Politics & Public Policy

Anyone in hope of elucidation on Brexit this week will have been a bit disappointed, even by recent standards. With submissions to the High Court providing no killer arguments either side – and both sides firmly stating that any loss will be challenged up to the Supreme Court and an immigration debate that has sunk to the […]

Julian L. Garritzmann Students in Finland and Germany study free of charge. In the U.S. and in Japan, in contrast, they pay tremendous tuition fees, leading to often six-digit student debt amounts after graduation. At the same time, most students in Finland and in the U.S. receive public financial student aid, while the majority of […]

Prime Minister Theresa May is determined to take Britain on a course to Brexit, but only six months ago she said it wouldn’t be in the country’s interest to do so. Mrs May, then Home Secretary, said in a pro-Remain speech in April 2016: “I believe it is clearly in our national interest to remain […]

Sarah Glück and Charoula Tzanakou[i]   “Researchers love what they do. It is not entirely clear to us that the systems in which we work love us.” (Bratislava Declaration of Young Researchers)   How can we attract young students to a career in science and how can we retain them? Those were the leading questions […]

A Brexiteer in the BBC Question Time audience last Thursday compared the EU to the Soviet Union. It’s an entirely false and unfounded comparison. There is absolutely no resemblance between the EU and the USSR. Such comparisons are reckless, childish and nonsensical. It shows no understanding or respect for those people who truly suffered and […]

Martina Vukasovic The 2016 edition of the General Conference of ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research) took place in Prague, 7-10 September 2016. Approximately 2000 participants presented their most recent work in political science, policy analysis, public administration and related areas of inquiry in almost 70 different sections. The newly formed ECPR Standing Group on […]

Now we’re back into the normal flow of things, I’ve been giving more talks about Brexit, and writing pieces for other sites. As I decried in my previous posts here (and here), a major challenge for pursuing Brexit is that there is no clarity on either side about what the objective might be. That in turn makes it almost impossible […]

So it turns out that Usherwood’s Law is simply that things can always get worse. It’s not quite my childhood dream, but (appositely) it could be worse. Since publishing The Brexit Clusterf**k earlier on, I’ve had lots of feedback on Twitter, essentially boiling down to “you forgot some other things”. Since I’m apparently on a roll here, […]

UPDATED: read a second installation here, after all your comments.   Summer is over: winter is coming in the world of Brexit. As politicians return from their sojourns in the sun, they open up their emails and briefings to find that things are going about as badly as they could. I’m writing this at the end […]

Ever heard of ‘L’Arlésienne’, a short story written by French novelist Alphonse Daudet in 1869 and included in his famous ‘Letters from my Windmill’? The title refers to a lady from the city of Arles, who is central to the plot, but never appears on the stage. No one ever sees her, and yet everyone […]