News and Blog

Public engagement used to be something I shied away from but in the past month I have taken part in two public engagement events to present the work of the IDEAL study and even discussed them on BBC Radio Wales.  In the past I worried about how to translate research to the public in a meaningful and engaging…

WISERD/CRESC Civil Society Colloquium 18th and 19th May 2016, Cardiff   As part of the WISERD Civil Society programme, WISERD and CRESC jointly organised an international colloquium on 18th and 19th May at Cardiff University for academics, policy makers and civil society organisations involved in Social Innovation (SI) initiatives. As an international event the colloquium was organised in…

  One of the most important dates in the entire EU referendum campaign will be the 7th June: the deadline for registering to vote. The introduction of Individual Voter Registration in the last parliament means that every eligible adult must register to vote individually, and can no longer be registered by university halls or the head…

  On 23rd May the Telegraph published the results of an ORB poll which suggested that the traditional advantage of the Leave campaign among older voters was being eroded. The poll showed that 51% of over-65s were planning to vote Remain in the EU referendum, compared with 44% planning to vote Leave. The finding may well have contributed…

  Let me introduce you to Moran’s Law of Academic Conferences: the more a conference draws on a single discipline, the less interesting it is.   The most mind numbingly boring conferences now are those lumbering leviathans, the Annual Conferences of  professional associations, where the only way to survive is to disappear to the bar to…

  With less than a month to go until the polls open, the broad strategies of the Remain and Leave campaigns have become fairly clear. For Remain, led by Britain Stronger in Europe their objective is to highlight the risks of leaving the EU in economic terms alone, for everything from the national economy to…

This article looks at the reasons behind the ‘rise of UKIP’ since 2013 and applies it to our data on young people and the EU referendum under three headings: employment and education; austerity; and political language. The findings show a divide in support between those who left school at 17 or 18 and those still…

Declining levels of trade union membership is often cited as evidence that trade unions have become less relevant within the modern UK economy. In 2012, particular attention was given to this issue as levels of union membership among TUC affiliated unions fell to beneath 6 million members for the first time[i].  The recent development and…

The campaigns to keep the UK in the EU – Britain Stronger in Europe – and their Eurosceptic opponents – Vote Leave – have now had almost a month since the launch of the official referendum campaign to outline and hammer home their key arguments for why we should vote to stay in or leave…

With the dust settling on the devolved election results last week and showing a 3% increase in turnout in Wales, now is a good time to explore the links between devolution and political engagement, particularly among young people, and ask what can we learn from this in the run-up to the EU referendum? In terms…