British Election Research Articles

Mental health and the ballot box: A correlational analysis of Google searches for mental health and national election periods in the United States and the United Kingdom from 2008 to 2020.

In electoral contexts, mental health topics have recently attracted sociopolitical relevance, influenced by policy developments, election-related psychopathology and popular discourse about individual candidates. Yet, whether this reflects generalised trends or is contingent on election-specific and contextual factors remains difficult to ascertain. This study sought to examine correlations between Google Trends (GT) data on mental health and four national elections in the US and the UK from 2008 to 2020. This was intended to yield preliminary insights into the relevance of mental health topics amongst voters and the potential impact of electoral cycles on patterns of online engagement with these issues. Monthly and daily Search Volume Indexes (SVI) were gathered from the 'Mental Health' category on GT in the US and UK from 2008 to 2023. SVI were evaluated around the past four national ballots, comparing election-year intervals and baseline data from the preceding year. Statistical tests were conducted to assess SVI and short- and long-term dynamics. The results showed heterogeneous SVI patterns related to mental health during elections in the US and the UK. In the US, there were statistically significant SVI increases proximal to the majority of elections as compared to data in the same calendar year, but these did not typically exceed baseline SVI. However, interestingly, divisive US contests showed correlations with several elevated SVI measures in the same and previous years. Conversely, there was a lack of consistent longitudinal trends in UK elections, perhaps informed by its disparate sociopolitical landscape. These findings underline the composite relationship between electoral politics and popular engagement with mental health topics around national votes, suggesting that this is driven more by situational factors rather than a recurrent electoral effect or signs of burgeoning engagement. Detailed research is required to understand the nuances and causality behind these dynamics and their wider implications.

Voted in, standing out: Public response to immigrants' political accession

AbstractHow do dominant‐group natives react to immigrants' political integration? We argue that ethnic minority immigrants winning political office makes natives feel threatened, triggering animosity. We test this dynamic across the 2010–2019 UK general elections, using hate crime police records, public opinion data, and text data from over 500,000 regional and local newspaper articles. While past work has not established a causal relationship between minorities' political power gains and dominant‐group animosity, we identify natives' hostile reactions with a regression discontinuity design that leverages close election results between immigrant‐origin ethnic minority and dominant‐group candidates. We find that minority victories increase hate crimes by 67%, exclusionary attitudes by 66%, and negative media coverage of immigrant groups by 110%. Consistent with power threat and social identity theories, these findings demonstrate a strong and widespread negative reaction—encompassing a violence‐prone fringe and the mass public—against ethnic minority immigrants' integration into majority settings.

Encouraging loyalty and defection: The impact of campaigns on tactical voting in Britain

AbstractI study the impact of party campaigns on tactical voting, focusing on voters with tactical incentives. Focusing on three UK Elections, I exploit panel data within each election to address endogeneity in party behavior, which would otherwise bias the estimates of campaign effects. My findings show that party contacts during campaigns have an influence in encouraging loyalty to preferred nonviable parties and defection to alternative viable ones. These findings are important as relatively little is known about what influences voters’ decision to cast tactical votes, beyond their demographic characteristics and the electoral circumstances they may find themselves in.

Emotions and the status quo: The anti-incumbency bias in political prediction markets

Emotions are often associated with politics, with new research confirming this connection. There is a link between negative emotions and political actions that oppose an incumbent candidate or party. We examine whether this “anti-incumbency” bias extends to political prediction markets, where such emotions can conflict with economic rationality. We analyze unique data from Media Predict, a commercial prediction market. Before a trade is executed, participants are asked to write a justification for their actions. Using text analysis, we measure the emotional sentiment of the justifications of traders buying contracts predicting a change in the incumbent candidate or party. Consistent with anti-incumbency bias, the justifications of buyers of a challenger contract had significantly more negative emotional sentiment scores. We document this finding in prediction markets associated with the 2012 US Presidential Election and the 2015 UK General Election. We conclude that, despite incentives to the contrary, traders’ actions in political stock markets are associated with strong emotions tied to incumbency status.

Affective polarization and strategic voting in Britain

ABSTRACT Do affective attitudes determine voting behavior? As a part of this broad question, we examine how third-party supporters’ affective attitudes decide their strategic voting behavior. Using seven waves of the British Election Study (2015, 2017, and 2019), we find that third-party supporters whose affective attitudes toward the two principal political parties in their constituency are more polarized are more inclined to vote strategically. The results imply that voting behavior is shaped by both feelings toward as well as cognitive evaluations of political parties. They also imply that British voters may increasingly engage in strategic voting if the level of affective polarization continues to rise. Lastly, and more generally, the results imply that all political parties should pay attention to voter “feelings” if they are to maximize their electoral support.

Exploring leadership on Instagram: A visual model for online leadership analysis

Online visual communication is becoming an established and central component of citizens’ everyday life. User activity on large-scale platforms, such as Instagram, can be mapped by tracing the rise and fall of communities of practice that share different visual languages, aesthetic values and forms of leadership. Accordingly, the present study proposes an analytical model for the identification, measurement, and categorization of leadership on visual-based social networks, by asking: how does the digital performance of leaders on Instagram construct different forms of leadership? To answer this question, the Leadership Visual Performance Model (LVPM) will be presented as a theoretical tool to analyze and compare leadership performance on Social Networking Systems. While previous models mostly employed theme-based coding, this analytical tool relies on a set of structural indicators that enable a higher level of comparability across domains. To demonstrate, the LVPM will be employed to investigate the Instagram activity of Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson during the 2019 UK General Election. Findings show how the LVPM indicators enable us to highlight differences in leadership style, compare them and employ them to build a typology.

Does fear of harassment reduce women’s online political participation? Evidence from the British Election Study across three UK general elections

Social media has become an important tool for political discussion and participation. Furthermore, recently, the question of gendered harassment in online political spaces has gained much scholarly attention. However, work here has largely focused on elected representatives, with little work on how this affects ordinary citizens. This article seeks to establish whether there is a gendered online participation gap, using data from the British Election Study across three elections. It further seeks to reveal why this gap may exist by assessing specific questions about being harassed or fearing negative responses online. The findings show a persistent gender gap in political participation online across all elections studied. Furthermore, although women were not necessarily more likely to have been harassed online, they were far more likely to have avoided posting about politics for fear of a negative response. This suggests that fear of harassment may contribute to lower political participation online for women.

Loving a good fight: personality traits and reactions to conflict in TV debates

AbstractThis article seeks to contribute to our understanding of media influence on political behaviour by investigating the ways in which people with different personality types react to candidates’ conflicting rhetoric in televised debates during election campaigns. It analyses responses along three reaction types: evaluations of candidate character, debate performance, and voting intentions in two debate clips from the 2019 UK general election and 2022 Australian federal election. The study uses semi-structured interviews with respondents in the UK and relies on deductive, flexible thematic analysis. The findings show that respondents’ personality traits are associated with different reactions to conflict in televised debates, which are sometimes mediated by the nature of attack, partisanship and preconceptions about candidates especially in the UK debate.

Winners and losers: Emotional shifts across elections are conveyed by a politician's smile.

The human smile can convey both rewarding and affiliative social intent and thus has significant utility in politics, where the ability to bond with and reassure voters is vital to electoral success. We examine experimental evidence from the 2019 UK general election to investigate the influence of a politician's reward or affiliative smile on voter emotions. It was hypothesised that the winner's affiliative smile would engender positive affect across all partisan groups compared to the winner's reward smile display. Participants from a nationally representative sample were shown campaign footage containing both types of smiles from the leaders of the main competing political parties both before and after the election. Increases in happiness and affinity were revealed across all partisan groups when shown footage of the eventual winner's affiliative smile; at the same time, supporters of losing parties indicated a decrease in negative affect. Affinity has been shown to increase civic engagement. Thus, we conclude that affiliative smiles displayed by leading candidates during the campaign likely acted as a mechanism to align voter behaviour with the dominant political message.

The geography of educational voting: Understanding where individuals with similar qualifications vote differently across Britain

This study offers a novel account of the geographical variation in the association of educational attainment with electoral behaviour. It estimates multilevel random-coefficient models using survey data from the British Election Study Internet Panel and data on constituency characteristics to explore the extent to which, and reasons why, the voting behaviours of individuals with identical qualifications varied across different types of parliamentary constituencies in British general elections from 2015 to 2019. We find the geography of this educational cleavage has not been evenly distributed in recent years. While the individual-level association of educational attainment and vote choice indeed varied geographically at the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, there is only limited evidence to suggest that similarly educated individuals voted differently in constituencies with low and high densities of persons with high levels of education. Rather, our findings suggest that constituency left behind-ness (broadly defined) is the most important factor in explaining the spatial heterogeneity of education-based voting in recent British general elections.

Surveying immigrant-origin voters in a post-migrant society: The first Immigrant German Election Study, 2017

This paper introduces the Immigrant German Election Study (IMGES) as the first survey that explicitly targeted immigrant-origin voters in Germany. IMGES fills the gap of insufficient data in the field of immigrant-origin voters with a combination of proven and novel survey measures of the electoral behavior of people with a background from either Türkiye or from the former Soviet Union or its successor states. The study was carried out in a post-election, cross-sectional survey in 2017. Its compatibility with the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), the Ethnic Minority British Election Study (EMBES), and the Dutch Ethnic Minority Election Study (DEMES) allows for in-depth comparative analyses between immigrant-origin voters and natives across different countries. In addition to standard measures of electoral behavior, the data include measures of immigrant-specific factors relevant to voting behavior. Moreover, the dataset is not limited to voting behavior in Germany, it also includes transnational voting behavior in the respective countries of origin.

Public understanding of Electoral Spending: Evaluating UK Transparency Mechanisms

ABSTRACT Transparency is core to the principles of electoral oversight. The disclosure of information is designed to allow voters, the media, academics, and civil society to hold political actors to account. However, in the context of evolving campaign practice occasioned by the rise of digital technologies, the effectiveness of transparency mechanisms needs to be consistently scrutinized (Electoral Commission. (2018). Digital campaigning: increasing transparency for voters. Electoral Commission.). In this paper we examine a lauded system of electoral transparency – the UK's electoral finance regime (Power, S. (2020). Party funding and corruption. Palgrave MacMillan) – and evaluate its effectiveness. Analysing a unique dataset of 22,720 separate items of expenditure and 5,770 invoices recording campaign spending at the 2019 UK general election, we review the sufficiency of the process and content of existing transparency disclosures. Our findings show significant deficits in the system of electoral transparency. We find that UK parties are not reporting data consistently, meaning that invoices are regularly uninformative, and that existing reporting categories are unable to capture the full spectrum of electoral activity. These findings are significant for understanding the requirements of an effective disclosure regime, but also for questioning the utility of the disclosures available to voters.

Far from the (Conservative) tree? Sexuality and intergenerational partisan preferences

ABSTRACT A rich pedigree in political sociology establishes the intergenerational nature of political dispositions. In this paper, I present a theoretical argument positing that the acquisition of non-hereditary social identities, such as those related to sexual orientation, can disrupt this intergenerational transmission. Leveraging data from the British Election study, I find that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals, particularly those who from Conservative-voting homes, are significantly more likely to break away from the partisan attachments transmitted by the symmetrically partisan households of their heterosexual peers. These findings have implications for theories regarding the intergenerational transmission of political dispositions and signals that LGB individuals, who seek out socialisation experiences beyond those of shared social and structural equivalence with their family and local ecology, are more inclined to form political attachments independently of their parents.

Understanding the Modern Election Campaign: Analysing Campaign Eras through Financial Transparency Disclosures at the 2019 UK General Election

Abstract What do modern election campaigns look like? According to the most recent accounts, they are data-driven operations in which extensive data are collected and targeted messages are deployed in efforts to maximize support. Whilst highlighting important new developments, in this article we argue that a focus on novel practices offers a distorted picture of modern campaigns. Presenting a unique analysis of over 22,720 separate items of expenditure made by political parties at the 2019 UK general election, we demonstrate that whilst there is some evidence of a ‘fourth’ era of campaigning, these novel practices do not define campaigns. Taking a more holistic approach that examines how campaign activities are blended and entwined, we offer unprecedented insight into the nature of modern campaigns, revealing variation in parties' campaign strategies. We also introduce a new dataset for those interested in party campaigns and call for others to pursue a more holistic analysis.

Reframing the Refugee: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Compassionate Politics

Countless polls, studies and surveys conducted prior to and following the 2016 UK Referendum on Membership of the European Union confirmed immigration to be the key emotive issue for not only the British electorate, but several Western European nations. By critiquing key pieces of EU legislation, Go, Went, Gone (2015) by Jenny Erpenbeck offers a humanising, caustic warning of the troubling politicisation of EU and non-EU migration in Germany, suggesting the ways by which literature can destabilise institutional optics of power and counteract myths surrounding the process of racial othering.

Abuse in the time of COVID-19: the effects of Brexit, gender and partisanship

PurposeThe authors investigate how COVID-19 has influenced the amount, type or topics of abuse that UK politicians receive when engaging with the public.Design/methodology/approachThis work covers the first year of COVID-19 in the UK, from March 2020 to March 2021 and analyses Twitter abuse in replies to UK MPs. The authors collected and analysed 17.9 million reply tweets to the MPs. The authors present overall abuse levels during different key moments of the pandemic, analysing reactions to MPs by gender and the relationship between online abuse and topics such as Brexit, the government’s COVID-19 response and policies, and social issues.FindingsThe authors have found that abuse levels towards UK MPs were at an all-time high in December 2020. Women (particularly those from non-White backgrounds) receive unusual amounts of abuse, targeting their credibility and capacity to do their jobs. Similar to other large events like general elections and Brexit, COVID-19 has elevated abuse levels, at least temporarily.Originality/valuePrevious studies analysed abuse levels towards MPs in the run-up to the 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections and during the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. The authors compare previous findings with those of the first year of COVID-19, as the pandemic persisted, and Brexit was forthcoming. This research not only contributes to the longitudinal comparison of abuse trends against UK politicians but also presents new findings, corroborates, further clarifies and raises questions about the previous findings.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2022-0392

Correcting campaign misinformation: Experimental evidence from a two-wave panel study

In this study, we used a two-wave panel and a real-world intervention during the 2017 UK general election to investigate whether fact-checking can reduce beliefs in an incorrect campaign claim, source effects, the duration of source effects, and how predispositions including political orientations and prior exposure condition them. We find correction effects in the short term only, but across different political divisions and various prior exposure levels. We discuss the significance of independent fact-checking sources and the UK partisan press in facilitating effects.

A Multilevel Spatial Model to Investigate Voting Behaviour in the 2019 UK General Election

This paper presents a modelling framework which can detect the simultaneous presence of two different types of spatial process. The first is the variation from a global mean resulting from a geographical unit’s ‘vertical’ position within a nested hierarchical structure such as the county and region where it is situated. The second is the variation at the smaller scale of individual units due to the ‘horizontal’ influence of nearby locations. The former is captured using a multi-level modelling structure while the latter is accounted for by an autoregressive component at the lowest level of the hierarchy. Such a model not only estimates spatially-varying parameters according to geographical scale, but also the relative contribution of each process to the overall spatial variation. As a demonstration, the study considers the association of a selection of socio-economic attributes with voting behaviour in the 2019 UK general election. It finds evidence of the presence of both types of spatial effects, and describes how they suggest different associations between census profile and voting behaviour in different parts of England and Wales.

We see symbols but not saviors: Women's representation and the political attitudes of working‐class women

AbstractHow does women's representation in politics affect working‐class women's attitudes toward political processes? Despite their increasing presence in the workforce, many women continue to concentrate in occupational sectors characterized by high economic vulnerability and low social status. This dynamic has important implications for the politics of representation. Previous studies suggest that women politicians positively affect women voters' political attitudes, but women's representation in politics is likely to have differing impacts on the political attitudes of working‐class and professional women. This study demonstrates that women's representation has a large class impact among women voters. In particular, using cross‐national data from 31 OECD countries as well as panel survey data from the British Election Study, we show that in countries with a higher degree of women's representation, there is more skepticism among women in low‐skill sectors toward voting and leadership than among those in white‐collar sectors. This is because there exist higher standards of accountability and relatability for women representatives among women voters. Given such high expectations, there is greater room for dissatisfaction among working‐class women than among their white‐collar counterparts when they constantly experience occupational segregation despite a high share of women in politics. In these settings, by contrast, women voters with high‐skill jobs are more likely to believe that voting and leadership matter, as they can better associate themselves with women political elites. Since men voters do not have strong expectations for relatability and accountability for public officeholders, the class impact of women's representation is weak among men. These findings have important implications for the symbolic representation of marginalized groups and democratic accountability.

BCS’ Impact and Influence: The UK Election and Tech

BCS’ Impact and Influence: The UK Election and Tech