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Talking about economic reform, Jean-Claude Juncker once remarked: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it”. That politicians get punished for welfare cutbacks used to be a truism in politics and academia. A couple of years later, we are not so sure anymore. Here, Paul Marx and Gijs Schumacher outline how important framing policy is, and how undecided voters might be more easily swayed by particular messages to support welfare cuts.

While no member state has ever left the European Union, Greenland opted to leave the EEC in 1985. Ulrik Pram Gad assesses what lessons the case of Greenland might have for the UK following its decision to leave the EU. He suggests that while the two situations are radically different, Greenland could serve as inspiration for a model in which Scotland, Northern Ireland and Gibraltar could retain membership of the EU while England and Wales pursue their own arrangements.

Mock elections help 16- and 17-year-olds understand how elections work. But do they make adults more likely to back lowering the voting age to 16? Erik Gahner Larsen, Klaus Levinsen and Ulrik Kjær looked at the 2009 local elections in Denmark, when a number of municipalities held mock elections alongside the real ones. They found that they did make over-18s more positive about votes at 16, though a stubborn core of older and more right-wing voters remained hostile to the idea.

A new project aims to open academic writing practice to reflections and experiments with the actual process of writing, with a view to creating new, open research products that have an impact on peers, public and policymakers. Ninna Meier and Charlotte Wegener outline their vision for the Open Writing project, its importance, and why Open Science must be about more than merely free access to academic research.

Coming so soon after the SNP’s storming victory in the Scottish Parliamentary elections in May, many had expected an SNP victory, or at least a very close result, in last weeks’ Inverclyde by-election. Lewis Baston writes that while Labour’s victory comes as a surprise (as does the poor Liberal Democrat showing), the result does not indicate a real swing back to Labour from the SNP.

To drive your digital transformation, you need to become skilful in connecting the past, present and future in a compelling story, write Verena Stingl, Marcus Lantz and Josef Oehmen

The underrepresentation of women in politics is often portrayed as a pyramid, with the main problem identified as too few at the top. However, research by Ulrik Kjær and Karina Kosiara-Pedersen, shows that, in the case of Denmark, it follows an hourglass pattern, with underrepresentation worst at the intermediary stages of party membership and candidate identification. This suggests that party strategies for encouraging women to stand are important for improving representation.

Our ‘publish or perish’ mentality is sacrificing more imaginative and innovative ideas. Looking at the field of Management studies, Marcel Bogers writes that a troubling shortage of novel academic ideas must be tackled by new institutional conditions, rethinking professional norms and cultivating a more scholarly identity.

When I started running the numbers at the end of January, I reluctantly began to draw my own conclusions regarding plausible future scenarios. I had a hard time convincing myself. I subsequently (re) learned that good old fashioned ‘denial’ is the first step of dealing with any crisis. As any good academic, I had written about it, but was strangely irritated when I experienced it myself. First, inside my own head, then with people I talked to. I’m writing when the coronavirus pandemic is in its initial stages. We are collectively snapping out of ‘denial’ right now, which is followed by panic, then anger, and eventually, a new pragmatism (discussed nicely by Karl Taro Greenfeld in this article for The Atlantic). I want to share some thoughts on fast-tracking your organisation towards the ‘new pragmatism’ stage. If you think risk management is a fairly specialised field, wait until you discover the many tribes that share it and constantly bicker about what exactly it is and means. I will highlight some thinking principles from corners that rarely make front page news: deep uncertainty, resilience and psychometric risk assessment.

Soon, we will all have convinced ourselves that we knew all along what was going to happen. Hindsight bias is how our brain manages its scarce resources and protects us from losing faith.The reality is that for the time being, both policy makers and business leaders have to keep making some of the biggest decisions of their lives under some of the worst uncertainty of their lives. In a previous article, we talked about how we can use resilience thinking to make better choices. Today, we want to look at another crucial aspect: how can we ensure the legitimacy of our actions, i.e., reflect on how much support we can expect from the general public or our employees for what we are about to ask of them.Megaproject management may not be the first area of expertise you turn to for advice in the current situation. We will explain in a little while why you should. Our interest in megaproject management focuses on the risk management side of things, particularly risks surrounding public support (or opposition) of these rather impactful and wide ranging endeavours. Here is why looking at megaprojects for inspiration in the current situation is interesting: They are very significant investments, they cause changes at societal scale (at least locally), they are unique, with a significant dose of first-of-a-kind actions, and at some point they are over and transition what they build into operations. That does sound a bit familiar these days.While legitimacy is important, there are also other factors. Most notably, legality and feasibility. A common pitfall for managers of megaprojects and business leaders or policymakers alike, is to take action that is legal (or at least: later legalised) and feasible, but not seen as legitimate. That leads into dangerous territory of provoking significant resistance.There are three aspects to the legitimacy of megaprojects that also apply to the legitimacy of the rather drastic actions being taken today by governments and business leaders.