Author: Matthew Flinders, Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics, University of Sheffield

The Nobel prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom once wrote about “the danger of self-evident truths” within academic research, warning that they were often wrong, or at the very least misleading. Since its earliest emergence as an academic discipline, political science has been forged around the self-evident truth that “blame is bad” and that any rational politician […]