Philosophers of law have spilled oceans of ink analysing how rules work, how they are read from the text, and how they make up larger systems called institutions. The knowledge gained in this way can be useful to those who analyse rules in political science. In this paper, I discuss several insights from legal philosophy that can be used to rethink the way rules are usually analysed in the social sciences.

Speaker: David Hope (KCL) with Julian Limberg and Yves Steinebach

Abstract

Social spending has fallen in the United Kingdom over the past decade and a half, reflecting efforts to limit public expenditures in the wake of the financial crisis. How do people in the UK feel about this slimmed-down version of the welfare state, and what would they like from social protection going forward? Drawing on results from the OECD Risks That Matter survey, a cross-national survey with representative samples in 27 countries, this report examines perceptions of economic risks and attitudes towards social protection in the UK.

Critics of globalization associate contemporary economic ills, ranging from growing economic inequality to deindustrialization, with the integration of world markets since 1990. But economic integration also had a political effect: while fueling significant growth, governments in this era found that their autonomy to intervene in domestic markets was severely constrained. This constraint on economic intervention was due to market, institutional, and doctrinal factors.

This paper analyses the design and negotiations of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) which the EU member states were required to formulate so as to access the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). By focusing on three Eurozone members (Austria, Greece, and Slovakia) which represent distinct voices and experiences within the EU integration project, we argue that a new form of conditionality, coordinative conditionality, can be identified.

The contemporary radical Right is not merely a series of nationalist projects but a global phenomenon. This book shows how radical conservative thinkers have developed long-term counter-hegemonic strategies that challenge prevailing social and political orders both nationally and internationally. At the heart of this ideological project is a critique of liberal globalisation that seeks to mobilise transversal alliances against a common enemy: the ‘New Class’ of global managerial elites who are accused of undermining national sovereignty, traditional values, and cultures.

We introduce a new method for measuring subjective perceptions at scale using innovations in both crowd-sourced image data and transformer-based computer vision technology. We aim to uncover the relationships between perceived neighbourhood conditions and political outcomes, potentially offering new insights into how urban environments shape politics. Our approach relies on a novel dataset of 360-degree street-level images from Mapillary, a non-proprietary crowd-sourced alternative to Google Street View.

Exact venue location: Kirdar Building of the Middle East Centre, entrance at 68 Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6JF – access to this building is at the north side, next to the bike rack The Boardroom is on the ground floor next to the main staircase of the hallway.