London School of Economics and Political Science

Urban design interventions reduce fear of crime in public spaces in gender-sensitive ways

Abstract Fear of crime in public spaces is a major policy problem worldwide. Environmental Crime Prevention proposes that modifying the built environment can reduce the fear of crime, but key questions remain: are these interventions equally effective across genders, and what int...

Waivers and frauds: The politics of regulation and claims-making in Indian microfinance

As microfinance has expanded in India, so have efforts to regulate the sector. The competing regulatory authority of the state governments and the central bank have produced unexpected refusals by borrowers to repay loans, claiming waivers. These waivers, however, are often found...

Exploring post-pandemic policies on staff testing, sickness pay and absence related to COVID and respiratory infections in English care homes

Abstract Background Residents of care homes for older people are at risk of illness and hospitalisation from respiratory infections. Care home industry pay and conditions may contribute to the risk that staff will transmit infection to residents at times when respiratory viruses...

Moral uncertainty and imaginative resistance

Abstract There has been a recent surge of interest in normative internalism, according to which what you ought to do depends on your beliefs about morality. This view has potentially wide-reaching implications for practical action, policy choice, and societal norms. The view is m...

Semi-pessimistic Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn an optimal policy from pre-collected data. However, it faces challenges of distributional shift, where the learned policy may encounter unseen scenarios not covered in the offline data. Additionally, numerous applications suffer from a...

Corporate Crime and Conceptions of a Corporate Person

Abstract I argue that our understanding of the basis for corporate criminal liability and punishment would be enhanced by bringing out the different conceptions of the company that the law commonly employs, in shaping liability and justifying punishment. These are the conceptions...

Tail-risk in real-time electricity pricing: Experimental evidence on preferences, perception and comprehension

Do households comprehend the nature of tail-risks inherent to real-time electricity pricing (RTP) plans? We develop a randomized and incentivized experiment calibrated to real-world price distributions and find that (a) probabilistic risk disclosure, beyond that offered in standa...

Ingroup bias is prevalent in user reports of hate and abuse online

Abstract The prevalence of online hate and abuse is a pressing global problem. While tackling such societal harms is a priority for research across the social sciences, it is a difficult task, in part, because of the magnitude of the problem. People's engagement with reporting me...

Echoes of growth: Demographic decoupling and path-dependent legacies in urban expansion across Europe

Urban expansion across Europe increasingly unfolds under heterogeneous demographic conditions. While population change has long structured interpretations of urban growth, recent evidence suggests urban expansion no longer adjusts to contemporary demographic dynamics as it once d...

Parenting under violence: comparing rural-urban coping and everyday peace strategies in Antioquia, Colombia

Caring practices are an area of growing interest in feminist debates on violence and are increasingly recognised as key strategies of everyday peacebuilding. Yet, among different caring strategies, parenting has rarely been analysed as a dimension of reproductive labour that is b...

Misremembering the past: a failure but not a malfunction

Abstract Episodic memories can fail to represent the past. We often forget, misremember, or make up histories we have never experienced. Yet according to the mnemonic function, episodic memory evolved for encoding, storing, and retrieving tolerably accurate representations of the...

Liability to Climate Defensive Harm: A Normic Risk Approach

Abstract Some authors have recently argued that people who emit large amounts of greenhouse gases are liable to defensive harm against their property. The main reason is that, according to recent estimates, a high emitter causes—in a matter of hours or days—a climate-related deat...

Forging fragility: Capitalogenic flows and landscapes in the Middle East

This theme issue introduces the concept of capitalogenic flows to explain how ‘fragile landscapes’ are forged across , and signify, the Middle East through infrastructures of extraction, militarisation and global supply chains. Drawing on critical political ecology and Capitaloce...

ESMA and EU Financial Market Governance Fifteen Years On: Soft Law, Functionality, and Expediency

Abstract This article examines the wide extent and diverse nature of ESMA soft law, including as regards its quasi-binding effects and its legitimation arrangements, some fifteen years after the 2011 establishment of ESMA. It finds that ESMA’s development and adoption of a range...

Determinants of life expectancy with unmet needs in the Chinese older population (revision 1)

Abstract This study investigates the determinants of and disparities in life expectancy (LE) with unmet long-term care needs among older people in China. The data come from four waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), a nationally representative surv...

Factors influencing FDA drug approval decisions beyond clinical trial evidence: a scoping review

Abstract Introduction The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval decisions are expected to rest primarily on clinical evidence, yet concerns persist about whether political pressure, commercial interests, or institutional dynamics also influence the approval process. Metho...

What’s historical about historical IR? narrativity, the philosophy of history and world order studies

Historical International Relations (HIR) represents a growing subfield within the wider discipline, offering a ‘history-first’ approach, lessening the grip of more theory and/or methods-driven scholarship. But this raises questions over the underlying philosophy guiding HIR schol...

The Autonomy Paradox: Artificial Intelligence and the Foundations of Political Behavior

Decades of research in political behavior show that citizens struggle with information, rely on cognitive shortcuts, and face barriers to participation. They are increasingly using AI tools to make sense of political information and express views, while interacting with platform...

Against Treason: An Argument from Political Obligation

Abstract There has been increasing scepticism about the meaning, relevance, and normative import of treason legislation. Relatedly, there is scepticism about whether treason constitutes a distinct moral wrong. These worries are often grounded in either the idea that the distincti...

Flexible firewalls: selective cooperation and strategic demarcation between centre-right and far-right parties in the EU

The success of far-right parties across Europe has sparked debate about whether centre-right parties maintain or abandon the cordon sanitaire against the far right. Moving beyond this binary, we conceptualise centre-right strategy in European Union politics as ‘flexible firewalls...