Academic Job Market Trends in Politics and International Relations: Evidence from the UK, 2012-25

Authored by: Dr Ralph Scott, Dr Lawrence McKay, and Dr William Allen

Read the full report here

Executive Summary

In this report we present new evidence on the state of the UK academic job market in Politics and International Relations. This is in the context of universities facing increasingly serious financial difficulties following changes to higher education funding, Covid-19,and subsequent severe inflation that have led to redundancies and retrenchment in hiring. However, given these issues, there has been little sustained study of recent dynamics in hiring across the range of academic roles.

We address this gap through quantitative analysis of three datasets to explore trends in the academic job market in Politics from 2012 to 2025: official Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA) data; aggregate job market data gathered from Internet Archive snapshots of jobs.ac.uk; and data on weekly new jobs from an archive of jobs.ac.uk emailed job alerts. Through this we provide the first account of the slowdown in UK academic hiring in Politics, in which we include International Relations, Government and other cognate disciplines. By doing so, we highlight significant consequences both for early career researchers in search of academic posts and more established scholars who are being increasingly squeezed.

Our key findings are as follows:

1. Staff spending in Politics departments has fallen in real terms since 2019-20, a dramatic reversal from a 28% real-terms increase between 2015-16 and 2019-20.
2. The recovery from Covid-19 has been weak: academic staff numbers and advertising rates fell in 2020-1, and neither have recovered to their pre-Covid trend.
3. The 2025 calendar year saw the lowest number of Politics jobs advertised on record, at 469, compared with a 2012-2024 mean of 836 a year.
4. Universities are spending less per academic member of staff: total staff spend per FTE employee has seen a marked decline when adjusted for inflation. As compared to 2019-20, real-terms pay is roughly £2,700 (or 7%) lower.
5. Research-intensive (RI) institutions have broken away from the pack in terms of staff numbers, while non-RI institutions employ fewer staff in Politics than in 2019-20.
6. The discipline is ageing: under-35s represent a declining share of staff, and there is some evidence for a ‘cohort effect’ working to the detriment of younger staff.
7. Much of the growth in jobs leading up to the post-Covid decline was in temporary jobs, particularly postdocs. While traditional teaching and research roles remain the most common type of contract, post-docs are the most common jobs advertised over this period (32%) with entry-level lectureships behind these at 23%, PhD positions at 14% and teaching-only roles at 11%.
8. Progress on diversity is mixed: ethnic minority presence has grown steadily; disabled people’s presence is increasing but remains low (at just 8% of staff in 2024-25); women’s presence may be stalling.

We conclude by arguing that in the absence of meaningful structural change to universities’ finances, this presents a troubling picture for the foreseeable future – not just for early career researchers hit hardest by the sudden collapse in opportunities, but also for more established colleagues whose work will become ever more intensified, and for the discipline and the sector as a whole. This risks losing a generation of academic researchers in a particularly wasteful form of ‘uncreative destruction’.