Research

This project examines electoral violence in Turkey. Issues related to electoral integrity in Turkey have risen to public attention in recent years. This research combines data from a survey carried out at the time of the 2018 election with a data set of electoral violence from coded newspaper reports in the aim of delineated the causes of electoral violence and the patterns it takes

Funded by the British Academy (September 2016 - August 2019)

This project examines the capacity of the UK system of vocational education and training (VET) to provide the technician-level skills required by the UK manufacturing industry. ‘Technicians’ are people who occupy roles requiring ‘intermediate’ (i.e., level 3-5) skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics

Evidence indicates that UK manufacturers are finding it difficult both to recruit skilled technicians ready-made and also to use the VET system to train technicians. The project, which will involve academics and PhD students at Oxford and Cambridge as well as King’s, will investigate the effectiveness of the UK VET system in generating the technicians required by manufacturers, especially in industries—both established and emergent—where methods of production are being transformed through the use of new technology. Through case studies of selected industries, the project will analyse the extent to which the set of institutions currently governing the provision of technician training in the UK is able to generate the information and the incentives required to ensure that the training programmes, training workshops, and tutors needed to train technicians to work with new technologies are in place, so that the requisite workers will be available as industries develop

Funded by the Gatsby Foundation (October 2016 - September 2019)

Funded by the British Academy (April 2017 - March 2019) In many elections, opinion polls affect electoral outcomes: some voters switch their original vote intention to support the party that is leading the polls. Previous research indicates that this ‘bandwagon effect’ can give an advantage of up to five percentage points to the leading party. Is this advantage unfair? To answer this question, we need to understand the mechanism behind election bandwagon effects. Campaign surveys are great tools to shed lights on the bandwagon effect. However, they can hardly elicit the mechanism behind it, as human beings are rarely the best judges when it comes at evaluating their own motives. Therefore, our plan is to conduct a series laboratory experiments where we organise elections among human subjects under various electoral rules. The advantage of laboratory experiments is that they allow the researcher to isolate some important factors, and as a consequence they can elicit the mechanisms that are at stake in group decision-making. In particular, we want to test whether the bandwagon effect is driven either by the willingness of some voters to follow the herd, or by them acknowledging that others might know better which is the best party.

Funded by EPSRC (September 2017- May 2020) This project aims to explore applications of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in domains involving voting and collective decision making. The introduction of DLT into the voting domain enables new possibilities for voting schemes. Political systems around the world have evolved complex election systems, for example single transferrable vote, where the results are cumbersome and time-consuming to calculate, but where the result is considered to better reflect the will of the electorate and hence worthy of this effort. However for non-political elections run with paper ballots this effort is generally prohibitive. Social choice theory within Political Science considers how different voting systems can affect how choices are made, and the ability to support such systems electronically enables the viability of schemes whose tallying mechanisms are more complex but which may give results that match more closely the collective choice of the voters. Hence the project also investigates the potential impact on decision making processes through the variation of voting schemes.

Funded by the Gatsby Foundation (November 2017 - March 2019)

Funded by the John Templeton Foundation (January 2018 - September 2020) This project examines how various institutional arrangements coordinate different forms of social action, ranging from the determination and enforcement of property rights to the provision of regulatory functions and the supply of public goods. The project understands these mechanisms to be ‘self-governing’ when they work outside the formal structures of the state and/or where those affected by a particular social problem have the capacity to ‘exit’ governance arrangements they deem unsatisfactory. Examples include the operation of ‘noxious markets’ (such as ransom for kidnap, and trade in human organs); mutual aid and reciprocity-based networks; financial regulation; the supply of collective goods (such as urban and environmental planning functions); definition and enforcement of property rights ‘outside of the law’; and trans-national governance and standards-setting processes.

Funded by the British Academy (April 2018 - April 2020) The expansion of the Gulag from the 1920s till the 1950s resulted in the forced resettlement of around 20 million prisoners to labour camps in previously unpopulated regions of the Soviet Union. Around 35% of them were highly educated political prisoners, i.e. enemies of the people. Our aim is to identify the economic legacy of this forced allocation of human capital. To do so we'll link camps to today's cities spatially to examine if the share of highly-educated political prisoners across camps can explain differences in education and income levels as well as firm performance across cities of the ex-Soviet Union today.

Funded by the British Academy (September 2018 - March 2020) This project represents the first systematic study of the patterns and drivers of unequal public goods provision in Tunisia. Leveraging original datasets on road construction and the geographic origins of political elites, available luminosity data, as well as fieldwork, we will explore the role of political patronage, protest and elite conflict in resource allocation. This allows us to systematically test competing theories on the origins of regional inequality in Tunisia, and to examine any change in these dynamics after the country’s democratic transition.

Funded by the Noble Foundation (October 2018 - June 2020) It is assumed that the rise in right wing populism poses a major and severe challenge for climate policy. Poland has seen some visible democratic backsliding since the right-wing populist Law and Justice party took power in 2015. However, Poland was widely perceived as the laggard of the EU in terms of energy transition and decarbonisation before the change of government, with the country often prioritising security of energy supply and economic development over environmental and climate protection. Poland’s representatives are often heard voicing strong doubts about both the form of, and the need for, global climate protection efforts. Poland provides a case for analysing the relationship between populism and different degrees of climate sceptical and climate denialist discourses. This project uses media analysis to focus on the relationship between experts and climate scepticism in public discourse and to outline the mapping of arguments used in Polish discourse domestically and in international forums – focusing on the extent of change in discourse before and after the election of the populist government in 2015; including a comparative analysis of Poland’s hosting of the UN’s Climate Change conferences (COPs) in 2013 and 2018. We seek to address questions such as: How prevalent is climate scepticism and denial in the media? Who speaks about climate change in Poland? What were the rhetoric strategies used in media discourse? What other topics were connected to climate change issues?

In the Muslim Middle East, the growth of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has not been accompanied by the creation of comprehensive guidelines and regulations. In this region, any method of medically reproductive assistance is consistently governed by Islamic law. Given divergent sectarian perspectives among Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, there are various approaches to ARTs. Sunni religious authorities banned all forms of ARTs involving third-party donors, due to their strict faith regarding incest and biological lineage. Nevertheless, Shi’a Muslims hold more progressive opinions on gametes and embryo donation, and gestational surrogacy. Despite this conflict of beliefs, two Shi’a dominant countries, Iran and Lebanon, supply the donor technology for infertile couples from both Shi’a and Sunni sectors in the Middle East. This project aims to build an international network of humanities scholars, social scientists, bioethicists, policy-makers, regulators, scientists, and other stakeholders, to understand the key debates on the ethics and governance of ARTs in this region. It will lay the groundwork for a future large grant application by building an international and collaborative network to explore the global and regional perspectives about how to develop more authoritative and efficient ethical governance of the new ARTs in this geo-politically important region.

Research on Islamism has remained predominantly Sunni-centric. This project brings ‘the Other Islamists’ – Shia Islamists – into the debate on Islamism in the Arab Middle East. It will use a cross-disciplinary theoretical approach which takes religion seriously without essentialising it, to explore whether, and if so, how and why, Shia Islamism(s) differ from their Sunni counterparts. The project will focus on three research puzzles drawn from the Islamism and sectarianization debates: 1) to what extent are Islamist movements shaped by their context, to what extent by their religious identity/ideology/institutions; 2) to what extent and how does the importance of sect-coded identities for Islamist movements change over time and how has this affected/been affected by the process of sectarianization; 3) what role does sectarian othering play in intra-sect competition within the current sectarianized milieu. These questions are examined through three work packages made up of comparative and within-case-studies of key Islamist movements in Kuwait, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Bahrain. The studies will be carried out by a team of internationally leading experts. The TOI Project’s co-leads are Dr Morten Valbjørn (Aarhus University) and Prof Jeroen Gunning. Funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (September 2019 till January 2023)

Find out more about the project here

Funded by Global Integrity (January 2019 - December 2020) India has been identified by Transparency International as one of the most corrupt countries among those with similar growth rates such as Brazil and South Africa (Afridi (2017)). Both politicians (Bardhan and Mookherjee (2012)) and bureaucrats (Nath (2015)) have been implicated. There is also considerable variation across the states in terms of corruption. Based on perceptions of corruption across 20 Indian states in 2005, Charron (2010) found that smaller, wealthier and more fiscally decentralised states like Kerala and H.P. seem to be less corrupt than Bihar and J&K. Indeed, fewer cases were registered in bigger states such as Bihar, West Bengal and U.P. relative to small states like Haryana, Kerala, and H.P.

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust

This project offers the first transnational history of Islamic Socialism in 20th century South Asia
It will focus on the vernacular translation of ideas and practices of socialism in political movements led by Sufi religious leaders in East Bengal and North West Frontier Province from the 1920s until the 1970s
Combining rare historical archives and interviews, the project analyses the formation of new political identities, strategies and alliances. Moving beyond the dominance of studies of Muslim conservatism, the project will recover ideas of progressive Islamic futures to contribute to broader debates on decolonisation in the global south and beyond
This project builds on previous research by Dr Uddin on political mobilisations in South Asia

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust.