A Neuropolitical Understanding of Government and Opposition
14th November 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM GMT
Government and Opposition Leonard Schapiro Memorial Lecture 2024
The Government and Opposition Leonard Schapiro Memorial Lecture is given annually in honour of Leonard Schapiro, one of the journal’s founding editors.
Laura Cram, Professor of Neuropolitics and Director of the Neuropolitics Research Lab at the University of Edinburgh will be giving this year’s Schapiro Lecture for Government and Opposition on ‘A Neuropolitical Understanding of Government & Opposition’. Her analysis is of significant contemporary significance, highlighting the challenges to good governance that obtain in often highly polarised decision environments.
Professor Cram’s lecture will be followed by an opportunity for audience questions and a further chance for conversation during the wine reception for attendees.
The event will be live-streamed on Thursday 14 November, from 18:00-19:15
Abstract
This lecture examines the concepts of Government and Opposition from a neuropolitical perspective. The lecture will introduce neuropolitics and explore how insights from this psychophysiology and the cognitive neurosciences can help to illuminate the underlying mechanisms through which decisions and compromises are made, or fail, to be made in often polarized governing environments. Drawing together her decades of research on the European policy process and her lab’s current work on the neuropolitics of identity and decision-making, Professor Cram will offer new insights into the implications of adversarial positioning of government and opposition, for governance outcomes.
Speaker biography
Laura Cram is Professor of Neuropolitics and Director of the Neuropolitics Research Lab(NRLabs) at the University of Edinburgh. Her lab uses experimental approaches, including fMRI brain scanning, face-emotion coding, eye-tracking and biometric measures along with social computational approaches to get ‘under the hood’ of political attitudes, identities and behaviours. She has also published widely on the European Union (EU) policy process and on EU identity. She held a Senior Fellowship on the Economic and Social Research Council’s UK in a Changing Europe programme, explore the insights that cognitive neuroscience could offer into contemporary debates on the UK’s EU membership of the EU. She was a contributing author to the EU Commission’s 2019 study Understanding our Political Nature: How to put knowledge and reason at the heart of political decision-making. She acted as Special Advisor to the Scottish Parliament’s, European and External Relations Committee, on the Inquiry into the Impact of the Treaty of Lisbon on Scotland. She has provided evidence to the Houses of Lords and Houses of Commons in the UK and works closely with industrial partners and government officials in her research. She has been cited in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Economist, Financial Times, Irish Times, Telegraph, the Conversation, BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera, CNN, International Associated Press. Her lab’s work has featured in BBC documentaries on the process of political decision-making. She was co-editor of Government and Opposition 2018-2024.
