Biography

Dr Will Jennings is ESRC / Hallsworth Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, and a Research Associate at the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the London School of Economics and Political Science, working on a project titled “Going for Gold: The Olympics, Risk and Risk Management” (ESRC Reference: RES-063-27-0205). Dr Jennings’ research interests include responsiveness of government to public opinion, agenda-setting and the politics of attention, blame avoidance and blame management by public officeholders and the politics and management of risk in mega-projects and mega-events, such as the Millennium Dome and London 2012. His research applies both quantitative (e.g. time series analysis, network analysis) and qualitative (e.g. archival, interview) methods.

Dr Jennings’ doctoral research (University of Oxford, 2001 to 2004) presented a qualitative analysis of the relationship between government policies of celebration and public opinion in cases drawn from the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. In particular it focused on the responsiveness of policy-makers and bureaucrats to public opinion, and their degree of success in implementing programmes of celebration. It explored the different ways in which the organizers gauged, framed and influenced public opinion, through polling, qualitative opinion research, and public relations programmes. At the same time it considered responses of the public to different types of celebratory policy and promotional strategies (such as the problems with marketing the Millennium Dome, despite extensive market research).

Research Interests

Dr Jennings is Co-Director of the ‘UK Policy Agendas Project’. As part of the Comparative Agendas Project directed by Professor Frank Baumgartner of Pennsylvania State University, this research explores the nature of political attention in the UK Parliament between 1900 and 2008 and is funded by the ESRC (ESRC Reference: ‘Legislative policy agendas in the UK’) as part of a European Science Foundation (ESF) Eurocores application, ‘The Politics of Attention: West European politics and agenda-setting in times of change’, led by Professor Stefaan Walgrave, University of Antwerp. This research applies the policy content coding framework of the original US Policy Agendas Project and applies quantitative methods to analyse dynamics of policy-making attention with particular reference to concepts of feedback, equilibrium and ‘error-correction’.

At present, Dr Jennings’ research explores the nature of both governmental and organizational responses to risk in bidding for, planning and staging of the Olympic Games. One of its main aims is to analyse the degree to which ‘risk’ is a mobilizing concept within the Olympic movement and in staging of the Games as well as to identify and analyse the specific systems, instruments and modes of ‘risk management’ used by Olympic organizers (e.g. insurance, budgetary controls). This also considers the nature of reputational risk for Olympic organizers in protection of the Olympic brand and its relationship with operational risk and also in the importance of public opinion to the IOC and to host cities.