National Productivity Week 27th January 2025 | Visit Website

A diverse community of leading experts, policymakers and practitioners

The Institute’s key research themes are led by ten academic partners spread across the UK.

Working closely with policymakers

We’re a UK-wide research organisation exploring what productivity means for business

Businesses are crucial to solving the UK’s productivity problems.

Dr Sam Warner

Lecturer, the University of Bristol

Research Theme: Institutions and Governance

Career

Sam Warner is a lecturer in Politics at the University of Bristol. Before this, Sam was a Research Associate at the Productivity Institute, based in the Department of Politics, University of Manchester. As part of the Productivity Institute’s Institutions and Governance theme, Sam’s research explored the extent to which productivity growth is constrained by the UK’s heavily centralised institutional landscape.  Between 2020 and 2023, Sam was a Research Associate on the Nuffield Foundation funded project ‘Public Expenditure Planning and Control in Complex Times‘. This research focuses on a tension between a highly centralised system of financial management and control and an increasingly fragmented system of governance. Previously, Sam worked as an Associate Lecturer at the University of York (2019-20) and Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham (2017-19). In 2018, he completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Birmingham and an MA in British Politics and the State, also at Birmingham, in 2012. Sam articles have been published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, British Politics, The Political Quarterly and The Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. His book, Who Governs Britain: Trade Unions, the Conservative Party and the failure of the Industrial Relations Act 1971, was published by Manchester University Press in April 2023.

Research Project The UK Productivity-Governance Puzzle: Are the UK’s Governing Institutions Fit for Purpose in the 21st Century?