News

Global Policy is launching January 2010

Global Policy is an innovative and interdisciplinary journal bringing together world class academics and leading practitioners to analyse both public and private solutions to global problems and issues. It focuses on understanding globally relevant risks and collective action problems; policy challenges that have global impact; and competing and converging discourses about global risks and policy responses. It also includes case studies of policy with clear lessons for other countries and regions; how policy responses, politics and institutions interrelate at the global level; and the conceptual, theoretical and methodological innovations needed to explain and develop policy in these areas.

Anne Phillips is currently on sabbatical leave

Anne Phillips is currently on sabbatical leave, working on a book on the commodification of the body for Princeton University Press.

In February and March 2010, she will be a Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. She returns to the UK via Japan, where she is contributing to a conference on ‘Bonds and Boundaries: New Perspectives on Justice and Culture’ at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. Other contributors include Axel Honneth, Achille Membe, Saskia Sassen, and James Tully.

Her most recent book, Gender and Culture, is published by Polity Press in March 2010. (Jan 2010)

National Student Survey 2010

January sees the launch of the National Student Survey (NSS) 2010 at most universities and colleges across the UK. Entering its sixth year, the NSS is a census of students in the final year of a course leading to undergraduate credits or qualifications across the UK. It is your opportunity to give your opinions on what you liked about your time at your institution as well as things that you felt could have been improved.

The survey will start in the week beginning 18 January and will run until the end of April.

Find out more about the National Student Survey 2010.  |  (Jan 2010)

We are extremely saddened to learn about the death of Gordon Smith

We are extremely saddened to learn about the death of Gordon Smith, Professor Emeritus in Government on Wednesday, 2 December. With Gordon we lose a much respected and distinguished colleague and scholar, whose work has shaped the discipline and our Department.

Gordon was at the heart of the study of European Politics, building on his expertise in German Politics and European party systems. He was founding editor of two journals West European Politics and German Politics and honorary vice-president of the Association for the Study of German Politics. Until the present day, he was very actively involved in West European Politics, Gordon had just sent off proofs for the next issue on Monday. This journal, very much linked to the LSE and the Department of Government, has been one of Gordon's chief legacies. But Gordon brought so much more to the Department than his scholarship and his vision: Until recently Gordon enthusiastically supervised students, applying his unique wit and insight to generations of students. His warmth and curiosity, his willingness to challenge and his guidance will be sadly missed by us all. (December 2009)

Read the obituary in the Times Online.|

LSE Global Governance receives United Nations Development Programme award

Dr Denisa Kostovicova, LSE Global Governance, has been awarded £17,029 from the United Nations Development Programme. The research will investigate sustainable human development.

A Survey of MEPs in the 2009-14 European Parliament

Professor Simon Hix has received a grant from the ESRC to conduct an on-line survey of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who were elected in June 2009. The survey will ask MEPs about inter alia their preferences on a range of salient issues in European Union (EU) politics, their behaviour inside the Parliament – such as their committee membership and voting behaviour – and their contacts with interest groups and national parties and governments. The research will extend a valuable time-series of surveys of MEPs, and will generate a new dataset which is likely to be widely used by students and researchers of EU and EP politics. The project is in collaboration with Prof. David Farrell, at the University of Manchester, and Prof. Roger Scully, at the University of Wales, at Aberystwyth. (30/06/2009)

Real innovation and joined up government needed to improve public services

Sir Michael Bichard KCB, Director of the Institute for Government, laid out his strategy for a new government in a lecture that formed the centrepiece of this year's Capstone Showcase for the LSE's fast-growing MPA Programme||.

Read the full report of the MPA capstone showcase|

Congratulations to Sofia Sebastian and Fredrik Sjoberg who have both won awards for best doctoral papers at the 14th Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities.

Two PhD students from the Government Department have won awards for best doctoral papers at the 14th Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities held at Columbia University, New York on 23-25 April 2009. Sofia Sebastian for her paper, 'A Three-Level Framework of Analysis for State Building Processes: Lessons From Bosnia' and Fredrik Sjoberg for 'Explaining Electoral Competitiveness in Kyrgyzstan: Moving Beyond the "Clan" Hypothesis'.  (29 April 2009)

Dr Michael Bruter has been awarded £193,133 from the ESRC to research ‘Vision on the future of EU citizenship’.

For the first time, 'Feeling European' will tell us how "European " citizens feels across the 27 member states of the European Union using a series of brand new questions to be asked in a mass survey, which will be carries out in the hours that will follow the European Parliament elections in June 2009. The survey will also evaluate the impact of European identity, democratic preferences and political protest. The survey will also ask citizens questions about what new rights and duties they would like to see associated with European Union citizenship. The same questions will then be addressed to political party leaders in nine countries in a series of in-depth elite interviews to be carried out in 2009-2010.

Government department graduate student Jan-Emmanuel De Neve Awarded Wicksell Prize

Contribute to Global Policy

David Held, Patrick Dunleavy and Eva Nag are the editors of a new journal, Global Policy. They warmly invite submissions, contributions and suggestions from LSE experts for the journal which will begin publication in January 2010.

Global Policy is a new innovative and interdisciplinary journal bringing together world class academics and leading practitioners to analyse both public and private solutions to global problems and issues. It will be based at LSE, and published by Wiley-Blackwell, one of the biggest publishers in the world. The target market is universities, governments, international organisations, NGOs and the private sector.

Main articles in the journal will report and analyse new research, theory, interpretations and scholarly controversy, while survey articles will map the state of knowledge or policy context of particular issues. The journal will also include practitioners' commentaries, which are crisp and focused articles of shorter length.

For more information, contact journal.global.policy@lse.ac.uk|

Government Department academics win political awards

Tony Travers and Professor Anne Phillips have both been honoured at this year's Political Studies Association (PSA) Awards. Tony Travers won the political studies communications award for his outstanding commentary on the London mayoral election, while Professor Phillips was given a special recognition award for her groundbreaking work in multicultural and gender politics.

George Jones has been made an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics.

The Government Department is delighted that George Jones has been made an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics. Rodney Barker, Professor of Government and Head of the Government Department, said, 'It's a hugely justified recognition of his long and distinguished service to the department, the school, and the community'. (10/03/2009)

Kai Spiekermann has won this year's Sir Ernest Barker Prize of the Political Studies Association for political theory.

Kai Spiekermann, Government Department, is the recipient of this year's Sir Ernest Barker Prize of the Political Studies Association for the best PhD in political theory for his thesis on: Norms and Games: realistic moral theory and the dynamic analysis of co-operation.

The judges said: "Dr Spiekermann's thesis is a highly intelligent and striking original piece of work. It develops and sustains an original argument from start to finish. Dr Spiekermann relates his work to that of other scholars in his field, but he rarely relies upon their work, preferring to strike out on his own in showing how game theory can help us understand how people can cooperate in maintaining social norms. His thesis brings together game theory , ethics, political philosophy, experimental psychology, modelling, computer simulation and real-life politics. The thesis is a beautifully crafted piece of work. It is simultaneously imaginative and rigorous and it combines the technicalities of game theory with lucid, elegant and unpretentious prose. It is altogether an outstanding intellectual achievement".

Dr Spiekermann will receive his award at the PSA annual conference dinner being held at the Hilton Hotel, Manchester on Wednesday 8 April. (02/03/2009)

Dr Christian List has been jointly chosen as the winner of the Social Choice and Welfare Prize

Professor Christian List| and Dr Franz Dietrich| have been selected for the fifth Social Choice and Welfare Prize, for their work on the theory of judgment aggregation.

Awarded every two years by the Society for Social Choice and Welfare|, the prize is to honour scholars, under the age of 40, who have achieved excellence in the area of social choice theory and welfare economics.

Professor List and Dr Dietrich were chosen for their work on the theory of judgement aggregation, which looks at how the judgments of several individuals on some controversial questions can be merged into coherent judgments for a whole group. Judgment aggregation problems arise in many contexts, from legislatures to referenda, expert panels to juries and courts, and from company boards to international organisations. The theory seeks to provide a general framework for investigating some of the common properties of different judgment aggregation problems, and their solutions.

Professor List, who was also recently awarded the Laurance S Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship from Princeton University's Center for Human Values, was delighted to be recognised by the Society. He said: 'The award has been a huge surprise for both of us, and we are thrilled, and feel honoured, to receive this recognition.'
Dr Dietrich said: 'It is a wonderful recognition of our area of research, and we both feel very motivated to make further contributions.'

The official award will be given at the 2010 meeting of the Society, held this time in Moscow, where Professor List and Dr Dietrich will deliver the Prize Lecture.

Further information about the academics' work on judgment aggregation is available on their personal webpages at http://personal.lse.ac.uk/list/| and http://www.personeel.unimaas.nl/f.dietrich/| or on the online bibliography at http://personal.lse.ac.uk/LIST/doctrinalparadox.htm|

Notes

Professor List is a professor of political science and philosophy in the Departments of Government and Philosophy at LSE. Dr Dietrich is a Nuffield Foundation New Career Development Fellow at LSE and assistant professor in the Department of Quantitative Economics at the University of Maastricht, Netherlands. He will take up the Ludwig Lachmann Fellowship in the Philosophy Department at LSE in October 2009.

Previous prize winners are Professor Matthew Jackson, Stanford University, Professor François Maniquet, Université catholique de Louvain, Professor John Duggan, University of Rochester, and Professor Tayfun Sönmez, Boston College.

10 February 2009

Dr Philip Cook has been awarded an ESRC Grant to fund his project 'Schools, Children and Social Justice'

Philip Cook has recently been awarded an ESRC Small Grant of £31,000 to fund his project 'Schools, Children, and Social Justice'. Dr. Cook's research concentrates on what kind of school children are owed as a matter of justice. The current debate on schools concentrates on their educational outcomes and the impact of this education on a child's future life chances. The question of what structure schools should have (comprehensive, private, selective, Academy etc.) is only addressed within this debate about educational outcomes. Dr. Cook's research asks: is the value of schooling identical with the value of education? If not, what is the basis of the value of schools separate from the education they provide, and are children owed a particular structure of school as a matter of social justice? The aim of the project is to develop principles of social justice that apply to the structure of schools, distinct from those that apply to the provision of education. These principles of the just school will address an important omission in the political theory literature and be valuable to stakeholders in policy debates on schooling, including professional organisations, think-tanks, government, and parents. This research considers schools as institutions that serve the needs of children as fellow members of a political community. Research into this political conception of childhood and of schools will include examination of the notion of child-citizenship, votes for children, and schools as institutional that protect child-citizens from inequalities with adults. (19/01/2009)

Government Department Prize Winners - Congratulations to Kai Spiekerman and Koichi Kato who have each been awarded prestigious school prizes.

Kai Spiekerman, who completed his PhD last year on Norms and Games: Realistic Model Theory and the Dynamic Analysis of Cooperation, has been awarded one of the school's four Robert McKenzie prizes. The prizes are awarded on the basis of outstanding academic performance during the 2006/07 academic session, in memory of the late Professor Robert McKenzie a former student and member of staff from 1949, and Professor of Sociology with special reference to politics from 1964 to 1981.

Koichi Kato has been awarded the William Robson Memorial Prize for his thesis on Evaluating Compulsory Voting: Australia in Comparative Perspective. This prize is intended to help present, or recent, students of the School to prepare for publication, as articles or books, works in the subject areas of interest to the late Professor Robson. Friends and colleagues of the late Professor W A Robson, Professor of Public Administration from 1947 to 1967 who was associated with the School from 1926 till his death in 1980, established the William Robson Memorial Prize. (15/01/2009)

Professor Christian List has been awarded a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship at Princeton University

Professor Christian List, of the Government Department, has been awarded a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship at Princeton University for the academic year 2009-2010. This fellowship is, '…awarded to outstanding scholars and teachers interested in devoting a year in residence at Princeton writing about ethics and human values.' (04/01/2009)

LSE ranked second in London and fourth in the UK in the 2008 Sunday Times University Guide

LSE was ranked second in London and fourth in the UK in the 2008 Sunday Times University Guide, published on Sunday 21 September. The School came first in Accounting and Finance, Economics and Politics, second in Business Studies, Geography and Environmental Studies, fourth in Law and Sociology, fifth in History and seventh in Mathematics.

Professor Janet Hartley, pro-director for teaching and learning at LSE said: 'It's pleasing that the Sunday Times guide rates LSE so highly - it reflects our confidence that we are one of the best universities in the world...LSE is academically excellent, but the School does not take that excellence for granted.' For more on this story see the article LSE scores highly in university league tables on the LSE website. (22/9/2008)

Professor Simon Hix has been awarded the Richard F. Fenno Prize from the American Political Science Association

Professor Simon Hix has been awarded the Richard F. Fenno Prize, from the Legislative Studies Section of the American Political Science Association, for the best book published in 2007 on legislative studies. The prize is for his book (co-authored with Abdul Noury and Gerard Roland) on "Democratic Politics in the European Parliament", Cambridge University Press, 2007. This is one of the most prestigious book prizes of APSA. (2/9/2008)

Nuffield Foundation have awarded LSE Public Policy Group a grant of £60,000 to study: 'Information on Redress Processes and Administrative Justice in the UK and England'.

A joint team led by Professor Patrick Dunleavy from the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Professor Helen Margetts from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford have been awarded a grant to research 'Citizen Redress' in the UK, from the Nuffield Foundation under their 'Access to Justice' research programme.

For citizens who are attempting to put right what they see as wrong decisions made by government departments, agencies, and local authorities or NHS bodies, the process can be difficult, stressful, complicated and long. Especially in the earliest stages, access to information about how to complain, seek an internal review of a decision that seems wrong, or appeal that decision through the administrative justice system is likely to be a critical influence on whether or not potential seekers of redress successfully activate their rights.

This research project will look at how all aspects of the current complaints handling process currently works. It will consider whether ideas such as co-ordinated provision of initial information, early case handling and active case progression can improve the situation for citizens trying to put things right. The project will also look at how finding information on complaints and appeals in the 'digital era' has changed the process of initiating redress. (9/7/2008)

Waterstone's London Student of the Year Award

Elizabeth Fison has been awarded the Waterstone's London Student of the Year Award. Elizabeth has been nominated for this award because of her commendable ability to keep up with her studies and remain an active participant in classes, despite living with M.E. Elizabeth has been a constant advocate, voicing the needs of disabled students at the LSE's termly Disability and Diversity Consultative Forum, working with peers to improve the Disability Equality Scheme and alerting people to access problems.

Read the full story, 'Waterstone's London Student of the Year Award'.

Congratulations to Janet Coleman

Janet has been appointed as Hellenic Parliament Global Distinguished Professor in the History and Theory of Democracy at New York University.

This is a post additional to her chair at LSE and is a distinguished honour.

LSE Forum in Legal and Political Theory Annual Fund Award

The LSE Forum in Legal and Political Theory has been awarded £2,200 by the LSE Annual Fund to support its activities.

The Forum was established in Michaelmas 2007 by Philip Cook (Government) and Thomas Poole (Law) to increase collaboration between academics and research students from different departments at LSE who share an interest in legal and political theory. Professor Chandran Kukathas was the inaugural speaker, followed by a full program of visiting and LSE based academics.

The Annual Fund grant will also support an international symposium on the work of Alan Brudner (University of Toronto) to be held in May.

For further information on the Forum's events please contact Philip Cook or Thomas Poole

The Government Department scores highly in Postgraduate Research Experience Survey

The Government Department has received excellent feedback from its PhD students in the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey 2007. This was the first systematic national survey of postgraduate research students, involving 58 institutions and more than 10,500 respondents. Government Department PhD students expressed very high levels of satisfaction with all the key aspects of their experience. As many as 83% of the Department's students indicate that their research degree programmes meet or exceed their expectations, and 90% are confident that they will complete their thesis within their planned timescale. Doctoral students in the Government Department, at the LSE as a whole, and across the country, regard the quality of supervision as the most important factor for the successful completion of their PhD. It is therefore particularly notable that 77.5% of the Department's students feel that the guidance and support they receive from their supervisors matches or exceeds their expectations, with as many as 71% indicating that their expectations have been exceeded (compared to 61.4% at the LSE as a whole and 60.8% nationwide). The Department's students are especially satisfied with the availability of their supervisors, the efforts their supervisors make to understand any difficulties that they might face, the good guidance they receive from their supervisors in selecting and refining their research topic, and the helpful feedback on their progress provided by their supervisors.

The students' responses indicate that the Government Department not only provides good supervision in the course of their work, but also gives them a clear understanding of how to reach the ultimate goal of producing a successful PhD thesis. The Department's students are confident about the standard of work expected of them, the required standard for the thesis, and the requirements of the thesis examination.

The experience of being a PhD student is not only to do with producing a wonderful thesis, however important that might be. The Government Department doctoral students feel that as a result of their experience, they have enhanced their ability to learn independently and have improved their analytical skills. The Department's PhD students also indicate that they have gained valuable and worthwhile experience as teachers.

The results of the survey are a testimony to the excellence of the Government Department's research degree programmes and indicate that the Department is one of the best places to do a PhD. The Department will naturally not rest on its laurels, but will work to maintain and exceed the standards it has achieved.