I'm a governance and public administration specialist, and my work has ranged across local government, devolution and accountability — and, in recent years, public leadership in China and the net-zero agenda. The themes below organise that work; the full record sits on the Publications page.
I began with quangos — the subject of my MPhil thesis — and with the question that has shaped much of my career since: how is power held to account? Across early research appointments and my PhD on local government modernisation, that question played out through executive and scrutiny reforms, member allowances, the roles of councillors, local elections, departmentalism, community appraisals, consultations and boundary change. Since arriving at Liverpool I have extended it to UK devolved governance and, latterly, to a more managerial agenda — students' unions, workplace issues, and public leadership in China.
The accountability of quangos and quasi-government, and the modernisation of British local government — executive and scrutiny reforms, member allowances, councillor roles, local elections, departmentalism and structure.
How devolution reshaped the way legislatures hold the executive to account — committee scrutiny in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, studied comparatively and across constitutional settings. Includes a report used to inform the reform of Welsh governance.
Public leadership and governance in China — provincial perspectives on the promotion and performance of political leaders, the workings of the Chinese stock market, and the state's use of social media during COVID-19. Much of this work is with Dr Jiajing Sun.
Key outputs
My latest completed project addresses the net-zero agenda: the relationships between innovation, governmental capability and carbon dioxide emissions. It includes global, comparative studies of decarbonization as a 'super-wicked problem' and a re-reading of the pollution haven hypothesis through 'climate capitalism'.
Key outputs
A more managerial line of enquiry: the changing functions of university students' unions in UK and comparative perspective, workplace issues, and the 'shared workplace' agenda.
Current collaborative papers in progress and preprints, listed with public project or preprint links where available.
Studies how the Yangtze River Delta's 2013 enlargement reshaped the geography of economic gains, using city-specific synthetic controls for 99 prefectures from 2004 to 2017 and event-time analysis designed to account for spatial spillovers.
Examines how environmental policy stringency relates to the composition of embodied carbon and grey-water footprints in global supply chains, using Eora26 final-demand footprints for 40 countries and 25 industries over 2010-2018.
Studies how migration-control institutions shape post-migration job quality, using a 2009 survey of 2,398 non-local-hukou workers across 12 destination labour markets in China.
Treats political turnover as a stress test for innovation-system resilience, using R&D and patent indicators for 45 economies from 1980 to 2020. The analysis distinguishes leader-only turnover from leader-and-party turnover and estimates dynamic switcher-based difference-in-differences models for recurring political-turnover events.
Analyses China's Hukou system as a membership architecture in which formal status assigns claims, while administrative gateways determine whether those claims become usable entitlements. The paper uses an original 2018 survey from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to examine healthcare, housing, education and consumption outcomes.
Recurring threads
At various points across my career, I have also researched and published on:
Research centre