Research students

Graduated since 2000 


Lodge, Martin (PhD at LSE, awarded 2000) "On Different Tracks: Institutions and Railway Regulation in Britain and Germany." Study of regulatory regimes in the British and German railways at three points in time: post-First World War, post-Second World War and the 1990s, seeking to explain why some reform templates were used but not others. A revised version was published as "On Different Tracks: Designing Railway Regulation in Britain and Germany"(Praeger 2002). Martin Lodge is now Professor in Political Science and Public Policy at the Department of Government, London School of Economics.



Curristine, Teresa (Oxford DPhil awarded 2003) "Reforming Civil Service Accountability in the US and UK: Two Highways Agencies Compared." Study of the implementation of performance-based accountability reforms, in the US and UK, looking at the case of highways agencies. Teresa Curristine is now working in the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund in Washington.



Jennings, Will (Oxford DPhil, awarded 2004) "Policy, Implementation and Public Opinion (Public Celebrations Canada 1967, U.S.A. 1976, Australia 1988, and the United Kingdom 2000)." Study of the relationship between policy-making and public opinion in four cases of public celebrations. Will Jennings is now Professor of Politics at the University of Southampton.



Carvalho Borges, André (Oxford DPhil, awarded 2005) "Politics, Education and Democracy: An Analysis of State-Level Reforms of School Governance in Brazil." Study of 1990s moves to elect school principals in state schools in Brazil, comparing Bahia, Ceará and Minas Gerais. André Carvalho Borges is working in the Department of Political Science of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul at Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil. He teaches courses on research methodology and public policy analysis, and is working on a research project on political representation, territorial inequalities and education spending in Brazil.



Stirton, Lindsay (PhD at LSE, awarded 2005) "Regulatory Governance in the UK National Health Service." Study of the development and impact of regulation in health care in the UK. Lindsay Stirton is now Professor of Public Law at the University of Sussex.



Jansky, Radomir (Oxford DPhil, awarded 2005) "The Cognitive Dimension of European Union Policy Making: The Role of Evaluation in European Union Regional Policy." Study of the role of evaluation in the policy process, looking at the case of Structural Funds policy in the EU in the 1988, 1993 and 1999 Structural Funds reforms. Radomir Jansky now works at the European Commission, the General Secretariat's President's and Vice-President's Briefing Unit.



Sulitzeanu-Kenan, Raanan  (Oxford DPhil, awarded 2006) "Blame Avoidance and the Politics of National Public Inquiries in the UK – 1984-2003." Systematic study of public inquiries (and decisions not to set up public inquiries) from a blame-avoidance perspective. Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan is now Lecturer in Political Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.



Gilad, Sharon (Oxford DPhil, awarded 2007) "An Intra-Organisational Perspective on the Role of Consumer Complaint Handling in the UK Retail Investment Regime (1981-2004)." Study of how regulatory responsiveness is shaped by external and internal factors, focusing on the critical case of UK long term insurance regulation. Sharon Gilad is now Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and the Federman School of Public Policy, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.



Broesamle, Klaus (Oxford DPhil awarded 2011) "Careering Bureaucrats and Bureacrats' Careers." Klaus Broesamle joined the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, in February 2011 as a Post-Doctoral researcher to work on careers, promotions and incentives in government organisations.



Krogstad, Erlend (Oxford DPhil awarded 2012) "Enduring Challenges of Statebuilding British-led Police Reforms in Sierra Leone, 1945-1961 and 1998-2007." Erlend Krogstad is currently working as an advisor in the climate negotiating team at the Norwegian Ministry of the Environment where his work is focused on climate finance.



Douglas, Scott (Oxford DPhil awarded 2012) "Success Nonetheless: Making Public Utilities Work in Small-Scale Democracies despite Social Capital Difficulties", survey of public utility providers in the Caribbean, which manage to succeed in delivering public value despite difficult societal circumstances. Scott Douglas is now an Assistant Professor in public management at the University of Utrecht.



McManigal, Barney (Oxford DPhil awarded 2013) 'Controlling Controversial Science: Biotechnology Policy in Britain and the United States (1984-2004) Examines first-generation regulatory policies for controversial science and technology, taking the cases of agricultural genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and human embryonic stem cell research in the UK and the United States over two decades from 1984 to 2004. The study recounts the biography of key policy documents in each case from a mixture of documentary sources and elite interviews, and describes and explains the different regimes that emerged for GMOs and stem cell research in the two countries. Barney McManigal worked at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change as a policy and strategy adviser in 2014-2015, was Policy Manager, Association for Decentralized Energy 2016-2017 and is currently Interim Head of Advocacy and Communications, Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network since 2017.



Hackett, Ursula (Oxford DPhil awarded 2013) "Explaining Sub-National Variation in Indirect Religious School Aid in the US." Examines cross-state variation in indirect public expenditure on private religious schools in America and shows that lower levels of government, due to particular constituency, international and bureaucratic pressures, are more supportive of expenditure on religious school pupils than higher levels of government. Ursula Hackett is currently a lecturer in Political Science at King's College London.



Goetze, Stefan (DPhil Oxford awarded 2015) "The Transformation of East German Police after German Unification." Explores the transformation of the East German police in the wake of German unification, and interprets weak performance of police departments as a product of a lack of career incentives for managers - an unintended consequence of the politics of administrative transformation in East Germany. Stefan Goetze is currently working at the University of Mannheim


Lopez Murcia, Julian (DPhil Oxford awarded 2017) "Recentralisation and its Causes: Colombia, 1994-2014." This thesis aims to explain why and how after a comprehensive set of decentralising
processes, Colombia experienced significant recentralising policies and reforms (1994-2014), contrary to what was expected by leading works on decentralisation in Latin America, and in a way that the existing hypotheses on recentralisation cannot fully account for. It argues that Colombia’s recentralisation was the product of interaction between institutional context and economic boom or crisis. Julian Lopez Murcia is currently Superintendent of Water Supply and Sanitation at the Superintendency of Public Utilities (SSPD), Bogota, Colombia.



Completing and in Progress 

Bilmes, Linda, DPhil on the United States financing of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in historical perspective.