About
Kate Alexander-Shaw is a teaching fellow in the political economy group in the European Institute.
She specialises in British and EU politics and comparative political economy, with a particular interest in the politics of economic ideas, and the politics of crisis. She has published on topics including polity formation in the European Union, theories of crisis, the Covid-19 crisis in the EU and US, economic policy in the UK, income inequality in Britain and the comparative politics of intergenerational fairness in post-crisis Europe.
From 2020-2025 Kate was a Research Officer on the ERC-funded project SOLID – Policy Crisis and Crisis Politics: Sovereignty, Solidarity and Identity in the EU post-2008, which was a collaboration between the LSE, University of Milan and the European University Institute. The project produced landmark research on the European Union's crisis years since 2008, and the ways in which crises have reshaped the EU as a polity.
Kate gained her PhD in 2018 from the LSE’s Department of Government. Her doctoral work developed a theory of the life-cycle of economic policy narratives under conditions of both stability and crisis, looking particularly at the New Labour government of the UK (1997-2010).
She is a board member at The Political Quarterly, where she also co-edits the Reports and Surveys section of the journal. She has previously been a visiting fellow at Brown University, and an affiliate researcher at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI).
Kate holds an MRes in qualitative political science research methods from the LSE, and a BA in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Prior to her PhD, she worked as a senior policy analyst at the Greater London Authority and at HM Treasury.
Expertise
- Political Science
- Political economy
- Economic Policy
- European Union
- United Kingdom
- Qualitative methods