To what extent can minor states constrain great powers? Do institutional practices shape state behavior? This study presents the argument that great powers engage in informal power- sharing in international organizations to attain unanimity, which enhances the signaling e ect of these institutions. The pursuit of unanimity lends weight to additional votes beyond those needed for decision-making under the formal rules. In turn, informal power-sharing to attain unanimity enables minor powers to exert more influence than they could if only material power and formal rules were decisive.

The series

For Trinity Term we are focussing on research methods. The aim of these sessions is really to excite an interdisciplinary audience of graduates to understand how different methods are being used creatively across the social sciences. The panel discussions will be held during the first four weeks of term and will focus on 'interviews' in week 1, 'numbers' (quant methods) in week 2, 'archives' in week 3, and 'ethnogrpahy' in week 4.

Panellists:

[Joint work with Tugba Bozcaga, Harvard University)

Does land inequality undermine democratization and development? The dominant consensus is that land inequality provides incentives for landed elites to block democratization and undermines the provision of public goods. Two key assumptions underlie these theoretical accounts: that landowners identify uniquely with land-related activities and that asset mobility is exogenous. In this paper, I propose an alternative explanation on how land inequality affects landed elites' calculations on both democracy and the provision of public goods that breaks with these assumptions.

To celebrate the publication of ‘Women of Ideas: Interviews from Philosophy Bites’, join Suki Finn in conversation with Rebecca Roache, Teresa M. Bejan, and Sarah Fine, as they discuss the status, works, and experiences of women in philosophy.

Long-term social and demographic changes – and the conflicts they create – continue to transform British politics. In their new book Sobolewska and Ford show how deep the roots of this polarisation and volatility run, drawing out decades of educational expansion and rising ethnic diversity as key drivers in the emergence of new divides within the British electorate over immigration, identity and diversity.

Multilevel regression and post-stratification is a way of estimating opinion in small areas.

If you've ever needed to make a prediction as to what a small area thinks, or control for "district-level preferences", this talk is for you.

This talk will give an overview on the use of Twitter data for social science research. The talk will focus on an applied example using data from participants in the 2017 US Women’s March protests. It will be followed by some hands-on exercises describing how to access the Twitter API, including the new Academic Research Product Track.

In the span of three months in 2020, Belarusian and foreign journalists were arrested more than 310 times in the line of duty. As of April 2021, 12 journalists remain behind bars. Volha Siakhovich is a legal expert and human rights campaigner for the Belarusian Association of Journalists. She will tell us about the current climate, and what the international journalism community can do to bring attention to it.