The Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society (CEPS) is delighted to announce that its researcher Manuel Sá Valente, together with Axel Gosseries (UCLouvain), has been awarded the 2026 Brian Barry Prize in Political Science for their essay “Long-Term Decisions and Youth Empowerment”.

Awarded annually by the British Academy in partnership with Cambridge University Press and the British Journal of Political Science, the Brian Barry Prize recognises excellence in political science. The winning essay is going to be published in the British Journal of Political Science, and the prize carries an award of £1,500.

The prize-winning essay addresses a central question in democratic theory: how should political decision-making account for the fact that long-term decisions often have a greater impact on younger generations? While some arguments for youth empowerment maintain that young people’s votes should carry greater weight when decisions have long-term consequences, Sá Valente and Gosseries systematically reconstruct the normative foundations of this position and identify several challenges to its justification. Their work brings political philosophy into dialogue with empirical considerations, contributing to ongoing debates on democracy, political equality and intergenerational justice.

The prize honours Brian Barry (1936–2009), a distinguished political philosopher and Fellow of the British Academy whose work brought together analytical philosophy, political theory, social choice theory and the social sciences.