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 citizens as well as other approaches 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 £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.

Tom Long's latest article, with Sebastián Bitar of Universidad de los Andes, has been published in the journal Revista CIDOB d'affers Internationals, a top Spanish IR journal. Entitled "Del consenso a la complejidad: relaciones interamericanas diversas y en transición" [From the Consensus to complexity: Interamerican Relations, Diverse and in Transition], the article examines the changing panorama of US-Latin American relations. The article is part of a special issue on changing geopolitics as seen from Latin America, edited by Ariel Sribman Mittelman and Mélany Barragán.

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’s actionable mitigation policies, leaving us prisoners of our climate polluting past.