The team

Dr. Lucy Barnes

Lucy is Associate Professor in Comparative Politics. She joined the Department in 2016 from the University Kent, where she worked as Lecturer in Quantitative Politics. She studied Political Economy and Government (AM, PhD) at Harvard University, and Philosophy, Politics and Economics (BA) at Oxford. She has also held research fellowships at Trinity College, Dublin, and was Prize Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, where she remains an Associate Member.

In 2019 Lucy became part of the first cohort of UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellows, winning four years of grant funding for her project on Mental Models and Political Economy. 

Research

Lucy’s research focuses on the politics of economic policymaking in rich, western democracies (including the UK). Her current projects encompass three main themes. First, the Mental Models and Political Economy project seeks to understand how people understand the economy, and how these understandings vary across different types of political actor (the public, policymakers, and journalists) and across countries (the UK, France, Germany, Denmark and the United States). Related work considers public views and experiences of risk and inequality through the lens of their treatments in political philosophy. Second, Lucy is interested in the politics of government budgets, and in particular how borrowing, spending and taxation are traded off against one another. Joint work with Ben Lauderdale and Jack Blumenau focuses on how to measure public attitudes in the context of these complicated trade-offs, and work with Tim Hicks seeks to understand the politics of austerity after the financial crisis, both in Britain and beyond. Finally, Lucy is particularly interested in the politics of taxation, especially in relation to redistribution and inequality.

Selected Publications

• Trade and Redistribution: Trade Politics and the Origins of Progressive Taxation, Political Science Research & Methods, forthcoming
• Risk and Self-Respect, British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming (with Alice Baderin).
• The Politics of Domestic Taxation, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics
• Making Austerity Popular: The Media and Mass Attitudes Towards Fiscal Policy, American Journal of Political Science 62(2), 2018, pp. 340—354 (with Timothy Hicks)
• Information, Knowledge and Attitudes: An Evaluation of the Taxpayer Receipt. Journal of Politics 80(2), 2018, pp. 701-706 (with Avi Feller, Jake Haselswerdt and Ethan Porter).

Dr. Anna Killick 

Anna is post-doctoral research fellow on the MENMOPE project. Between 2016 and 2018 she used interviews and focus groups to explore how people understand the term 'the economy' and different aspects of it, like debt and employment. This research, based in one city, suggested different groups think differently about the economy. However, it will be interesting to extend and deepen our knowledge about what mental models of the economy in a larger sample, a core aim of the MENMOPE project. Anna will be interviewing politicians to explore their mental models, across the main parties and in all five countries; Denmark, Germany, USA, UK and France. Before becoming a researcher Anna worked as a school teacher in the UK.

Marie Schwarzkopf 

Marie is research assistant on the MENMOPE project. She just completed her undergraduate studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at UCL. Assisting in various steps of the research project, including the design and roll-out of the survey, allows her to pursue her interests in those subjects, while also learning practical research skills from the team.