神马福利影片

While at CIDE in Mexico, Andreas Murr has been developing election forecasts for the upcoming Mexican presidential election on 2 June. In two blog posts written together with Mike Lewis-Beck he describes what as well as forecast.

NEW FUND: Interdisciplinary Research Spotlights: Research Development Fund (IRDF) Call 24/25
As part of the launch on the new Spotlights programme, we are pleased to announce the opening of a new fund aimed at interdisciplinary research. The 2024-25 Interdisciplinary Research Spotlights Research Development Fund (IRDF) will support awards of normally up to a maximum of 拢15,000 for interdisciplinary research projects that align with the Research Spotlights with activities taking place between 1 August 2024 - 31 July 2025.
The deadline for IRDF applications for 24/25 is 1pm, Wednesday 5 June 2024.

Dr Victor Agboga has successfully defended his PhD thesis, passing with minor corrections. His thesis, "Where Do Your Loyalties Lie? Party Switching and Voters' Response in Nigeria," was examined by Adrienne LeBas from American University, Washington DC, and Jessica Di Salvatore from PAIS, Warwick. Supervised by Gabrielle Lynch and Andreas Murr, Victor is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

This article analyses the social construction of climate change mitigation as a policy issue at the hands of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). IPCC models and scenarios, play a key role in constructing and legitimising political visions of pathways towards Net Zero. IPCC scenarios have important and real socio-ecological consequences that are crucial for the politics of tackling climate change, profoundly shaping what are seen as viable futures and mitigation policy options. We problematise five key assumptions that are fed into modelling, showing why and how they matter politically. These contestable assumptions built into IPCC IAMs undermine their credibility and usefulness for planning mitigation strategies. We find that, ironically, although IPCC efforts stress just how urgent political action is, their models and scenarios undervalue today鈥檚 actionable mitigation policies, leaving us prisoners of our climate polluting past.

A team of political scientists from VUB and the 神马福利影片 has won the Frank Cass Prize for the best article of 2023. Kamil Bernaerts, affiliated both with the Department of Political Science of the VUB and of the 神马福利影片 wrote the article 鈥淚nstitutional design and polarization. Do consensus democracies fare better in fighting polarization than majoritarian democracies?鈥� together with Benjamin Blanckaert (VUB) and Didier Caluwaerts (VUB). The article was published in the leading journal Democratization and has made an important contribution to understanding democratisation and political polarisation.