. Is your argument consistent with that?

13:50: How is it that your argument about schooling has become a version of received wisdom today?

15:21: Is the diffusion of ideas so slow in the social sciences because it’s a closed shop—it’s not very competitive?

16:27: What’s the difference between the social sciences and natural sciences in the way that ideas get diffused?

19:24: The maintenance of theory without evidence in economics: how did that tradition survive?

22:30: I’m going to take you to the QJE article on ‘Contested Exchange' and Walrasian general equilibrium theory. A group of economists in the 70s was discussing these ideas a decade before they went mainstream...

33:30: How is it that you weren’t interested in the Keynesian point about uncertainty in your critique of general equilibrium theory?

36:42: There is the problem of calculation when you have complexity and then there's the fact that we don’t know the future. Aren’t these separate issues?

39:05: I suppose there is an a-theoretical space that Keynes opened up—to license ‘animal spirits.’

40:20: In your view, our cultural values owe much to the evolutionary selection advantage they give to groups. What’s interesting about the ‘co-evolutionary’ part of this is that once we have co-evolution taking place, culture itself… can contribute to the evaluation of fitness.

44:40: If you think about our contemporary cultural values in the US and UK, you might say that two very important cultural values are a belief in liberal freedoms and a belief in democracy. Could you sketch how each of those cultural values gave this evolutionary selection advantage?

47:40: Hayek has a very similar evolutionary view of cultural values to yours… For Hayek, the great virtue of liberal freedoms is that they are an appropriate response to the problem of knowledge. Would you buy that?

55:15: If the ideas of democracy flourished for the reasons you mentioned, historically and evolutionarily, and if we actually buy into democracy for an entirely different set of reasons, which may have to do with egalitarian foundations, how does that tension get played out?

57:45: How did a generation of the best minds in economics spend so much of their time on Walrasian general equilibrium theory?

How do economists study morality? What are the origins of secure and prosperous societies? Are political dynasties good or bad? Tune in to the latest episode of the Governance Podcast featuring Gabriel Leon (King's College London) and Ernesto Dal Bo (Berkeley).

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The Guest

Ernesto Dal Bo is the Phillips Girgich Professor of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a political economist interested in governance broadly understood. His research focuses on a range of topics: political influence, social conflict, corruption, morality and social norms, state formation, the development of state capabilities, and the qualities and behavior of politicians and public servants. Most of his teaching takes place in the MBA program at Haas, where he teaches ethics, and at the doctoral level where he teaches courses on political economy.

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0:50: What made you get interested in economics and specifically political economy?

3:16: In your earlier work, you argued that elites can influence political outcomes, partly by threatening politicians or public servants or by accusing them of corruption even if there is no merit for that. What motivated you to start looking at that particular issue?

5:34: There’s this view by a lot of people in academia but also a lot of people on the ground, that all politicians are bad and are trying to enrich themselves, and one of the points that you make is that that’s not necessarily true—some politicians are good. It raises the question, how do we go about designing institutions that can deliver those good politicians?

8:02: There does seem to be a lot of cross-country variation in the attractiveness of working for the bureaucracy. In France, the view is that you want to work for the public sector. In the UK, there are some nice public sector jobs, and then there’s other parts of the world like Latin America, where that’s what you do if you can’t find anything else.

9:57: You’ve done some work on political dynasties: you’ve got the Bushes in America and Justin Trudeau and his father, and Mitt Romney and his father. There are many examples. What does your research find about them? Are they generally a bad thing or not?

13:34: That seems to go against the idea of a fully democratic system. Is there anything we can do to try and change hereditary power transmission?

15:28: You’ve done some recent work on morals, a topic that economics doesn’t really deal with, and political economy does to some extent, but not terribly much. What motivated you to start thinking about that issue in the economic framework?

18:25: This work is very interesting because it combines the idea that individuals can either be good or bad, or corruptible and non-corruptible depending on the context in which they operate, and that motivates my next question, which is—a lot of your work focuses on individuals while a lot of the political economy literature focuses on institutions, and individuals to some extent play a very little role. Do you see your approach as complementary to the institutional view, or is it more of a substitute?

20:24: Your work has recently turned to issues of state development, and you’ve made reference to what you call the ‘puzzle of civilization’ – what is that argument about?

23:58: Let’s talk a bit more about Latin America. There’s a lot that’s been happening recently. The continent seems to be experiencing a resurgence of authoritarianism and the re-emergence of charismatic leadership. What can explain the rise of politicians like Chavez on the left and Bolsonaro on the right?

27:32: Would you agree that democracy is under threat in the US, Latin America and parts of Eastern Europe?

29:43: What’s the next stage in your research agenda?

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Assistant Director Dr. Bryan Cheang interviews Prof. Daniel Smith from Middle Tennessee State University. This episode features his latest book Money and the Rule of Law, published by Cambridge University Press and co-authored with Alexander Salter and Peter Boettke. Drawing on a wide body of scholarship, this volume presents a novel argument in favor of embedding monetary institutions into a rule of law framework. The authors argue for general, predictable rules to provide a sturdier foundation for economic growth and prosperity. The authors argue that a rule of law approach to monetary policy would remedy the flaws that resulted in misguided monetary responses to the 2007-8 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Where are the fault lines in the modern liberal project? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Dr Humeira Iqtidar and Dr Paul Sagar of King's College London tackle this question in a dialogue on Francis Fukuyama's new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.  Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guests

Dr Humeira Iqtidar joined King's College London in 2011. She has studied at the University of Cambridge, McGill University in Canada and Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan. Before joining King's, Humeira was based at the University of Cambridge as a fellow of King’s College and the Centre of South Asian Studies. She is a co-convenor of the London Comparative Political Theory Workshop. Humeira’s research explores the shifting demarcations of state, market and society in political imagination, and their relationship with Islamic thought and practice. Her current research focuses on non-liberal conceptions of tolerance. Her research has featured in interviews and articles in The Guardian, BBC World Service, Voice of America, Der Spiegel, Social Science Research Council Online, The Dawn, Express Tribune and Open Democracy. 

Dr Paul Sagar is a lecturer in political theory at King's College London. His recent monograph, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the State from Hobbes to Smith, explores Enlightenment accounts of the foundations of modern politics, whilst also addressing contemporary issues regarding how to conceive of the state, and what that means for normative political theory today. He has also published a number of studies on topics such as: the political writings of Bernard Williams, so-called ‘realist’ approaches to political philosophy, the nature of liberty under conditions of modernity, and the idea of immortality. Paul is currently in the early stages of two major new projects. The first is a monograph study of Adam Smith’s political philosophy as rooted in his conceptions of history and commercial society. The second is an exploration of the idea of the enemy in the history of political thought. 

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0:55: Where do we see this book in Fukuyama's larger oeuvre? 

3:39: You can see Hegel's influence more in his previous work, more in terms of a teleological thrust through history, and the metaphysics in Hegel... I really understand to be a kind of battle of ideas. And Fukuyama takes that on, and his argument is more that if we are thinking about ideas that will triumph, then liberal democracy is the best idea.

8:55: I think what Fukuyama wants to say in this Identity book is, the same threats to the last man at the end of history, which is the desire for recognition, will overwhelm contentment with stability. Because even if liberal democracy... would provide all the comforts of life... and solve the economic questions, which we know now that it hasn't... but even back then Fukuyama thought that even if it does that, it will not solve the recognition problem, and if they don't get that recognition, they will break things, they will smash things.

11:14: I actually find the narrative that he tells pretty plausible. The idea that we exist not just with the desire for recognition, but a desire that each of us has an authentic self, an authentic identity, which may be at odds with wider society, and that society itself may be a structural mechanism of oppression. 

13:29: His account of the failure of multiculturalism, which... he doesn't actually spell it out in so many words... but he lays the blame on a certain kind of identity politics at the doorstep of the left. What is interesting is... I think there is a problem with thinking of it only as a left failure, partly because the left remains undifferentiated in his thinking.

16:30: I actually think that a huge missing part of the story is... I hate using this term, but the rise of neoliberalism- that what's often labeled as left wing identity politics is much, much more indebted to the intellectual victories of the right. What I mean by that is the rise of the view of the world that everything is about individual choice, every individual is a sovereign consumer who floats through the world unencumbered by structures, making market choices. 

19:02: Neoliberalism moves much more strongly towards freedom... or a particular understand of freedom which is entirely unburdened by a relationship to equality... and therefore to the economy and the state. It just becomes this abstract idea. 

23:40: If we take out Marx, who does try to bring together ideas and structures in a very kind of comprehensive way, we may disagree with his approach but it's an ambitious one and that's partly why I think he has traction today. But one of the problems we do have in the history of political thought is that the relationship between institutions and ideas is unclear. 

29:12: The entire narrative of the enlightenment as some kind of rejection of religion is just deeply deeply implausible... If you take almost all of the major Enlightenment figures, many of them were pious Christians.... the falling of religion in Europe is, if anything, a twentieth century phenomenon. 

37:47: There's this culture of Republicans and Democrats, top level politicians, who've perpetrated these wars for decades but of course, their class has not suffered the consequences of any of this. That area of identity, that sense of American betrayal, doesn't seem to get as much of a look in. And again it is very odd to point to America as an example of successful integration when you still have the persistence of these enormous racial divides which cut across the left-right spectrum in all sorts of complex ways. 

David Skarbek (Brown University) describes his ethnographic work on prison governance as a historical analogy to the emergence of states. Join us in this episode of the Governance Podcast led by John Meadowcroft (King’s College London) for a vibrant discussion on how governance emerges (or doesn’t) in different social landscapes, from prisons and gulags to clans and nation-states. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

David Skarbek is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. His research examines how extralegal governance institutions form, operate, and evolve. He has published extensively on the informal institutions that govern life in prisons in California and around the globe.

His work has appeared in leading journals in political science, economics, and criminology, including in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, and Journal of Criminal Justice. 

His book, The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System (Oxford University Press), received the American Political Science Association’s 2016 William H. Riker Award for the best book in political economy in the previous three years. It was also awarded the 2014 Best Publication Award from the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime and was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association’s 2014 Ethnography Award.

His work has been featured widely in national and international media outlets, such as the Atlantic, BBC, Business Insider, the Economist, Forbes, the Independent, and the Times.

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00:38: David, you’re well known for writing a book on prison gangs in California and America called The Social Order of the Underworld. Just to begin, tell us a little bit about that book.

2:01: You mentioned that prison gangs are often organized on racial lines. Why is that the case?

4:10: So race is a convenient way of organizing a large group of people. Is that what you’re arguing?

4:34: Does that mean this has changed over time? So as a prison population got bigger in America, gangs organized upon racial lines have become more important?

7:44: You mentioned that the convict code, if you like, was informal. Would you see gangs as providing more formal governance?

9:15: Would it be fair or is it a stretch to suggest that this is like a prison constitution?

10:53: One thing when you read the book that’s quite striking is there are lots of vivid descriptions of violence that occurs in prison. How do you reconcile that evidence with what you describe as some sort of order?

13:55: I imagine that the question that comes to many people’s minds when it comes to prison gangs, is what would happen if they went to prison? Would they have to join a prison gang, and if the didn’t, what would be the consequences?

15:26: So it’d be fair to say you cannot be a solitary individual, you cannot be a holdout, so to speak.

16:15: Could we then imagine that prisons are close to what we might think of the state of nature in social science?

17:05: This brings us to your latest work in this area, which I think is going to be called the Puzzle of Prison Order. How does it extend your previous work?

20:03: Maybe you can say a little more about English prisons. One senses that they don’t have that kind of gang organization that we observe in California. Why should that be the case?

23:39: One challenge this book takes on is trying to unpack all these different factors, all these different possibilities. So I guess one common sense question would be, looking at California, America, the UK, there is a presence of gangs on the streets. One might assume intuitively that the gangs on the streets are more well organized in California compared to England and Wales. Is that the case, and how does that play into what happens in prisons?

26:08: Another dimension which I think would be of interest is the difference between men’s and women’s prisons. What have you been observing?

29:44: Let me ask a more mischievous question: You’ve looked at prisons around the world and spent many years reading research on this. Is there a country or prison system that is completely opposite to what your theory would predict? For instance, where there is a small prison population but there are lots of gangs?

31:42: So it’s a story ultimately about governance, and much less about the size of prisons.

32:10: One thing that’s striking is, prisons have people with very few resources, they may be predisposed to violence… should this lead us to be hopeful about people’s capacity for self-governance?

35:06: So it’s undoubtedly impressive that prisoners are able to self-organize or self-govern in this way. Thinking of the comparative political economy of this, though, wouldn’t it be better if there was formal governance? Is that safer and less violent?

37:00: Essentially you’re engaging in qualitative research. Maybe the first question here is about the challenges of obtaining that kind of data from prisons around the world and how you go about overcoming that challenge.

40:27: What’s your sense of the challenges of comparing different ethnographic studies?

44:26: So you were trained as an economist originally. How do economists view this sort of methodological approach, and would they be concerned about your ability to give causal answers?

46:04:  As a political scientist, you see political science going in the direction of causal identification and experimental results. Should we be concerned about that and is it limiting the types of questions we can ask?

48:18: I assume you’re not going to be working on prisons forever. What other ideas do you have going forward?

Given the upheavals unleashed by the Brexit referendum of 2016, many are now wary of direct democracy. But Jonathan Benson (Utrecht University) argues that to improve our current politics we need more, not less, direct involvement of the people in decision-making. Join us on this episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Jonathan Benson is Assistant Professor in Political Philosophy at Utrecht University (j.d.benson@uu.nl). His general research interests are in political and democratic theory, political epistemology, and theoretical political economy. He has published on issues such as deliberative and participatory democracy, the relationship between democracy and the market, the limits of markets, and environmental politics.

Is socialism feasible? What is the future of heterodox economics after the financial crisis? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington (King's College London) sits down with Geoffrey Hodgson (Loughborough University London) for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of social democracy, neoliberalism, and new paradigms in economics. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest Geoffrey Hodgson is a Professor in Management for the Institute for International Management at Loughborough University London. He is a specialist in institutional and evolutionary economics, with a background in economics, philosophy and mathematics. His research has applications to the understanding of organisations, organisational change, innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development. Hodgson is also the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics (ABS rank 3). He has published 18 academic books and over 150 academic articles. He is the winner of the Schumpeter Prize 2014 for his book on "Conceptualizing Capitalism".  Skip Ahead

0:55: You've actually got two books out in the last year -- Is Socialism Feasible? and Is there a future for heterodox economics? I wonder if we could start by you talking us through-- first of all, how do you write two books in a year, but also the rationale for these two particular books?

8:44: I'd like to follow up on that last part and link it to the motivation for writing these books-- you're very clear to make a distinction between socialism and social democracy, so you do see yourself as a kind of social democrat who has been influenced by arguments in the liberal tradition. I wonder if you could say something about why you think, following the crash, there's been a movement toward going back to what you describe as 'big state socialism' as opposed to embracing a radical Keynesian view or some kind of interventionist or redistributive politics, which isn't about nationalising or controlling everything from the centre.

14:45: I really enjoyed this section of the book where you're talking about the use of terminology-- how the use of this term 'neoliberal' has meant that you almost can't have a conversation in certain areas because anything turns out to be neoliberal if it isn't full blooded socialism and I think there's a wonderful line in the book where you say that if you follow this kind of reasoning, when Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy to save the Soviet people from starvation, this would have been described as a neoliberal policy by some of the contemporary left.

16:34: Why do you think that label [neoliberalism] has become so ubiquitous?

18:17: You mention some heterodox thinkers using the term, dismissing certain things as being right wing just because of that. Perhaps we can connect to the second book-- could you talk about the rationale for writing it?

26:32: Can we pursue that more, this issue about how effectively methodological questions seem to get confused with policy positions or ideological views in heterodoxy? This is something that's always frustrated me-- I consider myself to be quite heterodox in the sense that I'm very influenced by the Austrian school ideas. There are lots of debates I'd like to engage with people who are post-Keynesians or post-institutionalists or evolutionary thinkers, and I feel that we should have a club identity around those themes. But because we might divide on policy issues that seems to come apart. 

29:59: There is so much within neoclassical economics which promotes, if not radical socialism, although you could interpret some general equilibrium theory in that way, but it certainly promotes interventionism  -- it assumes away all the problems of tacit knowledge. 

30:33: You've given reasons why you think heterodox economics as a set of broad theories is not in as good a shape as you'd like it to be, and that's one of the reasons you've written this book-- I wonder if you could address institutional economics, which on some readings is a kind of subfield within the broad heterodox camp, but arguably with things like new institutional economics there are some overlaps with the mainstream. 

34:46: I would have thought there should be more overlap between some of the concerns of institutional economics-- you think about the role that soft institutions or beliefs play, or the way ideas are communicated, with a lot of the work that takes place in cultural studies or communication studies, these kind of areas which often see themselves as being antithetical to economic ways of thinking, but they're actually dealing with questions about how ideas spread, how norms change, and you'd think this is terrain where they should be interested in the kind of insights you'd get from these fields. 

39:07: This connects back to our earlier discussion about the socialism book-- within our research centre here we're very much concerned with governance questions. Of course within that area we focused on themes like markets and private property, state ownership. But one of the great contributions I think of institutional economics, certainly of people like Elinor Ostrom, is to point out this whole space that many people have missed, which is between markets and states. And there's even been the argument made that to speak in terms of markets and states is a kind of outdated mode of analysis, that we actually need to be seeing all solutions to social problems in some sense as being some form of hybrid. Do you think that is one of the most important contributions of institutional economics?

41:33: I'm struck by how few politicians are able to articulate that kind of language. You could say that some people used to talk about the third way as something different, but people spoke about a third way or looking for some notion of hybrids. 

46:50: Is there a way in policy terms where people can conceive of allowing different institutions to coexist so that we don't see this as being a choice between all markets or all something else; we actually have different kinds of organisation coexisting in a society? If you think about a solution to religious conflict -- it's to tolerate the fact that people have different religions. If we can tolerate the fact that some people prefer different institutional forms, we've got to figure out some way allowing them to coexist rather than seeking victory for one side. 

52:09: To reflect a bit on what is happening to economics -- to think about those questions post-crisis-- I remember the financial crash, there was a huge amount of activism by students and people in the profession saying that economics needs to rethink itself. Some of the issues we've talked about get to parts of that, but my understanding is that economics hasn't changed much at all these 15 years. Do you see any signs of change?

Can employers wield dictatorial power over employees? Join us for a lively discussion between Mark Pennington (King’s College London) and Elizabeth Anderson (University of Michigan) on how power accumulates in the market, which institutions can ameliorate the problem, and how Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) as a discipline helps us understand the human condition. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Elizabeth Anderson is the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor; John Rawls Collegiate Professor; Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Department Chair in Philosophy at the University of Michigan.

Professor Elizabeth Anderson specializes in ethics, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, social epistemology, and the philosophy of economics and the social sciences. She is particularly interested in exploring the interactions of social science with moral and political theory, how we learn to improve our value judgments, the epistemic functions of emotions and democratic deliberation, and issues of race, gender, and equality. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics, The Imperative of Integration, and, most recently, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It), as well as articles on value theory, the ethical limitations of markets, facts and values in social scientific research, feminist and social epistemology, racial integration and affirmative action, rational choice and social norms, democratic theory, egalitarianism, and the history of ethics (focusing on Kant, Mill, and Dewey).

Professor Anderson is currently working on a history of egalitarianism from the Levellers to the present. Professor Anderson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and designed and was the first Director of the Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at UM.

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1:10: How does it feel to be the recipient of a Genius award?

2:09: What is the ratio of women in major philosophy departments?

2:40: What do you plan to do with the MacArthur grant?

5:35: If I may, let’s discuss some of the things related to our work at the Centre, which is about governance arrangements, the relationship between formal and informal governance structures. And in your case you’ve done this interesting work on what I would describe as the governance of the employment relationship, and that work as I understand it really builds on your previous work thinking about what equality means or should mean.

9:05: You make some strong and provocative claims in the book arguing that some of the powers that employers have are equivalent to those you see in dictatorial regimes. I think at some point you say it’s almost as though the management of those firms resembles a communist dictatorship.

12:15: It really is challenging the way you list these kind of practices. Most people would have a gut reaction, that was certainly my sense when I read about this. But I was also thinking… how do you situate an understanding of the kind of abusive relationships that happen in these corporate environments with many other aspects of life? … I guess the argument would be, human beings aren’t always very humane. And this is true in all aspects of life. So if we’re thinking about the role of that private government plays in contributing to domination, we also need to have an understanding of the sources of domination outside of work. I didn’t feel you said all that much about that in the book.

16:39: Why on your account do you think that in this employment relationship we see these kinds of practices that lead to the domination of people?

19:25: Thinking about the arguments that economists would typically make in these situations, people would argue that if the employment relationship is really not working out for a worker or if there’s some kind of abuse… all that really matters is the existence of exit options. Is there competition operating in the labour market, etc.

24:35: Why do we not see greater movement to things like worker cooperatives?

27:27: Why do you take the argument that market forces themselves don’t lead to a sufficient treatment of workers? Is it basically that the labour market isn’t sufficiently competitive? Or is it a legal situation?

29:15: I think this is where you deliver a very powerful challenge to classical liberal or libertarian type arguments. Because people from that perspective are basically making arguments that we ought to focus on making constitutional limits on government power… but you’re actually saying that we should think about constitutional limitations on this private government power.

33:20: Do you see the solution just coming from the state itself through a democratic structure introducing regulation into these situations or do you see other vehicles?

37:22: How does co-determination address situations where part of the abuse is coming from other workers?

39:07: On the empirical side of this… you’re obviously quite sympathetic toward the German type co-determination model, but how do you compare the outcomes of that model with those of alternatives?

44:41: What I take from that is there isn’t a one size fits all model… this is very much a pragmatic search for a solution, and that there are multiple different types of approaches depending on the cultural context, which can interact with the functioning of the labour market.

45:46: It sounds like one reading of pragmatism could be an argument for a focus on quite decentralised arrangements to tackle these problems. One of the thinkers that inspires our work at this centre is Elinor Ostrom…. Although would the polycentric arrangements not be subject to some of the forms of domination you’re talking about?

47:22: So you’re not going to recommend that we roll out the German style model everywhere?

47:45: Do you think there are any insights from what you’re saying here about how we think about employment relationships outside the western context?

50:01: Thinking about your overall approach to political philosophy, what I really enjoy about your work is that you bring together insights from economics to inform political philosophy and vice versa. And that’s very much in what I would call a PPE tradition of research. Is that informing the kind of project you’ve been engaging with? How do you see the state of PPE research at this point in time?

Which governance arrangements best help us manage and preserve natural resources? Markets, states, or something in between? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Dominic Parker of the University of Wisconsin, Madison discusses his latest research on comparative institutions and the commons. 

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The Guest

Dominic Parker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics at UW-Madison. His research fields include environmental and resource economics, law and economics, development, and institutional economics. Specifically, he is interested in the  role that property rights and governance play in affecting the extent to which societies and individuals benefit from their natural resource endowments. Topics include conflict minerals, oil boomtowns, private land conservation, commercial fishery reform, and the economies of indigenous communities.

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1:15: Which governance arrangements have you found to be most effective in managing natural resources? The government, the market or something in between?

2:49: Which governance arrangements best promote wildlife conservation? How do the US and UK differ it this regard?

9:20: Is the government always the preferred source of governance over large territories where it’s too costly for social actors to contract together?

18:45: How do you compare the performance of the government and private sector in the management of oil resources?

25:25: What is the tragedy of the anti-commons?

26:05: How do you determine the benefits versus the costs of government ownership of natural resources?

33:36: Let’s take the example of a dictatorship where there is no institutional diversity in resource ownership and elites don’t share oil rents back with the population. Does government ownership still make sense despite its efficiency benefits, or is there value to having institutional diversity in principle?

38:12: What implications does your work have for addressing climate change? The language of action in the scientific and policy communities tends to be very anti-market. Does this conversation require more nuance or can we safely say that the market won’t be an option?

44:54: Can people privately contract among themselves to reduce emissions when government policies fall short?

45:58: What is the legacy of the Ostroms? Did Elinor Ostrom’s work successfully move us beyond markets and states?

How did F.A. Hayek influence the course of economic history? What is the fate of his liberal project in the 21st century? Are we on the road to serfdom? Tune in to the latest episode of the Governance Podcast featuring Professors Mark Pennington and Peter Boettke.

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The Guest

Peter Boettke is a University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism, and the Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

As a teacher, Boettke is dedicated to cultivating enthusiasm for the economic way of thinking and the importance of economic ideas in future generations of scholars and citizens.  He is also now the co-author, along with David Prychitko, of the classic principles of economics texts of Paul Heyne's The Economic Way of Thinking (12th Edition, Prentice Hall, 2009).  His efforts in the classroom have earned him a number of distinctions including the Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University and the George Mason University Alumni Association's 2009 Faculty Member of the Year award.

In 2005, Boettke received the Charles Koch Distinguished Alumnus award from the Institute for Humane Studies and the Jack Kennedy Award for Alumni Achievement from Grove City College.  Boettke was the 2010 recipient of the Association of Private Enterprise Education’s Adam Smith Award as well as George Mason University's College of Humanities and Social Sciences Distinguished Alumnus of the Year Award. In 2012, Boettke received a doctorate honoris causa in Social Sciences from Universidad Francisco Marroquin.  In 2013, Dr. Boettke received his second honorary doctorate from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Romania. Dr. Boettke served as President of the Southern Economics Association from 2015 - 2017 and President of the Mont Pelerin Society from 2016 - 2018. He also is the Editor of the Review of Austrian Economics and the Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

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0:50: Why did you decide to write this new book about Hayek?

5:10: It’s interesting that you divide Hayek’s work into four phases: Phase 1 is economics as a coordination problem… Phase 2 is the abuse of reason project… Phase 3 is the liberal principles of justice… and Phase 4, where he is addressing these concerns of cultural evolution. The book focuses on the first three phases—why did you decide to break the book down this way?

13:20: I think the common core of those three phases is the idea of Hayek developing epistemic institutionalism… what do you mean by this term?

17:44: Reading Hayek over the years, the idea of ignorance has always struck me as absolutely essential to his project- the idea that agents are not fully rational, that they stumble around in the world, they are purposeful, and they have limited information processing powers. And what we have to do is think about how institutions enable them to cope and to learn in these very non-ideal circumstances.

18:55: Why do you think there are so many misconceptions about what Hayek actually said? You’ll repeatedly hear people say that Hayek’s case for the market assumes that agents are fully rational or fully informed—or if they’re not fully informed, the price system acts as a surrogate for perfect information.

24:08: To push back on the way economics is taught, I definitely agree that if you look at the dominant textbooks, market failure is a dominant theme. I think that what some people in that movement are suggesting… is the idea that the economist’s model, the 101 model, starts from the assumption of there being some kind of a market, and then you talk about there being market failures which the government might correct. But the idea that the market is the primary mechanism of resource allocation is taken as given. What Knight and Johnson say is that you shouldn’t start with any presumption in favour of anything- a market or anything else… Institutions should be more about negotiating that uncertainty. The Econ 101 model doesn’t really recognize that problem. Is that a fair argument?

27:18: Hayek’s argument is that, in a democratic, pluralistic society, we are not going to be able to agree on ends… so the only thing we can agree on is the means by which we interact with each other. [What if we disagree on the means, too?]

31:04: Let me ask you a little about Elinor Ostrom. One of the characterizations you get of Hayek goes something like this: he made very important arguments based on the limits to human knowledge that a broadly competitive market system helps people overcome those limitations more effectively than some kind of top down or centrally planned economy. There are many people now across the political spectrum who would accept at least part of that argument… but they would then say, for example, that we’ve learned from people like Elinor Ostrom that there’s more to economic allocation than markets and states.

42:36: The Hayekian critique of the central planner is that the planner can’t have access to the information which needs to feed into prices… the Ostrom argument which is analogous is that a central rule-maker can’t frame rules to overcome collective action problems given that the circumstances of time and place which affect those collective action problems on the ground are radically dispersed across many different sorts of agents… so you need to have something like a discovery mechanism.

48:15: In the same way that Hayek sees competition between firms as a kind of discovery procedure where firms can copy the successful models and avoid the failing ones-- likewise in a polycentric order where we’ve got multiple decision centres which are public entrepreneurs, if you like, who are trying to cope with collective action problems in different ways, the different localities can observe what other localities are doing to try to learn themselves how to adapt to their own particular condition.

52:38: You mentioned that reconstructing the liberal project is a key part of… Hayek’s work. If we’re thinking about today’s world, many people would argue that that project, in so far as it has been implemented (or attempted), is actually collapsing. We’ve got declining faith in free trade, protectionism is on the rise, we have a much greater scepticism of markets of any time in the last 30-40 years. Is there anything in Hayek’s attempt in that 1960-80 period… that can help us address these problems?

1h:02: One mechanism to deal with our human divisions is democracy. The problem there is that people like myself think that cosmopolitanism is wonderful and we embrace creative destruction… but there are others who see creative destruction as the destruction of their identity.  

What can we know about the social world, and how much of it can we control? How high are the stakes in the battle between positivism and interpretive social science? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington (King’s College London) and Mark Bevir (UC Berkeley) discuss wide-ranging questions about the influence of philosophy and social science on public policy. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guests

Mark Bevir is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for British Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is also Professor of Governance, United Nations University (MERIT) and Distinguished Research Professor, Swansea University.

Born and raised in London, Mark moved to Berkeley in January 2000, having worked previously at universities in India and the UK. He has held visiting fellowships in Australia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Norway, South Korea, UK, and USA. Currently he is the general editor of The Oxford History of Political Thought, and he has been an editor of Journal of the Philosophy of History, associate editor of Journal of Moral Philosophy, President of the Society for the Philosophy of History, and Chair of the Interpretive Politics Group (PSA). Mark has done policy work for governmental organizations in Asia, Europe, and North America, as well as for the United Nations and its agencies.

Mark’s research interests in political theory include moral philosophy, political philosophy, and history of political thought. His methodological interests cover philosophy of social science, philosophy of history, and history of social science. His work on public policy focuses on organization theory, democratic theory, and governance.

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0:55: I wonder if you could start by what you’ve been working on most recently, perhaps the book on interpretive social science.

1:55: What is distinctive about the interpretive approach? We have the typical dichotomy between the interpretive or hermeneutic approach to social science and a more positivist view. And positivism is associated with some notion that you can read off almost in a mechanical way people’s behaviour by understanding background conditions, whether they’re economic incentives… or macro-structural influences.

5:29: It seems to me that if you adopt that approach--- I take the point that there’s a difference between particular epistemological foundations for social science and attachment to particular methods—but it seems to me nonetheless that if you do adopt this kind of [interpretive] approach, the implication is, to really get an appreciation of the meanings people attach to their actions or the beliefs they have or the traditions they’re situated in, you have to get up close with the actors. You have to try to be in their heads, and that does imply a more ethnographic approach.

8:48: One of the areas where you’ve applied this interpretive method to great effect is in trying to understand changes in governance relationships, especially within public sector organizations in the last 20-30 years. As I understand it, what your work points to is the influence of a particular set of social scientific beliefs about the problems that face hierarchical forms of state bureaucracy. And your argument is that initially this was questioned from a market-liberal perspective, public choice theory emphasising contracts and markets as an alternative to hierarchy, and then later we have the movement towards joined up governance approaches often associated with New Labour in the UK. And this is another set of social scientific ideas that markets produce excessive fragmentation and they need to be reintegrated in some sense. You make a very powerful claim that essentially it’s social scientific ideas that drove this change to the new governance arrangements that we see. Why do you think the actual social science has been important in the shift toward the kind of network governance arrangements we see in the world today?

14:30: You were saying that you’re interested in the way in which many of these policy reforms in the public sector have failed, and perhaps connect that to your interpretive method and approach. As I understand your argument, the problem with these various reform agendas, from whatever direction they come, whether it’s for markets or network governance or joined up governance, they fail to recognize that the actors who are required to implement the policies are going to be interpreting these policies in different ways, ways that are unpredictable to the actual reformer. Therefore we get all kinds of unintended or emergent outcomes.

18:26: Presumably this would also apply to evidence based public policy… or if you look at the recent focus on randomised control trials, would the kind of critique you’re applying transfer to these kind of ideas?

20:30: In your approach as I understand it, you do allow for the idea that there are patterns in the sense that particular traditions knit together in a certain way can create a certain regularity. But what you’re saying is there is no inherent necessity for that regularity to be there, that at some point there can be some kind of rupture or change in people’s beliefs, maybe some kind of exogenous event that breaks up what look like long-established patterns… It strikes me that would be what could happen to big data.

24:14: I wonder if we could say something about the tendency for social science (and I think arguably for some people this is the case for people who are using big data today) … people very much still believe that good social science should be able to predict in some sense. If we take the view that you’re presenting, there seem to be severe limits to our capacity to predict because there are always going to be these unexpected contingencies or developments… The financial crisis was not predicted by most economists and the rise of populist movements was not predicted by most political scientists. Why do you think so many people still want to cling to the notion that good social science is science that predicts?

29:43: What you just said there could be construed as quite critical of an expert-centered view of the world, the idea that there is a body of expertise which understands how societies function and how they can be controlled. In essence what you’re saying is that simply isn’t the case- other than that people might believe this to be the case. In some of your writings you propose what you call a de-centered approach to public policy. I understand that to be de-centered in two senses. It’s de-centered in the sense that you recognize the importance of local contingency, variety, unpredictability. But it’s also decentered in the sense that you’re wanting to, at least as I understand it, dethrone the power of experts and to empower citizens much more.

37:14: Aren’t politicians… almost inevitably going to look for quite simplistic kind of interpretations of what social science might say, or is it reasonable to expect that we could have a more nuanced understanding from politicians who ultimately are still involved in political battles? They’re trying to assert the value of their ideas versus what they see to be opposing sets of ideas.

41:24: It strikes me that there’s a sort of irony in that one of the things that you point out about Foucault’s work is… you emphasise that there needs to be a role for agency, some notion of creativity that people can resist dominant epistemes or forms of governmentality, that there has to be some scope for that in order to explain how change actually happens.

49:05: The centre here is within a department of political economy. So we’ve got people here from economics, political science and political theory backgrounds. Do you think some of the concepts that you use in the interpretive framework can say something to economists or the types of questions they’re interested in?

54:58: Perhaps this is unfair, I’m not sure, but I take to be a pretty significant implication of a lot of what you’re saying… is that people are looking for order in the world that really isn’t there. But the nature of a lot of social science is to try and find order. Why do you think people are so uncomfortable with the notion that maybe we just can’t fully understand what’s going on?

What are the origins of constrained government? How did globalisation influence politics in Victorian Britain, and are there lessons for modern times? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Gary Cox (Stanford) sits down with Anton Howes (King’s College London) to discuss his corpus of research in economic history and political economy from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Gary W. Cox is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. In addition to numerous articles in the areas of legislative and electoral politics, Cox is author of The Efficient Secret (winner of the 1983 Samuel H Beer dissertation prize and the 2003 George H Hallett Award), co-author of Legislative Leviathan (winner of the 1993 Richard F Fenno Prize), author of Making Votes Count (winner of the 1998 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, the 1998 Luebbert Prize and the 2007 George H Hallett Award); and co-author of Setting the Agenda (winner of the 2006 Leon D. Epstein Book Award). His most recent book is Marketing Sovereign Promises (2016).  A former Guggenheim Fellow, Cox was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. He received his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1983.

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2:38: There’s a book of yours from 1987, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England. Could you summarize the thesis of that book?

10:37: You seem to have returned to that theme in your book on the US House of Representatives. Are you building up a corpus of case studies?

12:20: Sounds like things were particularly difficult in the eighteenth century to get any law through, which makes it more surprising that you do actually get a lot of members’ bills… you needed an act of Parliament to suspend limits on limited liability, to have things like canals, railways and so on.

12:52: The idea of Whig-Tory is really just alignments of which kids you’re sitting with in the cafeteria more than there being a party structure.

13:30: Did MPs run on party manifestos or personal manifestos?

16:47: Do you think that’s a structural result of the Great Reform Act?

20:13: I guess a striking thing there is the electorate changes as well. You’ve got the parties changing, but voters themselves are now seeing MPs not as these individuals to vote for, but as just a member of a party.

21:25: What are the effects of that process? With greater party control and party boss control, what are the effects on lobbying? What are the kinds of legislation that you start to see?

26:18: Countries with different constitutional processes like the US and UK still end up dealing with modern political questions rather similarly. They’re facing similar exogenous or external shocks to their political systems. What do you think are the sources of those external shocks across different countries?

27:46: Is that potentially similar to what happened in the Victorian era when you have that first big wave of globalisation? I’m interested in the fact that you said there’s this change affecting Britain between the 1830s-80s… then you’ve got this almost identical thing happening in the United States after the civil war from the 1860s through the 1890s. Is there something similar going on with exogenous shocks forcing these changes?

33:07: That’s a very interesting case, this idea that you’ve got this disenfranchised group who are seemingly enfranchised, or at least some of their representatives are enfranchised with the Reform Act, but it’s not quite coming to fruition.

40:23: Around when you came to Stanford, you joined your colleagues North and Weingast and started publishing in a similar vein to what they’d been doing. The classic paper was the 1989 one, Constitutions and Commitment. You’ve had quite a body of research building on that work.

56:11: I really like this idea of the state being split in half because it also explains why you have this idea of these ancient English liberties being maintained throughout this period, and really that’s just talking about the civil list being constrained whereas at the same time you have the extraordinary growth of the British state.  

Why did state building fail in Afghanistan? What are the root causes of corruption and endemic poor governance? Ilia Murtazashvili from the University of Pittsburgh joins us for a conversation on the lessons Afghanistan teaches us about state predation and potential ways it can be reversed.

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The Guest

Ilia Murtazashvili is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He specializes in political economy, institutional design, land governance, public policy, and public administration. Substantively, he is interested in emergence and change in property rights institutions, American political development, challenges of public administration in weakly institutionalized contexts, and the relationship between property rights and security in fragile states. He has written on emergence and change in property rights on the American frontier, self-governance of land relations in a diversity of contexts both in the US and the developing world, the relationship between land and state-building in Afghanistan, and on the governance of hydraulic fracturing. His current research focuses on the relationship between governance and legal titling in the developing world, the implications of economic studies of anarchy for public policy, the link between institutions and the shale boom in the US, and on lessons of the American frontier for current challenges confronting developing countries seeking to improve prospects for economic development and political stability.

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1:11: In the literature on political economy, there are two views about how the state behaves. What are these views and which one better describes what we see in the real world?

4:15: What do you think is missing from our political science frameworks? How can we improve the theory of state predation?

7:41: Your latest paper is about Afghanistan, a country that has seen little in the way of political or economic development despite trillions of dollars of investment from the international community. Why do you think state building has failed there?

11:35: How has a history of foreign intervention affected the modern-day Afghan state?

14:45: What does predation actually look like in Afghanistan?

17:30: What role does self governance play in Afghanistan? Has customary law been important in counteracting state predation?

21:11: Where does the Taliban fit into your framework of self governance? Can’t self governing systems be predatory in their own way?

25:04: Does the state actually exist in Afghanistan, or are we actually only observing groups competing for power? Where does a framework of state predation fit here?

27:50: Let’s go back to the four variables that can reduce state predation: a strong monopoly on coercion, robust political institutions, the lack of foreign intervention and the presence of self-governing institutions. Could Afghanistan realistically reverse course by following these ideals as a blueprint?

32:55: To some degree, we know the variables that are correlated with good governance. But in much of the developing world, political actors don’t have incentives to relinquish power and those societies get stuck in transition. Do we have a decent theory of development or is it merely a matter of historical accident?

38:17: What does Afghanistan’s experience teach the developed world about state building and foreign aid? Should the west stop all forms of intervention abroad?

40:54: What’s the role of culture in inhibiting the development of a commercial society in Afghanistan?

44:28: You have a new project on the horizon that compares governance in the US, China and Afghanistan. What do you expect to find in that comparison?

What do the working conditions of street-level bureaucrats tell us about the nature of democratic governance? What new moral questions do we start asking when political theorists go into the field? Join us for the latest episode of the Governance Podcast on Bernardo Zacka's (MIT) new book: When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency.

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The Guest

Bernardo Zacka is an Assistant Professor of political science at MIT. He is a political theorist with an interest in ethnographic methods. His research focuses on the normative challenges that arise in the course of public policy implementation. He is interested in understanding how the organizational environment in which public officials are situated affects their capacity to operate as sound and balanced moral agents. Zacka is also interested, more broadly, in normative political theory, architecture and urbanism, and 20th century European political thought.

Zacka’s first book, When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, was published by Harvard University Press in 2017. It explores the everyday moral lives of the frontline public workers, or “street-level bureaucrats”, who act as intermediaries between citizens and the state. It won the 2018 Charles Taylor book award from the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association, and it builds on Zacka’s doctoral dissertation, which won the 2015 Robert Noxon Toppan prize for the best dissertation on a subject of political science at Harvard University.

Prior to joining MIT, Zacka was a junior research fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (2005), and received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2015.

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0:32: What drove you to write this book and what’s the overarching argument?

3:20: The empirical focus of the book is on the street level bureaucrats, the front-line workers. Who are those people?

6:02: Why do street level bureaucrats determine the way you interact with the state?

8:04: What is the size of street level bureaucracy? How many people are you talking about?

12:07: You undertook some original ethnography inside a bureau. Can you tell us a bit about that experience?

15:54: How did the other bureau workers respond to you, knowing you were a researcher?

17:57: Your background first and foremost is as a political theorist. How do ethnography and political theory fit together?

20:49: I can’t help but think of Rawls there—the most influential political theory work of the second half of the 20th century – the Theory of Justice is a book in which there are no implementation problems whatsoever. The state just makes decisions and they’re implemented without difficulty.

21:59: Let’s think about some of the moral dilemmas that street level bureaucrats encounter. In the book you describe three pathologies of street level bureaucracy… You describe how street level bureaucrats take on a role of indifference, a role as a caregiver, and a role as an enforcer. What are those three roles and how do they emerge?

26:52: There are pressures of resources, of time, of money, on the street level bureaucrats. There’s psychological pressure as well. My personal reaction is that the bureaucrats’ responses seem perfectly reasonable. They’re how I would react in those situations.

29:56: Another striking thing is that these people aren’t well paid. The bureaucrats themselves are struggling.

31:16: There’s also ambiguity at the high level. You describe the overall manager of the organization who’s got a particular view of how the centre should be run… her aim was to create a welcoming environment different to other governmental agencies.

34:25: This description of the importance of the personal in public service delivery, and how people’s personal decisions may determine people’s outcomes made me think of another literature which you don’t really discuss in the book but is very present at the moment – and that’s the work on behavioural economics…. For example, the time of day you see a judge can determine the sentence you receive. Is that complementary to what you’re doing?

37:24: That raises one of the boldest claims in the book. You write that street level bureaucracy erodes and truncates the moral responsibilities of the workers. I think later in the book you may be less bold in the claim, but I wonder, would the bureaucrats and clients you met with agree with that?

41:52: What do you advocate we change in the system to help prevent these moral distortions at the street level?

44:45: This is one of the big questions for me reading the book—at times you’re advocating a moral craft.

48:34: As a political theorist, the final set of questions must relate to how this should make us think about democracy and the state.

Tune in to the Governance Podcast with Professor Peter John of King’s College London, who discusses the history of behavioral economics, the limits of “nudge,” and how citizens can be empowered to “nudge” their political authorities back.  Learn more about how to enhance democratic accountability in the policy-making process from a key voice in the field.

The Guest

Peter John is Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He was previously Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University College London. He is known for his work on agenda-setting, local politics, behavioral interventions, and randomized controlled trials.

He is author of Analyzing Public Policy (2012), which reviews the main theories of public policy and the policy process. He has carried out empirical work on agenda-setting to find out why governments focus on particular policies, which is represented in the book, Policy Agendas in British Politics (Palgrave, 2013), co-authored with Anthony Bertelli, William Jennings, and Shaun Bevan. With Anthony Bertelli, he developed public policy investment as an approach to understanding decision-making, which was published as Public Policy Investment: Priority-Setting and Conditional Representation in British Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 2013).

He is interested in how best to involve citizens in public policy and management, often deploying behavioural interventions. He tests many of these interventions with randomized controlled trials. Some of these trials appeared in Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behaviour (Bloomsbury, 2011). Practical issues with the design of experiments are covered in Field Experiments in Political Science and Public Policy (Routledge, 2017). Experiments are also used to examine the impact of social media and politics in Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press, 2015), with Helen Margetts, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri.

His current book, to be published in 2018, is a critical review of the use of behavioral public policies, called How Far to Nudge: Assessing Behavioural Public Policy (Edward Elgar).

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00:50: What is the concept of “nudge” and where did it come from?

5:05: What has your personal journey in public policy been like? Where did it start and where is it now?

10:00: How do you propose including citizens in the policy-making process?

20:00: What’s the cost of nudge plus?

30:18: How do you measure the impact of a behavioral public policy study?

31:12: How do I complain to the NHS about its services?

39:40: Is ‘nudge plus’ the best way to connect citizens with good public policy outcomes? After all, people have very little incentive to complain about government services.

44:50: Are you over-relying on the goodwill of the nudgers to create good public policy? What happens when a corporation or authoritarian government uses behavioral insights for nefarious purposes?

50:17: Can the private sector use ‘nudge plus’ to build trust with customers?

53:03: What is the future of behavioral economics as a field?

57:02: How has being interdisciplinary influenced your work?

Thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, how are post-communist nations changing their relationship with the west? Are right wing populists in Central Europe successfully proposing a new philosophy of governance? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Roger Schoenman (UC Santa Cruz) sits down with Tomas Maltby (King’s College London) to discuss the ever-shifting political and economic trajectory of post-communist Europe.  Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Roger Schoenman is an Associate Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. Prof. Schoenman’s work explores three related topics: 1) the varieties of capitalism in the post-socialist countries, 2) the role of networks in political organization and 3) the conditions under which large and long-term political projects become possible.

Recent publications investigate the impact of party-competition on the politicization of the economy and institutional development. He has recently published a book titled Networks and Uncertainty in Europe’s Emerging Markets (Cambridge University Press 2014), that examines the impact of party systems and cleavages, business-elite origins, and the structure of business networks on institutional development in the evolving market democracies of the post-socialist area.

Current research examines the development of post-communist party systems after the financial crisis, the role of new media in mass protest and the politics of renewable energy across the European Union. Using computer assisted text analysis, he has also explored patterns of political debate in post-communist Europe.

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0:58: Let’s begin with your 2014 book Networks, Institutions and Europe’s Emerging Markets. Where did the interest and motivation come to study this topic and region? 

6:35: I think it’s very interesting that at least some of the literature suggests there is much more homogeneity among some of these countries and what your book has found is that there are actually significant differences in those varieties of capitalism within this region… In a country like Poland… one of the most successful examples of these post-communist countries in terms of developing these institutions… would you have a similar view of the country today given that we’ve had constitutional reform, attempts to change and pack the Supreme Court? 

12:48: Your more recent work has taken that regional and institutional focus and looked at how a series of regional governments have come to power and addressed these quite popular frustrations… they’ve come to power, they’ve said we need to do something about foreign direct investment, the value and redistribution of this wealth, and they’re also saying it has an impact on local businesses, local capital. How has FDI become a focal point of your research? 

15:40: So we have this puzzle, this real openness and real encouragement of FDI throughout the mid-late 1990s and through quite a lot of the 2000s, and there’s this change your article identifies around 2010 (not equally across the region) where suddenly there is this anti-globalisation discourse of the governing parties. 

21:45: It also seems that there are bursts of anti FDI policies and re-nationalisation of industries. In both Poland and Hungary, the years 2015 and 2016 seem to be marked by a matching of the rhetoric and the policy, but this seems to have dropped off in 2017-19. And you point out that some of those policies like bank and corporation taxes have been reversed. Why the reversal? 

28:01: It seems like the governing parties have rolled back some of their extreme positions to something more moderate but do you get the impression that they’ve managed to achieve a broader national consensus? 

30:46: It’s remarkable that both Fidecz and Law and Justice are both doing so well in the polls and at least in parliamentary elections—and it seems hard to envision a time when they’re not going to be in power… do you think the anti-FDI policy had an effect on local business that may have translated into economic benefits or electoral support? 

34:49: Particularly in Hungary, in the midst of the anti-FDI measures and rhetoric there was still a necessity to coopt FDI, and I’m thinking of this massive investment from Russia into the nuclear power plants back in 2014. More recently you see Orban saying the Chinese belt and road initiative is fully in harmony with Hungarian interests. It’s never been as extreme as to say all policies we’re going to enact are anti-FDI. 

40:23: On a more methodological point, how open have interviewees been in discussing these issues – network ties, political connections, both in private firms and government? In some ways this is something the governing parties want to project as a positive vision and yet in the past I can imagine there were controversies around the topic. 

Modern political life is fraught with difficult choices: cosmopolitanism or statism? Liberalism or socialism? Where do these debates stand and can political theorists help us choose? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Carmen Pavel (King’s College London) sits down with Lea Ypi (LSE) for a conversation about the fundamental role of politics and radical democracy in current affairs. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE, she was a Post-doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD.

She has degrees in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and has held visiting and research positions at Sciences Po, the University of Frankfurt, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, the Australian National University and the Italian Institute for Historical Studies.

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0:49: Global issues have become more salient in both public political discourse but also in political theory. You’ve made an important contribution with your book, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (OUP 2011). I’d like to start by asking you some questions about your argument. I’m interested particularly in your contribution to a conversation that sees the role of the state as being outdated by current political problems and the evolution of political interactions at the international level. There’s one strong argument in the global justice literature that argues that states are obsolete forms of political association, and they’re inadequate at solving the problems of global injustice we’re confronted with. You argue against this position and defend statist cosmopolitanism.

6:27: How does your position in practice differ from a cosmopolitan position? Ultimately, you say the goal is to realize these global egalitarian principles.

7:26: Would you say that being a statist cosmopolitan makes a difference in terms of the time it might take to realise cosmopolitan justice? Or would you rather say that without states we couldn’t even get to the point where we realise cosmopolitan justice?

9:22: And I think this kind of argument reflects your particular view of the right way of doing political theory…. So how is your account of statist cosmopolitanism related to your view about the role of political theory?

14:00: It seems that you have a view of the political theorist as an agent with a distinctive contribution to political evaluation, political criticism and political debate where on the one hand the political theorist can provide some general principles or end points for reform but at the same time engage with the question of, how do we get from where we are to the principles we want to realise? … In your book with Jonathan White called The Meaning of Partisanship (OUP 2016), you discuss the foundational role parties play and ought to continue to play in modern democratic life. Can you tell us why you think parties are so irreplaceable?

20:39: Do you think there are costs associated with organising our political life around parties?

23:39: I think you take this point about public engagement as a political theorist very seriously as well. In your more recent work you’ve become more interested in reaching a wider audience as a political theorist and so you write in the popular press about contemporary issues in the UK and Europe. And I’m really interested in what your experience with that has been like. What are you learning as a political theorist?

25:57: One of the themes of your public engagement is the need to develop an alternative to liberalism. Can you tell us where contemporary liberalism fits in your view?

32:45: I think it’s very important to develop alternative visions of political society, both to test whether and why we value the kind of society we do, but also understand whether there are things wrong with it and change it. And so this kind of project I think is very valuable. It’s clear that there are problems within liberal society today that perhaps illustrate the tensions you talk about. And I think many self-professed liberals would say that these problems exist. What their reaction to these problems would be is not to say liberalism should die but to see those tensions as perhaps inherent in liberalism and try to work them out also within liberalism. It’s a much more gradualist approach to political reform. It sounds from the way you talk about recuperating this criticism of commercial society that you want to reject this gradualism… why move all the way to socialism as opposed to moving within the confines of existing political institutions?

37:37: Let’s pursue this question of the socialist alternative further. What would you say would characterise, not just at the level of principles, but in terms of actual institutions, what would be different in this alternative political world?

41:02: Socialism comes with a very distinctive vision, not just an end point in principles but also institutions and how they would be differently organised than current ones.

42:34: It sounds to me like you’re not persuaded by some socialist scepticism—and I mean scepticism in the following way –Jerry Cohen for example, who sees socialism as the right moral ideal, the best justified vision of political society… but he’s worried that we lack the institutional technology to realise that vision. Someone like Jerry Cohen became disenchanted particularly after the fall of communism that we might just lack the institutions to channel these radical forms of representation.

Is good governance a choice between markets and states, or is there a third way? How can institutional diversity help us fight climate change or enhance social welfare? Tune in to this conversation with Dr Derek Wall of Goldsmiths College on what we stand to learn from the intellectual legacy of Elinor Ostrom, the first and only woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

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The Guest

Dr Derek Wall is an associate lecturer in Political Economy at Goldsmiths College.  His books include The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (2014) and Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals (2017).  He is a former International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales and contested the Maidenhead constituency in the 2017  General Election.  He is currently writing a political biography of Hugo Blanco.  He is a patron of Peace in Kurdistan.

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0:45: What was Elinor Ostrom’s main contribution to the social sciences?

1:55: Was Ostrom successful in moving beyond markets and states?

4:44: What is the relevance of her work for green politics?

8:00: Is Ostrom’s framework limited to localities? If so, how well does it tackle environmental problems in the global commons?

15:30: What is the connection between Ostrom and John Dewey?

19:26: How did Vincent Ostrom influence Elinor’s work?

22:43: Was there a possibility of confirmation bias in Elinor’s work? Was she interested in demonstrating outcomes in her empirical work that we might view as favourable to building a self-governing citizenry in the way that Vincent envisioned it?

25:46: What happens when localities come up with bad rules, or even oppressive ones? Should the state monitor local policy experimentation?

29:43: What are the social justice implications of Ostrom’s research framework? Should we be comfortable in accepting institutionally diverse approaches to income redistribution?

31:23: If there are macro-level structural inequalities in society that are too big for any one person to overcome, wouldn’t the state be the only entity capable of solving problems at that scale?

36:01: Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about your political background. How do you translate such complex ideas from the academy into policy?

40:15: What are the 13 rules for policy makers to begin thinking in an Ostromian way?

42:28: Let’s take a more pragmatic challenge to the Ostroms. If we’re dealing with a diverse constellation of rule systems in a given country, it looks like utter chaos for investors. Doesn’t the diversity and localism implied in the framework undermine the Ostroms’ pragmatism?

45:02: What is Elinor Ostrom’s legacy? What research programs has she left open for the future?

In this special roundtable discussion on the Governance Podcast, we sit down with Jennifer Murtazashvili (Pittsburgh), Liya Palagashvili (SUNY Purchase) and Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center) to discuss their research on self-governing social orders outside the west, the future of economic methodology and the challenges women face in academic science. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guests

Jennifer Murtazashvili (bio) is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Drawing from diverse research methods including field experiments, public opinion surveys, and ethnographic fieldwork, Murtazashvili focuses her work on Central and South Asia, and the former Soviet Union. She also has experience advising for the U.S. Department of Defense, the United Nations Development Program, and UNICEF. Her work focuses on formal and informal political institutions, the political economy of development, decentralization and local governance, and post-conflict reconstruction.

Liya Palagashvili (bio) is an Assistant Professor of Economics at State University of New York-Purchase and a research fellow with NYU Law. For the 2018-2019 academic year, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London. She is currently investigating the regulatory and public policy environment for technology startups and is broadly interested in questions of governance, polycentricity, and the role of external influence and aid on institutions. In 2016, Liya was selected as a Forbes '30 under 30' in Law and Policy.

Shruti Rajagopalan (bio) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a Fellow at the Classical Liberal Institute at NYU School of Law. She is also Associate Professor of Economics at State University of New York, Purchase College (currently on leave). Her research interests specifically include law and economics, public choice theory, and constitutional economics. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, law reviews, and books. She also enjoys writing in the popular press and has a fortnightly column called  The Impartial Spectator in Mint. 

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0:45: When we talk about self-governing social orders, we use concepts like federalism, polycentric governance, constitutional governance, all of which tend to originate in western and specifically American empirical contexts, so we often assume a specific set of norms and institutions that may be absent or difficult to nourish in the developing world. 

Collectively, your research addresses really important questions about the nature and viability of self-governing social orders across almost every continent. Jennifer, you've been working on Central Eurasia, Shruti, you've been working on India, and Liya, you've been working on diverse cases in Africa and Native American groups in the US. I want to start with a couple of broad questions which you can take in whichever order and direction you want. 

Firstly, within your own research programs, what does a self-governing or polycentric social order look like? And what do you think are some of the biggest challenges to the emergence of polycentric social orders around the world? 

5:39: What functions do mahallas in Uzbekistan play in terms of the provision of public services or social order? Are they compensating for a lack of state infrastructure?

7:20: Liya, your work has looked at a different angle in which self governing communities have been sabotaged in both Africa and the US. What sorts of mechanisms are you observing that are undermining local and community governance?

11:26: Shruti, you've looked at a case on environmental governance in India where local communities following ancient traditions have been successful at managing the environment following a deep history of state-led control. What's behind the success of this community-led governance and are there downsides to it?

18:50: It seems that across your cases there is an emergent story which goes something like this: historical movements, whether colonisation, Sovietization, or any kind of centralization of power have devastated local communities and practices and the mechanisms communities have used to either maintain their natural resources or to resolve any number of collective action problems. But at the same time it seems there is also a danger when we pick the success cases... Is there a danger in going too far in a utopian direction and romanticizing self-governance as something that always leads to more accountable government or participatory government… ? How do you evaluate where to draw a line and say sometimes it can be problematic, but if that’s the case, what do you do about it?

28:35: I guess the benefit of paying homage or respect to self-governing systems is that you might end up with this vast array of experiments in living across countries, within countries, and you end up with a lot of variation in terms of public service provision, economic development, and people would in principle be free to vote with their feet in an ideal world… But often we do have a situation where you have the privilege of being included in a local council and if that represents your interests as a woman, you find that beneficial, but also you might be signing on to a very patriarchal order. So in some ways there is an unclean tradeoff and it’s hard to tell what kinds of governance to privilege.

31:00: Along with that, given that you’ve all done really interesting archival research and fieldwork and going into the details of case studies – which is not usual for economists to do – have you been surprised by what you’ve found in terms of the assumptions you’ve been using as an economist? Have you found interesting information that you’d bring back to the table, to theory? Have you changed the way you think about governance more generally?

43:09: It sounds like a lot of what your work entails is sociology and anthropology, what might be considered “softer” social science disciplines that aren’t doing RCTs and testing policy interventions with experimentation. And most people wouldn’t say you shouldn’t do one method or another, but why do you think this more fine grained sociological approach isn’t entering the economics profession? It’s not something you’d come across as an econ student. If you’re taking an econ course, you’re exposed to a lot of mathematics and formal modeling. Why is this kind of methodology not getting the attention it needs?

58:06: I want to drive in on the sociology of science itself… science gets better the more perspectives there are from the methods, conceptual frameworks, from the kinds of data that we look at, and also from the kinds of people who bring new ideas to the table… Speaking on one element of diversity, you are three successful women economists and social scientists, and I wanted to finish the podcast by asking you, how do we get more women into economics?

Wars don't look like what they used to. Using a variety of new data sources from modern war zones, Jacob Shapiro of Princeton University offers transformative insights into the nature of 21st century terrorism, civil wars and development aid. Join us for this conversation between Dr Shapiro and Dr Samuel DeCanio of King's College London on the way we govern warfare.

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The Guest

Jacob N. Shapiro is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and co-directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, a multi-university consortium that compiles and analyzes micro-level conflict data and other information on politically motivated violence in nine countries. He studies conflict, economic and political development, and security policy. He is author of The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations, co-author of Foundations of the Islamic State: Management, Money, and Terror in Iraq, and co-author of the forthcoming Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict. His research has been published in broad range of academic and policy journals as well as a number of edited volumes. He has conducted field research and large-scale policy evaluations in Afghanistan, Colombia, India, and Pakistan.

Shapiro received the 2016 Karl Deutsch Award from ISA, given to a scholar younger than 40 or within 10 years of earning a Ph.D. who has made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations. He is an Associate Editor of Journal of Conflict Resolution, World Politics, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, a Faculty Fellow of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS). Ph.D. Political Science, M.A. Economics, Stanford University. B.A. Political Science, University of Michigan. Prior to graduate school Shapiro served in the United States Navy.

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0:48: How did you get interested in this project?

2:05: Why should people be interested in studying asymmetric conflict?

4:20: Why are western militaries investing so heavily in technology when their opponents are often technologically weak?

6:33: What’s the theoretical argument of your book about asymmetric conflict?

9:30: Are there any drawbacks of studying conflict through the lens of non-combatants?

12:25: What is the role of communications and cellular technology in the relationship civilians have with combatants?

17:50: You had a student who had been a special operations task force commander in Iraq, and he had an interesting story about cell phones. Can you tell us that story?

20:52: Did insurgents have any response to civilians using cell towers to send tips to the government?

23:30: Was the telecommunications experience in Iraq different from Afghanistan?

25:10: When we think of the term ‘big data’, we usually think of maybe someone in Silicon Valley analysing large datasets removed from events on the ground. But the book draws on a variety of data sources. How did they help you study conflict?

30:24: What argument do you develop on the relationship between poverty, development aid and violence?

34:51: What’s the different impact of big and small aid projects?

39:00: Does timing matter for development aid? Should you bring in small projects first to reduce violence and follow it up with larger projects to enhance local development?

40:20: How did this research help you create a network between academics and policy makers?

42:17: What is the next stage of your research agenda?

How do states learn how to solve problems? Does federalism create chaos or diffuse conflict in complex societies? Join us for this conversation between Hanna Kleider (King’s College London) and Jenna Bednar (University of Michigan) on the key challenges and benefits of multi-layered governance. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Jenna Bednar is the Edie N Goldenberg Endowed Director for the University of Michigan in Washington Program; Professor of Political Science, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; Research Professor, Center for Political Studies and the Institute for Social Research at Michigan.

Professor Bednar’s research is on the analysis of institutions, focusing on the theoretical underpinnings of the stability of federal states.  Her most recent book, The Robust Federation demonstrates how complementary institutions maintain and adjust the distribution of authority between national and state governments. This book makes two theoretical contributions to the study of federalism’s design.  First, it shows that distributions suggested by a constitution mean nothing if the governments have no incentive to abide by them, and intergovernmental retaliation tends to be inefficient.  The book’s second contribution is that while no institutional safeguard is sufficient to improve the union’s prosperity, institutions work together to improve compliance with the distribution of authority, thereby boosting the union’s performance.

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1:08: The topic of federalism has gained a lot of attention, not only by academics but also by international institutions. Policymakers more generally often recommend federalism as a solution to conflict-ridden and heterogeneous societies. What do you think makes federalism so attractive in these contexts?

7:33: I really like this idea of retaliatory non-compliance by the states vis a vis the federal government. Can you give a recent example of how that would work?

11:50: You’re seeing this with climate change too, how states are taking the lead in challenging federal authorities.

16:41: Since we’re already talking about policy experimentation, that’s kind of an important part of federalism research. We think that state governments should take the lead in experimenting with new policies. What’s a good way federal governments can nudge the regional ones?

21:09: Going back to your work on the principles of federalism, you talk about institutional design, you don’t want to give one ideal federal system but you have some sort of design principles. If you were to give policy makers some advice on what those are, what would you tell them?

24:27: What do you think about this idea that if federations are linguistically homogenous, they will tend towards centralization? And if they’re heterogeneous, they’ll tend towards decentralization?

27:38: What’s the next stage in your research agenda?

30:08: How did you become interested in this area of research? Diversity, federalism, comparative institutions?

What role did guilds play in the economic development of Europe? Why do bad institutions persist throughout history? Join us for this conversation between Mark Pennington (King’s College London) and Sheilagh Ogilvie (University of Cambridge) for a discussion of her new 900-year history and economic analysis of the European Guilds. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Sheilagh Ogilvie is Professor of Economic History in Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. She holds degrees from the University of St Andrews (1979), Cambridge (1985), and Chicago (1992). She has been successively Lecturer (1989), Reader (2000), and Professor of Economic History (2004) in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge.She is the author of State Corporatism and Proto-Industry (Cambridge, 1997), Women, Markets and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2003), Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000-1800 (Cambridge, 2011) and the editor of European Proto-Industrialization (Cambridge, 1996), Germany: A New Social and Economic History (3 vols, London, 1996/2003), and Revolution des Fleißes, Revolution des Konsums? (Ostfildern, 2015). She has published journal articles on institutions and economic development, the economics of guilds, merchants, rural communities, serfdom, consumption, retailing, occupational structure, demography, proto-industry, banking, female labour force participation, regulation, the growth of the state, and social capital.

She is the winner of the Gyorgy Ranki Prize (1999), the Anton Gindeley Prize (2004), the René Kuczynski Prize (2004), and the Stanley Z. Pech Prize (2008). She has been the director of research projects on “Social Structure in Bohemia, 1500-1750” (British Academy, 2001-03), “Economy, Gender, and Social Capital in the German Demographic Transition” (Leverhulme Trust, 2005-07), and “Human Well-Being and the ‘Industrious Revolution’: Consumption, Gender and Social Capital in a German Developing Economy, 1600-1900” (ESRC, 2008-12). She held a British Academy/Wolfson Research Professorship (2013-16), during which she explored the relationship between human capital and long-term economic growth. Her book on the economics of guilds was published with Princeton University Press in March 2019.

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1:03: Sheilagh, why have you decided to bring your work together in a volume of this kind?

4:13: How would you define a guild? What are the key features of such an organisation?

8:40: The title of the book is The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis. Economists often disagree about things. One of the things they disagree about is the efficiency properties of these guilds. Some would argue that these guilds played an important function – they were efficiency enhancing, they might have been necessary for growth. I know that’s not a view that you hold. But could you give us an indication of what those arguments are?

14:22: These are basically arguments which are suggesting that some kind of market failures arise in these situations, and you have an institutional response to address the market failure. In this instance the guild is seen as the institutional mechanism to solve it.

15:32: Your view as I understand it is very much that guilds should be seen as rent seeking institutions which were actually seeking exclusive privileges for the members – and rather than solving a market failure, they essentially create a different sort of failure, which is that certain people are excluded from markets, there’s a lack of competition, you actually don’t get the quality control or professional certification that you might have gotten from an alternative institution. Is that a fair summary of your view?

20:14: So this is saying that guilds are about distributional matters; they’re institutions that are quite conflictual in terms of grappling with a part of the pie rather than increasing the size of the overall pie.

20:56: Can you say a bit more about the role of the state in your particular theory? Some of the work in this area that’s focused on guilds from a rosier viewpoint often depicts them as a kind of bottom-up private order institution that arises spontaneously to solve an efficiency problem. Whereas your view suggests that these institutions were embedded in political structures of power and authority which were used for these distributional purposes. Why do some people hold that rosier view?

26:45: I think in your first book you used the term ‘state corporatism.’ Would you describe guilds as corporatist institutions? They’re a kind of negotiation between a semi private organization and the state?

27:49: Given that you subscribe more to this view of guilds as rent-seeking or privilege-seeking organisations as opposed to efficiency enhancing ones, could you describe the ways in which guilds reduced efficiency?

36:02: Reading your account, this is quite a damning indictment of these institutions. There really is evidence of rent seeking—the scale of these markups is at a level where… how could anybody think that they have any beneficial properties? I guess the contrary view is that, OK, from today’s point of view, these were inefficient practices. But if you look at the context at the time, what was the alternative to providing the kind of mechanisms that would address market failures?

43:39: So in your view, you didn’t need guilds to address the kind of training market failures. What about asymmetrical information and quality controls? Did you find evidence of alternative mechanisms to deal with those?

49:41: This reminds me of a conversation I had with Barry Weingast – his argument is, yes, many of these kind of restrictions, when looked at through today’s lens, we would see them as inefficient and would want to get rid of them. But you have a slightly different take on them if you realize that the alternative might not be a free market type situation—it might actually be one where… you don’t have a market at all because you have societies embroiled in violence. And the various restrictions and privileges at least provide some rudiments of peace and order in a context where the alternative would be something worse than that… do you see cases where states seem to be able to avoid violence without having guild privileges or some of these distributional deals?

58:00: Why did guild institutions decline? As I understand your argument about why they persisted for so long, it’s basically a kind of public choice, rent seeking argument, which says that you’ve got relatively small organised groups…facilitated by public authorities through these corporatist deals, they gain privileges which are inefficient, but the reason why you don’t have …people challenging that is either because they’re politically disenfranchised or they face a huge collective action problem… If you take that kind of explanation, it implies that those privileges would be hard to break down.

01:06: I understand it’s a difficult question, but …I understand the explanation you’re giving there is a kind of accidental one. That is, by accident some factors come together and then we’re able to break free of guilds. I guess that’s not an unsatisfactory explanation in some ways, but I was wondering if you’ve thought of more positive explanations… I’m thinking of Deirdre McCloskey’s work on why we have the industrial revolution, and that’s a more ideas-based explanation…. Do you have any sympathy with that kind of view?

01:12: I want to ask you about a theme closely related with our research centre, and that’s thinking about the relationship between informal and formal institutions and how that can sometimes go wrong… there’s a tendency to see community as providing certain kinds of services in a singularly romantic view rather than seeing it as double edged, where you can recognize that there’s a positive side to traders getting together but at the same time recognize the dark side- the exclusion as the flipside of community.

Stephen Skowronek (Yale) and Karen Orren (UCLA) argue that the institutional fabric of American government is crumbling. Why is this happening? Is the American political system facing an unsolvable predicament? Tune in to the latest episode of the Governance Podcast featuring Samuel DeCanio (King's College London) and Stephen Skowronek. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University. He has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has held the Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research concerns American national institutions and American political history. His publications include Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982), The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, (1997), The Search for American Political Development (2004, with Karen Orren), and Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (2008). Among other activities, he was co-founder of the journal Studies in American Political Development, which he edited between 1986 and 2007, and he provided the episode structure and thematic content for the PBS miniseries: The American President (Kunhardt Productions).

About The Book

Policy is government’s ready response to changing times, the key to its successful adaptation. It tackles problems as they arise, from foreign relations and economic affairs to race relations and family affairs. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek take a closer look at this well-known reality of modern governance. In The Policy State they point out that policy is not the only way in which America was governed historically, and they describe the transformation that occurred as policy took over more and more of the work of government, emerging as the raison d’être of the state’s operation.

Rather than analyze individual policies to document this change, Orren and Skowronek examine policy’s effect on legal rights and the formal structure of policy-making authority. Rights and structure are the principal elements of government that historically constrained policy and protected other forms of rule. The authors assess the emergence of a new “policy state,” in which rights and structure shed their distinctive characteristics and take on the attributes of policy.

Orren and Skowronek address the political controversies swirling around American government as a consequence of policy’s expanded domain. On the one hand, the policy state has rendered government more flexible, responsive, and inclusive. On the other, it has mangled government’s form, polarized its politics, and sowed deep distrust of its institutions. The policy state frames an American predicament: policy has eroded the foundations of government, even as the policy imperative pushes us ever forward, into an uncertain future.

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0:58: How did you become interested in the historical study of American politics?

3:49: When you initially went to graduate school as a political theorist, were there specific theorists you were interested in studying?

5:18: Do you remember when Theda Skochpol wrote States and Social Revolutions? She was also one of the editors of Bringing the State Back In, published in 1995… Do you remember when that volume came out? How did people view it in political science at the time?

6:40: What led you to write the Policy State?

10:00: Are the conflicts over Obamacare emblematic of the policy state?

11:11: In a certain way you see the form of governance that the policy state is displacing is a stable administrative organization?

13:49: Why do you think this transition to the policy state happened?

18:01: On the one hand, it’s good that rights are expanding, more people have access to them, but do you see any potential downsides to this?

20:05: Why couldn’t a skeptic just respond and say what you’re describing is a responsive, democratic polity?

21:57: Do you see any problems with the expansion of policy, the fact that so many decisions are influenced by so many different actors, do you see that as a problem for democratic legitimacy?

23:40: Do you see any solutions to this problem?

28:54: Given that diagnosis of the contemporary American political scene, do you have any predictions about what’s in course?

31:35: Is deliberative democracy a practical solution to the rise of the policy state?

32:37: Where is your research going next?

How does science drive the economy? What are the origins of the creative sector, and how should it be governed? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, David Edgerton (King's College London) sits down with Terence Kealey (University of Buckingham) to discuss the counterintuitive role science plays, and should play, in society.  Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Terence Kealey is a professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom, where he served as vice chancellor until 2014. As a clinical biochemist Dr. Kealey studied human experimental dermatology. He published around 45 original peer-reviewed papers and around 35 scientific reviews, also peer-reviewed. In 1996 he published his first book, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, where he argued that, contrary to the conventional wisdom,  governments need not fund science. His second book, Sex, Science and Profits (2008) argues that science is not a public good but, rather, is organized in invisible colleges, thereby making government funding irrelevant. Professor Kealey trained initially in medicine at Bart’s Hospital Medical School, London. He studied for his doctorate at Oxford University, where he worked first as a Medical Research Council Training Fellow and then as a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Science.

David Edgerton  is the Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History at King's College London. He graduated from St John’s College Oxford and Imperial College London. After teaching at the University of Manchester he became the founding director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London (1993-2003) where he was also Hans Rausing Professor. He joined the History department with the Centre on its transfer to King’s in August 2013. He was a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellow, 2006-2009, and gave the 2009 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Prize Lecture at the  Royal Society. 

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1:00: Terence, you and I have known each other for many years. You started off as a scientist, as I did, indeed, and we've both found our way to thinking about the place of science in society and in the economy. How did you start on this path?

3:53: Where did you develop your thoughts about science funding? It's very unusual for a scientist to be writing about the economics of science at all, especially from the positions you were taking. Where did you find the space to articulate your criticisms?

6:48: I imagine you were politically engaged in some way at this time. What were you reading outside science, what positions were you taking in this rather strained political atmosphere of the 1980s?

8:52: In the 1980s, you're pointing out that the university labs are getting fuller and fuller. Now I assume that most of the money that paid for all those new researchers was government money. Your argument, as it developed over the years, was that governments need not fund research in universities or elsewhere. So you were effectively saying that the Thatcher governments were spending too much on scientific research.

10:51: But the great bulk of the money going into universities from the so-called private sector is surely charitable money from the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research and so on, and highly focused on the biomedical sector. 

11:44: Now the Thatcher governments presented themselves as wanting to reverse the British decline, and many of the people arguing for more investment in research argued that the British decline since the 1870s was caused by a lack of investment in research. So you might imagine that the Thatcher governments would in fact launch a program of such investments, and it's interesting today to see the Brexiters today including Dominic Cummings talking about increasing funding for research... Why weren't the Thatcher governments pursuing that policy of investment?

15:13: So you don't see her [Thatcher] as following through on the liberal arguments from Gladstone onwards.

15:57: Terence, let me put this to you: in 1979, the British R&D - GDP ratio was higher than it was in 1990, when Margaret Thatcher left office. That's to say, essentially the private sector, dominating overall R&D funding, was spending less on research as a portion of GDP at the end of the Thatcher period. That doesn't seem to square with your crowding out thesis. 

18:30: One could argue that the effectiveness of R&D productivity has declined since the 1970s-- obviously that is the case in pharmaceuticals; perhaps it's the case more generally.

21:41: I'd like to go back just a little bit to an issue that we both addressed in the 80s and early 90s, which is pertinent here. That is the relationship between national investments in R&D and national rates of economic growth. We both put forward the argument that there was no positive correlation between these numbers. And I think I recall correctly that experts in science policy and scientists were incredulous and thought that we'd lost a few marbles along the way. How did you come to this conclusion?

24:28: If you look at the industrially funded British R&D, it was relatively high into the late 1960s and the rates of British economic growth were low, and this wasn't because the British were bad at exploiting the research; I think that even there we had an element of an inverse correlation between national growth rates and national privately funded civil R&D.

26:49: One very striking conclusion you report in your first book, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, is that the higher the GDP per capita of a country, the higher the R&D - GDP ratio. That's important because the richer the country is, the lower the rate of economic growth. 

29:52: If one were to put in the phrase 'economics of science' into google scholar, very quickly we'd be taken back to some foundation work in the late 50s and early 60s which treated science as a public good, and out of that a whole series of arguments about the need for the state to fund science.

38:37: So what you're saying is that that model of economics of science in the late 50s and early 60s which suggests that science is a public good misunderstands that science cannot be a public good in the same way that the light from a lighthouse is a public good... We can't all read a scientific paper and understand what it's about.

44:15: One of the new features of our public life is the centrality of a certain discourse about innovation and creativity; we're all supposed to be innovative and entrepreneurial. There's not a CV that doesn't claim innovation in some way... but you seem to be saying something rather interesting in that context, which is that what appears to be innovation is to a very considerable extent the result of learning, dare I say it, imitation. So what enterprises that want to create something new do is steal other people's ideas. That's very interesting. Another way in which your idea could be developed is to understand why creative institutions, far from being a universal feature of the economy, are in fact highly concentrated-- very particular firms have contributed very large proportions of innovation in the 20th century; very few universities account for a big chunk of Nobel Prizes. Could your model help explain this?

50:46: Terence, one of the many things you've done in your career is to become a Vice Chancellor. And you're clearly very committed to education and learning. Tell us a little bit about that role... that entrepreneurial drive to conquer the world of knowledge.

“Smith’s answer is that human beings have a basic capacity to observe, to be aware of, and in due course to be moved by the feeling of others. He calls that sympathy.” How did Adam Smith's insights into morality and sociology transform the modern world? Do they offer answers to the deepest political challenges of the twenty-first century? Jesse Norman MP discusses his new book on Smith with Mark Pennington on the Governance Podcast.

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The Guest

Jesse Norman MP was appointed Minister of State for the Department for Transport on 12 November 2018. He was previously Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for Transport from June 2017 to 9 November 2018. He was elected as the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire in May 2010.

Before entering politics Jesse was a Director at Barclays, researched and taught philosophy at University College London, and ran a charitable project in Communist Eastern Europe.

His books and pamphlets include ‘The achievement of Michael Oakeshott’, ‘After Euclid’, ‘Compassionate conservatism’ and ‘The big society’. His book ‘Edmund Burke: politician, philosopher, prophet’ was listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Political Book Awards and the George Orwell Prize. He has also written regularly for the national press.

 

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00:38: Why write a book about Adam Smith, and why now?

3:05: What is Smith’s view of human nature, and the role of empathy within it?

9:17: If you look at the Theory of Moral Sentiments, there’s the idea that moral order doesn’t need to come from a legislator [or from God] – it is a bottom-up account of how rules are developed.

12:15: One thing critics say about Smith is that he has a purely descriptive account of morality—it’s describing how people act in ways to seek others’ praise, but that doesn’t address whether the action itself is actually worthy of praise.

15:17: In the Smithian account of morals, how do morals change? If what others perceive I should do is not what I think I should do, how do I challenge that public view?

18:40: I think The Theory of Moral Sentiments can help us understand things like celebrity culture, or what goes on in social media. People looking for ‘likes’ on Facebook is very much praise and blame. But there’s a tension here: this is how moral norms are enforced, but Smith also talks about the “man within the breast,” the person who knows what is really praiseworthy.

21:35: In my view, what the invisible hand is referring to is a kind of social process, it’s an understanding that there are emergent properties in society, when people interact and then something emerges which is more than the sum of its parts and which wasn’t anticipated by its participants… it’s the unintended consequences of spontaneous order.

24:45: If you have a theory of the invisible hand, you might also have theories of how the invisible hand can break down. Economists have theories of market failure, but does Smith have a theory of moral failure?

27:45: When we’re talking about morality, yes we can point to celebrity culture as being a moral market failure, but what’s the alternative? Would the Smithian account favour a legislative response?

31:10: You’re very good at explaining that Smith is, in some ways, an egalitarian… the challenge is, and I think this is a problem that no one’s cracked—what do we do when people who acquire economic power then try to use the state to limit competition?

37:00: We know that financial markets have important information asymmetries… that’s a standard argument some people use to argue for regulation…. But equally, we know that regulation can be captured by big players. To solve a market failure, you end up with a governance failure.

40:28: One of the things I take from Smith is a scepticism about politicians… how do we constrain politicians?

 

What are the dangers of theory building about property rights in development economics? Are we becoming more ethical in the way we conceptualize property over time? In the latest episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Bart Wilson of Chapman University discusses his book project on the origins and meaning of property. 

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The Guest

Bart J. Wilson is the Donald P. Kennedy Endowed Chair in Economics and Law at Chapman University. He is a founding member of the Economic Science Institute and founding member and Director of the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy. His research uses experimental economics to explore the foundations of exchange and specialization and the origins of property. Another of his research programs compares decision making in humans, apes, and monkeys. Bart has published papers in the American Economic Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, and Nature Human Behaviour. His research has been supported with grants from the National Science Foundation and the Federal Trade Commission. Bart has co-authored with Vernon Smith a forthcoming Cambridge University Press book entitled, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century.

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01:05: What is property?

07:10: How using tools gave primates a sense of ownership

08:30: Tools as extensions of ourselves

11:50: What's the difference between property 'in,' 'on' and 'of'?

15:54: An original experiment exploring what property means

26:40: Does this experiment tell us something new about the way we treat the concept of property in economics?

30:07: Where do property 'rights' come from?

36:20: Is the language of 'rights' morally and conceptually meaningful in domains other than property?

40:30: Are human beings becoming more ethical in the way they conceptualize property over time?

42:30:  How can the humanities and social sciences find a common language to theorize property?

43:07: Does interdisciplinarity make our work better or noisier? 

Social science theories suggest that informal governance thrives when the state is weak. Shelby Grossman of Stanford University argues otherwise. In this episode of the Governance Podcast, she sits down with John Meadowcroft (King's College London) to discuss the relationship between markets, states and informal institutions in Lagos, Nigeria.  Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Shelby Grossman is a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She was previously an assistant professor of political science at the University of Memphis. Dr. Grossman’s primary research interests are in comparative politics and sub-Saharan Africa. Her research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, World Development, and World Politics.

Dr. Grossman was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2016-17. She earned her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2016. Skip Ahead

00:28: Shelby, you're involved in a research project on the politics of order in informal markets. You're looking at informal governance in parts of Africa. Why did you choose to study Africa?

2:03: How do the markets in Lagos work?

5:18: Would most economic exchanges in Nigeria take place in this informal context?

6:05: You did extensive fieldwork in the Lagos markets. Tell us about that process.

9:20: You mentioned that these markets often exist on land owned by local governments. I imagine that introduces a lot of local politics into the equation. Could you give us an account of how local government works in this context?

12:44: What would be the key cleavages in Lagos or Nigerian politics?

13:28: That takes us to the heart of your work, which is the interaction between the politics and markets. What does the literature lead us to expect about that interaction in a place like Lagos?

16:45: Who writes the constitution in the market?

18:58: You mentioned that market leaders were responding to pressure from politicians-- what sort of pressures were they exposed to?

20:45: What then is the relationship between the market leaders and the politicians?

22:51: In the absence of those sort of political threats, how does a market leader tend to behave?

25:01: Did you have outliers at either end? Were there examples of having almost no formal governance but very good informal governance, or vice versa?

26:07: What were your overall conclusions vis a vis the relationship between formal and informal governance? 

26:57: How does this play out in other contexts? Have you observed other examples that seem to follow the same pattern? 

28:18: In one sense, what you're saying is that there isn't a simple downward sloping demand curve for informal governance... it's actually a U shape of sorts.

28:32: What are your next research pathways?

What are the paradoxes of economic development? How can we preserve liberal democracy in an era of populism and polarisation? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Barry Weingast of Stanford University joins Professor Mark Pennington of King’s College London for a conversation on the key lessons we’ve learned from the study of political economy.

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The Guest

Barry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Department of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1996 through 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Weingast’s research focuses on the political foundation of markets, economic reform, and regulation. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. Weingast is co-author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis, 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Analytic Narratives (1998, Princeton). He edited (with Donald Wittman) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006). Weingast has won numerous awards, including the William H. Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize (with Ken Shepsle), the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz), and the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics.

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1:00 In response to the age old question, ‘why are some countries rich and others poor?’ you argue that some countries fail to develop because they are stuck in a ‘violence trap.’ What do you mean by that?

3:46: How does your explanation for the persistence of poverty differ from others?

6:08: How can developing countries escape from the violence trap?

7:50: Economists have often assumed that markets existed in societies before states began to interfere with them. You argue that markets don’t necessarily exist in many developing societies, but violence does. Why do so many economists have a different starting point?

9:43: In many ways, you’re arguing against the idea that markets are natural phenomena. You argue instead that markets have to be sustained within certain institutional conditions- but whether you actually get to those institutional conditions is the big question.

13:22: It’s not only markets that aren’t natural phenomena—democracy is also not a natural phenomenon. How can we build democracy where it doesn’t exist?

15:12: Is there anything that external bodies or national policies can recommend to help governments reduce the stakes of power?

17:35: How do you respond to Easterly’s arguments about foreign intervention?

18:52: Looking at your insights into early economic development in Europe, much of the good outcomes are unintended. Could we conclude that development isn’t something one can plan or design policy for?

21:48: What is an example of a democracy-promoting policy that isn’t just focused on creating elections?

23:23: What is the role of beliefs or moral attitudes in your framework?

25:55: Is there a role for political entrepreneurs to help societies out of their violence traps?

27:28: Do you see any implications of your research for contemporary events? Today we’re seeing a lot of ‘us versus them’ zero sum thinking. Can people find ways to discover mutual gains from cooperation in this environment?

30:25: What is the contemporary importance of your work on market-preserving federalism?

35:35: How can we explain the current shift in public opinion against market-preserving federalism across the west?

39:02: What are your future projects?

When does political violence result in stability and order? Does realist international relations theory help us understand war and peace? Will the world remain unipolar for long? Join us for our latest conversation on the Governance Podcast between Samuel DeCanio (King’s College London) and Nuno Monteiro (Yale University).

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The Guest

Nuno P. Monteiro is Director of International Security Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Dr. Monteiro’s research focuses on International Relations theory and security studies. He is the author of Theory of Unipolar Politics and Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation (with Alexandre Debs), published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and 2017, respectively. His work has been printed in the Annual Review of Political Science, Critical Review, International Organization, International Security, International Theory, and Perspectives on Politics; and his commentary has appeared in numerous outlets including the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, and Project Syndicate. At Yale, Dr. Monteiro is also a research fellow at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and a fellow of Branford College. He is originally from Portugal and earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2009.

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00:52: How did you become interested in international politics?

01:42: Who influenced your thinking during your PhD at the University of Chicago?

03:28: John Mearsheimer falls under the general category of realism, and you identify to some degree with this label as well.

04:38: Are there themes in the classical realist tradition that you identify with? How do you place yourself in the umbrella of different realist IR approaches?

09:34: Your first book, Theory of Unipolar Politics, examines this concept of unipolarity. Can you give us an overview of the central argument?

15:25: I guess the elephant in the room for this argument would be the rise of China as both an economic and military power… how would you respond to someone who pointed to the rise of China as a counterpoint to your view?

21:01: I suppose the question that’s immediately posed by that is, if China isn’t trying to acquire a global power projection capability, why is it now investing resources in developing aircraft carriers?

27:04: That was your initial book project. You wrote on nuclear proliferation with Alex Debbs. Can you tell us a little bit about your current project?

35:10: In one sense I can see how this idea might have been influenced by the US’s counterinsurgency experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. But somebody might ask whether that limits the explanatory power of the argument because it’s not applicable to war between states. But it sounds like you’re offering a general framework that can incorporate both small scale insurgencies and war between states.

36:50: It almost seems as though it’s an account that would tell a more hopeful story about the possibilities for peace following wars between states.

37:52: I guess you’re suggesting that Waltz’s second level of analysis—the organizational level—matters in a way that perhaps a structural realist who’s emphasizing the role of anarchy in conflict between states might not necessarily take into account.

39:27: It does sound like you have some of the realist’s pessimism in that you’re suggesting that even if conflict among states becomes less frequent due to technological developments… insurgencies that exist don’t have simple tactical or strategic solutions, which I suppose is an accurate depiction of the world we’re currently in.

41:02: Couldn’t somebody say that what you’re suggesting is that we try to influence the organizational structure of insurgencies?

Tune in to a special conversation on the governance podcast between Professor Jeremy Jennings of King’s College London and Professor Quentin Skinner of Queen Mary University. Professor Skinner discusses the meaning of intellectual history, key insights about republicanism and political representation, and the perennial lessons we stand to learn from the humanities about our political present.

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The Guest

Professor Quentin Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London. Previously the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, he is known as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. His most recent book is From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics.

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1:05: What do intellectual historians do, and what are the defining features of the Cambridge school?

6:34: Is there a reason intellectual historians are so drawn to the early modern period?

8:08: What is Hobbes’ legacy? Why is he important?

10:38: What was so original about the Hobbesian conception of the state?

16:00: Why did Britain fail to adopt the Hobbesian view of the state?

19:41: What is republicanism, and why is it important?

25:00: What does the Irish case teach us about republicanism?

28:00: Your new book is about teaching the humanities. Why is that so important?

33:10: What is the meaning of laughter?

37:15: What is Hobbes’ theory of political representation?

40:45: How do classical debates about representation bear upon the present?

43:50: How much can we learn from the past?

49:02: How do you see yourself entering public debate as a moralist?

Urban housing prices are skyrocketing in London and around the globe. What's behind the crisis and how do we fix it? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, John Myers of London YIMBY joins Sam DeCanio of King's College London for a discussion about the critical policy response we need to reduce costs and reinvigorate our cities. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

John Myers is the Co-Founder of London YIMBY, a grassroots campaign to end the housing crisis with the support of local people.

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0:39: What is the London housing crisis and how bad is it?

2:39: Homes have not become more expensive or technologically different than they were 100 years ago—it’s bricks, mortar, the tech is the same. And at the same time, wages in London have been going up. Yet the housing situation is getting worse given both of these conditions. Why aren’t markets responding to these signals?

4:03: When you’re saying we’re not planning enough housing, these are political plans or market actors?

4:52: Is this problem especially acute in London relative to other cities?

5:28: London is a centre of productive capacity and you’re essentially disincentivizing people from moving here by making them face such commutes.

6:44: Do these problems have distributional effects as well? I imagine there would be certain economic groups that would be disproportionally harmed.

9:45: I suppose the natural question arises, how has this happened? Unlike these prior societies that you’ve mentioned, the UK is a democracy, we have elected officials that can make decisions that can influence the society. If the effects of the crisis are to replicate authoritarian political systems and these premodern societies, why hasn’t the political system responded to the crisis in a way that limits these distributional inequalities?

11:48: 2/3rds of the voters are home owners. I would also still think there are considerable numbers of voters that don’t own homes that are being harmed. Why aren’t they mobilising?

14:40: You mentioned that people are heavily invested in their homes. What would happen if the housing crisis were solved and the result of that was the construction of a large amount of houses that led to prices beginning to fall in areas like London?

17:51: Why isn’t that happening? Why aren’t we adding more urban density into London and building more vertically?

20:40: How would you respond to someone who was concerned that extra would alter the historical character of their neighborhood?

24:17: So if the companies that are constructing new homes are not as responsive to individual purchasers as before, who are they responsive to?

25:42: I wanted to ask you about foreign ownership of homes in London. One of the frequent explanations you hear for the crisis is that there are extremely wealthy global elites purchasing homes, often masked by limited liability corporations. To what extent is the crisis influenced by foreign property ownership?

28:33: You mentioned the estimates-- around 13 percent of London properties are owned by foreign purchasers, up to 50 percent of new sales in Central London.

32:06: Tell us a little bit about the role the green belt is playing in the London housing crisis.

36:09: Why couldn’t someone respond to this and say this is just the tradeoff for protecting nature? Aren’t there good reasons for preventing London from expanding beyond the current boundaries?

42:58: Given that there are all these problems, are there any simple solutions available to mitigate the crisis?

47:05: Which political actors do you think would be most suited to institute this kind of change? Would the Mayor have an easier time of it?

49:20: So it would actually be incredibly helpful if you could have a neighborhood do this, demonstrate that if you allow these smaller territorial units to have more control over housing permissions and planning, this actually could generate benefits?

Larry Bartels and Chris Achen argue that we have a romanticised view of democracy. How is democracy letting us down and what can we do to reverse course? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Sam DeCanio of CSGS sits down with Larry Bartels to discuss his book with Chris Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Larry Bartels is the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. His scholarship and teaching focus on public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and political representation. His books include Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2nd ed., Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, 2016) and Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (with Christopher Achen, Princeton University Press, 2016). He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and of occasional pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other outlets. Bartels is a co-director of Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation, and a past vice president of the American Political Science Association. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Book

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government was published by Princeton University Press in 2016.

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00:50: How did you come to write your book with Chris Achen?

2:17: What do you think are the key components of this romanticized vision of democracy? How would you characterize the folklore you’re responding to in the book?

2:54: What’s at stake with this depiction of democracy? What are some of the costs of adopting this depiction of democracy?

3:52: This is a fairly elitist depiction of democracy- not in the sense that you’re endorsing elite rule, but in terms of your understanding of how policy is actually drafted and implemented. You don’t see voters playing a very large role in the actual operation of contemporary democratic governance.

4:47: What is the evidence you use to critique this folk wisdom account of democracy?

8:59: I guess that’s an interesting example for two reasons: one is that political parties are typically seen as one of the vehicles that voters can use to come up with issue positions if they don’t have more detailed policy knowledge. But that seems to suggest that political parties may be able to manipulate preferences of voters in a way that is a top down model of opinion formation. This could have disturbing consequences for democratic theory and democratic responsiveness depending on the elites actually running the party.

11:20: At one level, the book describes problems with democratic representation that might occur with low information voters but the book also suggests that there also might be problems with voters that have large amounts of political information. Can you describe some of those problems?

13:03: Do you think that any proposals for direct democracy can help address some of these information problems – that is, involving voters through direct primaries, referenda or efforts to enhance democratic deliberations?

15:29: It strikes me that if democratic politics can be short circuited by voters’ poor understanding of causal relations between policies, when it comes to more technical situations where the linkage between a voter’s electoral decision and the consequences of that decision … is less clear or counterintuitive… it strikes me that that problem we see at this local level should be fairly concerning.

16:58: It seems as though complexity poses problems if electorates don’t have a causal understanding of issues. Although I guess the flipside to that question is whether elites making technocratic decisions themselves understand causal relationships in these issues.

18:28: One of the alternatives that academics have proposed for ensuring democratic responsiveness and accountability is what’s referred to as a ‘retrospective model’ of voting- the basic idea being that if the economy performs poorly, the incumbent party suffers in the next election cycle. What is the book’s argument about the potential shortcomings of retrospective voting?

21:06: One of the examples the book discusses involves shark attacks… How does that have implications for American presidential elections? What do they tell us about retrospective voting?

26:24: So the question is, whether or not voters’ understanding of politics is accurate enough to be able to discern whether the incumbent has done something that made them worse off… it strikes me that there is a second potential problem with retrospective voting. For retrospective voting to replace political parties whose policies are ineffectual… voters must have information about whether the other party they’re voting into power is proposing policies that will have better effects than the incumbent.

29:39: What are the solutions you propose to this problem?

32:04: I understand why information might create problems with voter selection of candidates, but why should we think that political elites are going to be better at selecting candidates or policies? What give you that faith?

33:35: It’s certainly the case that elites have specialized knowledge… but it is also the case that you can find well-intentioned elites that simply disagree about which technocratic policies are most efficient for dealing with social problems… the question then becomes, if elites that are more political sophisticated disagree among themselves… how do we know which elites should be selected to be in charge of policy decisions? Especially when the stakes are high?

37:17: I guess the concern here is … much of this book is a critique of how academics think about democracy. You are suggesting that professional political scientists… have adopted an incorrect and costly vision of what democracy entails… my concern is that if academics can make that kind of an error in their theoretical understanding of democracy as a system of governance, we should also expect to see similar errors occurring in their analysis of public policy.

42:18: Can you tell us a bit about your next project?