Albert Weale is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy in the Department of Political Science, University College London, where he still teaches and researches. Earlier in his career he worked at the Universities of Newcastle, York, East Anglia and Essex. He stayed at Essex more than 17 years.
His research and writing have concentrated on issues of political theory and public policy, especially health policy, environmental policy, the theory of justice and democratic theory. In addition to over one hundred papers and chapters, he has authored, co-authored or co-edited nineteen books.
He has published widely on social values and health policy, editing Cost and Choice in Health Care for the King’s Fund in 1988 and, as part of the KCL/UCL Social Values Group, has recent articles in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Journal of Health Organization and Managementand the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal.
In environmental policy, his works include The New Politics of Pollution (Manchester University Press, 1992) and with others Environmental Governance in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2000), as well as the edited Risk, Democratic Citizenship and Public Policy (Oxford University Press, 2002).
His work on environmental policy led to research on the European Union more generally and in this field his published work includes, as sole author, Democratic Citizenship and the European Union (Manchester University Press, 2005), as co-author and as co-editor Citizenship, Democracy and Justice in the New Europe, with Percy Lehning (Routledge, 1997) and Political Theory and the European Union, with Michael Nentwich (Routledge, 1998).
His latest book. Modern Social Contract Theory, was published by Oxford University Press in June 2020, and it is the first systematic study of the full range of those modern social contract theories that have been developed since 1950. The work follows from his previous book Democratic Justice and the Social Contract (Oxford University Press, 2013). In September 2018 he published The Will of the People: A Modern Myth (Polity Press), a response to the misplaced populism of the Conservative Party in the wake of the 2016 referendum and the global trend against the principles of constitutional democracy.
He is a former co-editor of two books series, Issues in Political Theory (Macmillan) and Issues in Environmental Politics (Manchester University Press), as well as of the British Journal of Political Science.
In 1998 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and between 2008 and 2012 was one of its Vice-Presidents with special responsibility for Public Policy. In 2013 he awarded a CBE for services to Political Science.