Political Studies Association prize awarded to Nuffield Fellow
Nuffield Senior Research Fellow Iain McLean has been awarded the Political Studies Association’s W J M Mackenzie Prize for his recent book The Way the Money Goes: the fiscal constitution and public spending in the UK, written in collaboration with former Associate Members Barbara Piotrowska and Maia King, as well as the late Christopher Hood.
The Political Studies Association is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. Its Mackenzie Prize is one of the most prestigious awards for academic research in political studies, and has been presented annually for nearly 40 years. 2025 marks the third time Iain has won this high-profile award, and we warmly congratulate him.
The Way the Money Goes originated a decade ago through a request from HM Treasury to the Nuffield Foundation to support research to rebuild the Treasury’s corporate memory of UK public expenditure control. The Foundation invited tenders for this project, which Iain and Christopher Hood won in 2016. Maia King, a former Treasury economist, and Barbara Piotrowska, a political scientist, joined the team as postdoctoral researchers. Every living Chancellor of the Exchequer and almost every Chief Secretary to the Treasury who served during the period covered by the book (1992-2015) was interviewed, as well as over 100 current and former officials and politicians. The results of this research were published several years later in this book, delayed in part by COVID-19.
In the book, Iain and his team examine how and why many core aspects of the UK's fiscal constitution have endured, despite extensive discussions about change and reform in areas ranging from parliamentary procedure to bureaucratic processes.
Iain says: ‘I am honoured and humbled to have won the W J M Mackenzie Prize jointly with the late Christopher Hood, and with our two superb postdocs Barbara Piotrowska and Maia King.
‘The Mackenzie Prize is awarded for the best UK book in political science published during the year. I have won it twice before (for State of the Union with Alistair McMillan, 2005, and for What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?, 2010. It would also have been Christopher’s third award of the prize. We are all saddened that Christopher died in January 2025. He was a great figure in the discipline. I am one of those commissioned to write a memoir of him for the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, which should appear this autumn.
‘All three of my prizewinning books were commissioned for Oxford University Press by Dominic Byatt (current Associate Member), another Nuffielder who has been OUP’s Commissioning Editor for politics for quite a number of years. He is another valued member of the team.’