In 2025, three new colleagues joined Government and Opposition’s editorial team. We are delighted to welcome Rene Bailey, our managing editor; Dr Olivia Cheung, our Michael Moran associate editor; and Dr Edalina Rodrigues Sanches, our Robert Elgie associate editor, to Government and Opposition. 

For more information about our new colleagues, please read on.

Rene Bailey joined Government and Opposition as Managing Editor at the beginning of September 2025, bringing with her a wide range of personal and professional expertise. She has a BA and MA in European Studies and has spent several years in Eastern Europe, working variously as a teacher of English, translator and interpreter, and local representative for Oxford University Press. In 2006 a series of unintended consequences led her into journal editing, when she was appointed Managing Editor of Political Studies. She stayed in the role until 2017, after which she worked in a freelance capacity for Routledge social science publications, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Asia Dialogue, among others. She is currently completing an MA in Historical Research at the University of Sheffield, where she is researching questions of nationalism and identity in the Slovak-Hungarian borderlands. She is competent in French, German, Czech, Hungarian and Spanish.

Dr Olivia Cheung is Lecturer in Politics at King’s College London. Her research examines Chinese politics and foreign policy, international orders, and ideological competition. Her books include China’s Global Strategy under Xi Jinping (OUP, 2026), The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (OUP, 2024), and Factional-Ideological Conflicts in Chinese Politics: To the Left or to the Right? (AUP, 2023). She holds the DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford and has held positions at SOAS University of London and the University of Warwick.

Dr Edalina Rodrigues Sanches is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences – University of Lisbon.  Her research interests include democratisation, political representation, political protest, parties and party systems with a focus on Africa. Her research has been published in journals such Legislative Studies Quarterly, Politics and Governance, Party Politics, African Affairs, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Parliamentary Affairs, Electoral Studies, among others. Her first bookParty Systems in Young Democracies: Varieties of institutionalization in Sub-Saharan Africa (Routledge, 2018), is the result of her PhD thesis, which was awarded the Prize for Best PhD Thesis by the Portuguese Political Science Association (2016). She recently edited the book Popular Protest, Political Opportunities, and Change in Africa (Routledge, 2022); and currently leads a project funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology that investigates the causes and consequences of constituency service in Africa.