A key feature of parliamentary democracy is government accountability vis-à-vis the legislature, but the important question of who speaks for the government—cabinet ministers or unelected bureaucrats, and the institutional underpinnings of this behavior—receives scant attention in the existing literature. We investigate this question with the case of Japan, and data on millions of committee speeches spanning distinct electoral and legislative institutional environments.

Carrier Strike sits at the heart of a Royal Navy that is growing in size for the first time in a generation but as the Queen Elizabeth Strike Group prepares for her inaugural deployment many still question the utility of aircraft carriers. Commander UK Strike Force and Commander UK Carrier Strike Group discuss the opportunities and capabilities a 5th generation Carrier Strike Group affords a nation in a period of increasing competition.

The major geopolitical contest that will shake the world over the next few decades will be the US‒China contest. The lecture will discuss the deep structural forces driving this contest, the mistakes made by both sides and potential solutions. It will also discuss the implications and options for other regions and countries, including ASEAN and Singapore.

The following seminars will take place at 1pm unless otherwise stated. All welcome to join via Zoom, but registration required: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/calendar.

MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson’s classic article “Macropartisanship” extended the study of voting behavior from static analyses of American elections to the dynamics of partisanship between elections. This launched new frontiers of research, such as studying the effects of
presidential approval and economic indices on aggregate party identification. However, the Macropartisanship literature made an important oversight: Changes in partisanship between elections are usually from one partisan group to identification as an independent, or vice

'After the Golden Age: Resetting UK‒China Engagement': This major report, After the Golden Age, calls for a fundamental reset in the UK’s relations with China, and sets out a conceptual framework for the British Government to develop a UK‒China Engagement Strategy.

Few could describe the strategic performance of the Western alliance over the last couple of decades as satisfactory. Iraq is just one example of our efforts falling, in the words of the Chilcot Report, ‘far short of strategic success’. Much of the rich and growing literature analysing this failure blames some mixture of setting the wrong ends, choosing the wrong ways, and allocating insufficient or inappropriate means.

A growing body of evidence suggests a strong association between perceptions of threat and conservatism, yet little work specifies the precise psychological mechanisms connecting the two. Integrating perspectives from across the psychological sciences, we argue that conservative responses emerge from intuitive processes geared towards solving evolutionary problems associated with particular kinds of threats and, hence, vary systematically from one threat to another. We label this learned threat management.

The mainstream position is that a combination of technology and strategy is pushing us to a world where crises in maritime Asia will be more stable, taking the form of a defensive standoff. We believe that view is overly optimistic, for it overlooks how operational culture, bureaucratic incentives, and the temptation to strike first are creating the circumstances for a perfect storm. In our talk, we will outline what the dangers are and why we need to pay more attention to them.