Martin (2016) found that "holding a ministerial portfolio confers an electoral advantage, and so, in contrast to their co-partisans, politicians who are ministers simultaneously maximize policy, office and votes." In so, parties are not entirely unitary actors. To advance this point, I propose that cabinets should not be considered unitary either. Rather, cabinets are hierarchical, and cabinet committees mark a clear demarcation line of this hierarchy. In this paper, I propose and investigate two claims.

What explains support for European Integration? Why did people on the Left oppose, and Right support, European Integration in the 1980s, but this pattern reverse in the 2020s? In contrast to the common account of European Integration as a new ‘cleavage’ in European politics, on a par with class, religion, and geography, we argue that citizens evaluate European Integration by what it has on offer for them. If Europe offers them a policy-bundle in line with their own (left-right) preferences, they support it. If not, they are opposed.

It is a common complaint about public attitudes towards fiscal policy that voters want something for nothing, or that they want "Scandinavian levels of spending and American levels of taxation". However, these results typically come from survey questions which make expressing these views entirely possible, rather than asking respondents to internalise the relevant trade-offs. Recent research has begun to move in this direction by building in trade-offs with taxes when asking about spending proposals, as well as considering the necessary tax or spending consequences of deficit reduction.

Nationalism is something that the more one reads about it, the less sure one is of what it is. This talk recounts an intellectual outsider—one working on signalling theory and crisis-management experimentation—travelling through and pondering over the landscape of nationalism research. How many types of nationalism exist? Which types are theoretically valid and which are arbitrary? How can we tell? Is nationalism forever to be a contested concept, or can social science evolve it into an “uncontested”—or “less contested”—concept?

Today there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what 'the Jews' are: either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. The widespread conception is that the Jews were formerly either a religious community in exile or a nation based on Jewish ethnicity. The latter position is commonly known as 'Zionism,' and all articulations of a political theory of Zionism are taken to be variations of that view.

Niamh has 15 years' experience in the field of diplomacy, human rights and international organisations. She has worked in senior advisory roles in the European Union in Ukraine and North Macedonia and with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Vienna.