Politics @ Surrey

The blog of the Department of Politics at the University of Surrey

Does UKIP have the brains, bodies and legs to prosper?

As appears to be usual in these matters, as soon as I am away from my blogging, there’s a whole cavalcade of eurosceptic-ness that appears. Thus I’ve missed out on explaining the joys of the additional UK contribution to the EU’s budget – short version: it’s complicated, but not that complicated – and much of […]


Feeling better about ‘drones’ shouldn’t make us feel easy about war

Last month the Birmingham Policy Commission published ‘The Security Impact of Drones: Challenges and Opportunities for the UK’; available online here. It is recommended reading for anyone interested in the topic of ‘drones’, or remotely piloted aircraft/remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPA/RPAS) as they are more meaningfully described. In particular, the report usefully highlights the fundamental […]


Are crises good or bad for the EU?

This week I’m in Oslo, to attend a small part of the celebrations of Norway’s bicentennial for its constitution, with a conference on democratic constitutionalism in the EU run by ARENA. Despite finding myself in a room with lots of constitutional lawyers, the experience the first day has been very positive and given much food for […]


The national interest and what’s in the interest of the nation: Confusion in the European system

A leitmotif of the the British debate on the EU is that ‘we’ don’t always/often/ever (delete as applicable) get what we want. Thus, we’re told about all the times the UK gets outvoted, or the structural impossibility of UK MEPs blocking anything in the Parliament. What is interesting is the conceptualisation that underpins this view. […]


Reflections on a prisoner’s dilemma

In this week’s POL1012 Introduction to Politics: Power and the State seminars, on Rational Choice theory, I ran a prisoner’s dilemma game with the students. This is something I have done for several years now but this time I wanted to make a record of what happened. Students were told that they had been arrested […]


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