A long-standing puzzle is whether powerful media outlets can shape public opinion when people self-select their news. A rare, exogenous event—the 30-year boycott of The Sun in Merseyside after the Hillsborough soccer disaster—creates leverage to answer that question. The boycott targeted the most important Eurosceptic tabloid in England and provides a quasi-experimental test of media effects on attitudes toward leaving the EU.
Did a new identity supplant traditional politics? This study investigates how opinions surrounding Britain's 2016 EU referendum birthed potent 'Brexit' identities.
How Markets Shape Values and Political Preferences: A Field Experiment
This research uses conjoint experiments conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom to test whether voters discriminate against candidates with disabilities. Candidates were presented with attributes that varied, including the presence of physical or sensory impairments, and respondents chose between competing profiles.
The coronavirus pandemic changed what news outlets covered in the United Kingdom, moving attention away from sharply political topics toward lifestyle, sports, and entertainment. Omar Hammoud Gallego, Roberto Stefan Foa, and Xavier Romero Vidal ask whether that depoliticization of media content altered how partisans evaluate democracy—and whether it reduced cross-party divides in those evaluations.
Omar Hammoud Gallego investigates whether a dramatic change in news content during the COVID-19 pandemic altered how citizens evaluate democracy. The paper asks whether a shift away from politically divisive coverage toward neutral topics reduced partisan differences in satisfaction with democratic performance in the United Kingdom.
This research examines how party campaign contacts affect tactical voting decisions among voters who have tactical incentives in three UK elections. The focus is on whether campaign outreach encourages voters to remain loyal to preferred but nonviable parties or to defect to alternative viable parties.
Patrick Bayer asks when and why local political conditions shape public views of international climate governance. Existing work finds that regions facing costly policy adjustments—like areas dependent on fossil fuels—tend to oppose international climate cooperation. Bayer tests whether features of regional politics alter that backlash, and whether those same regions might instead see international institutions as attractive alternatives to the national center.
This study evaluates how union sponsorship affected the electoral prospects of British parliamentary candidates throughout the 20th century. A new dataset was compiled covering the universe of union‑sponsored candidates to enable this long‑run analysis.
Does height affect voting behavior beyond income? This study explores how height serves as a useful proxy for economic status. Using data from the British Household Panel Study, researchers find taller individuals are more likely to vote Conservative and support conservative policies. A seemingly modest one-inch increase in height corresponds with a 0.6% higher probability of supporting Conservatives.
What drives legislators to use emotive rhetoric in parliamentary debates? The article argues that emotive rhetoric is a strategic tool for appealing to voters and predicts that legislators are more likely to use it in debates with a large general audience.
This article asks whether voter bias helps explain the near absence of politicians who are publicly HIV-positive. Using original nationally representative survey experiments in the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, the authors estimate how voters respond to hypothetical candidates with HIV and explore explanations for any observed penalty.
Conventional wisdom holds that terrorist attacks produce public “rally” support for incumbent executives. This study asks whether that pattern holds when the executive is a woman, focusing on right-leaning UK Prime Minister Theresa May—an incumbent with security credentials—after the 2017 Manchester Arena attack.
This study examines how online activism affects dyadic representation in the UK Parliament.
Support for leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum was significantly higher in U.K. regions most severely affected by economic globalization, particularly the import surge from China.
Does partisan dealignment weaken political parties by increasing MPs' incentives for personal vote seeking? This article tests that argument.
Identifying significant government policies has always been a challenge. This paper introduces an innovative method using positive unlabeled learning, where experts highlight just a few key outputs, then algorithms find others like them in large datasets.
Negativity Bias: How Framing of Immigration Influences Welfare State Attitudes
This paper argues that rulers may strengthen legal institutions during political crises to secure support and funds. Using newly compiled data on 12th-century English common law operations, the author examines changes following Richard I's kidnap in 1192. Analyses show the catastrophe led to increased Royal Court activity initially concentrated in vulnerable regions. This short-term effect appears persistent into later periods and eventually spread nationwide. Evidence from court funding shifts between 1184-1203 suggests crises can permanently enhance legal system capacity.
British politics saw significant ideological and partisan shifts between 1983 and 2016. New research examines polarization theories through repeated cross-section and panel data analyses, testing three prominent accounts.
Does geographical variation in tolerance towards specific ethnic groups reflect an underlying cultural trait? This study uses English data to test if anti-immigrant sentiment today correlates with medieval immigrant settlement patterns, despite modern immigration being different. It finds that the geographic persistence of attitudes is driven by a deep-rooted cultural characteristic rather than contemporary diversity.
This paper explores how trade politics influenced the emergence of progressive taxation in Europe before World War I. It argues that when labor interests aligned with elites through free trade coalitions, they secured compromise on redistributive policies.
This study explores Britons' attitudes toward environmental taxes through survey experiments.
This study revisits groundbreaking work by Sniderman et al., originally conducted in the Netherlands, to understand ethnic prejudice through threat perceptions. We now test this framework within Britain's distinct socio-political landscape.
Political text methods are used to estimate ideology and polarization from speech, but unsupervised approaches often assume that the dominant variation in text equals the quantity of interest. This assumption frequently fails in real speech data. The paper assesses how supervised approaches that incorporate party affiliation perform compared with unsupervised models when measuring polarization in parliamentary speech.
Does partisanship echo across household lines? This article examines how shared political identity influences electoral participation through relational selective consumption benefits. Using British household survey data, it provides empirical evidence that when individuals align with other family members' partisan loyalties, their likelihood to vote increases significantly.
How do parties compete? Not just by following citizens' issue priorities—but because they prioritize issues, citizens follow their leads.
This article examines how government support responds to social welfare rhetoric and spending in Britain, Spain, and the United States.
Why did poor, agricultural Denmark become a leader in mass public primary education (1814) with multiple tracks including vocational training? And why didn't rich industrial Britain create such systems until 1870?
What happens when open-list proportional representation elections replace closed-list ones? This article reveals that parties with internal disagreement on key issues may benefit. Under a closed system, voters tend to support unified parties; however, with open lists allowing candidate selection by voters, specific candidates within divided parties can attract supporters.
Political scientists often convert treatments with multiple intensities (for example, years of schooling) into coarser measures (for example, a binary indicator for completing high school). This common choice can substantially upwardly bias instrumental variable (IV) estimates by subtly violating the exclusion restriction, producing misleading causal inferences.
Most ideal-point estimation assumes legislators vote according to spatial (policy) preferences. That assumption ignores non-policy, tactical motives and can produce implausible results in many legislatures—especially in parliamentary systems where party strategy and motion origin matter.
This article explores how geography shapes electoral outcomes in multi-party systems. By analyzing Great Britain elections, it demonstrates that territorial concentration significantly influences a party's seat gains or losses.
The anti-prejudice norm and the motivation to comply with it significantly influence political preferences among majority populations, argues this research. Existing studies often overlook these internalized social pressures against minority bias. This paper introduces measures capturing such motivations and demonstrates they affect voting behavior through experiments and surveys in Britain and Germany. The findings support a dual-process model: while negative stereotypes may exist, contextual signals can activate individuals' better angels to act against prejudice.
A fresh statistical approach for multiparty electoral data promises to transform comparative politics research.