British Election Research Articles

The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching

Teacher trainers and conference presenters are often asked questions along the lines of ‘Does correction work?’, where the questioner seems to be hoping for one of two definite answers. But instead of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ we often find ourselves coming up with something like ‘Well, it depends…’. That’s because complex questions which demand binary answers (e.g. ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’—the question put to the British electorate back in 2016) seldom produce workable and useful solutions. Look at all the trouble that referendum has caused—because things are invariably more complicated than a simple two-way choice! (And to bring things ‘closer to home’ for us language-teaching specialists it is worth pointing out that the influence on language teaching from Europe-wide thinking has been profound. The loss of any contributing member of those discussions—like the UK—would have quite an effect).

‘Left behind’ people, or places? The role of local economies in perceived community representation

Modern economics attributes importance to spatial inequality: yet in studying discontent with politics, existing research has mostly neglected local contexts and attitudes people hold about them. I use British Election Study data to investigate the factors leading people to believe their community is ignored by the political process. Firstly, real economic contexts play a role, since residents of low-income communities tend to take more negative views about how well their community is represented. Secondly, negative perceptions of the local economy are associated with more negative views of community representation, whereas equivalent ‘egotropic’ measures of people's personal economic situation have no such effect. Thirdly, I observe a ‘grievance’ effect wherein people are particularly negative about community representation when they believe that the national economy is more successful than that of one's local community.

Promoting voter registration: the effects of low-cost interventions on behaviour and norms

AbstractWe report two studies investigating whether, and if so how, different low-cost interventions affect voter registration rates. Low-cost message-based interventions are increasingly used to promote target behaviours. While growing evidence shows that such ‘nudges’ often significantly impact behaviour, understanding of why interventions work or fail in particular contexts remains underdeveloped. In a natural field experiment conducted before the 2015 UK general election, we varied messages on a postcard sent by Oxford City Council to unregistered students encouraging them to join the electoral register. Our primary finding from the field study is that just one of our interventions – a reminder that people failing to register may be fined – has a significant positive impact. Offering small monetary rewards to register instead has a negative but insignificant effect. In a second study, using an online experiment we identify a particular mechanism explaining the influence of this intervention. Specifically, we show that our interventions have divergent effects on perceptions of the normative appropriateness of registering: emphasising that failing to register is punishable by law strengthened the perception that one ought to register, while offering monetary inducements for registering weakened the perception that doing so is an action already expected within society.

The present in retrospect: Press reporting of UK General Elections, 1918–2015

This article provides a unique content analysis of 100 years of national press coverage of UK General Elections and tests four claims about historical trends in election news reporting in democratic systems: (1) that coverage is becoming more focussed on political leaders at the expense of other political sources; (2) that reporting of the personalities and personal lives of politicians has expanded; (3) that editorial treatment of politicians has become increasingly negative and (4) that news coverage is increasingly obsessed with the conduct of politics rather than its substantive content. Through the detail of this analysis, we identify areas of historical continuity as well as change and challenge overly neat periodisations and simple histories of election news reporting.

Communities of online news exposure during the UK General Election 2015

Media exposure has become increasingly complex and hard to measure with the rise in online news consumption. Furthermore, since many people now routinely access news via social media, questions arise as to whether social news-sharing is affected by the polarization and partisan echo chambers that are often observed in social media communication. This study considers news-sharing on Twitter during the UK General Election in 2015, using the act of sharing as an indicator that the sharer has been exposed to that online news content. Analysis of the network structure of users and the news articles they share identifies multiple distinct user communities, which are characterized by analysis of the articles shared within them. Communities are characterised by news article sources (web domains), geographical origin and content; time of article publication was also considered but showed no significant relationships. There is evidence for ideologically biased audiences that predominantly share content from either left-leaning or right-leaning news sources, but these audiences also see content from opposing viewpoints. Other audiences are characterized by geography and/or specialised on particular news topics. Overall these findings suggest that many people consume a diverse range of news content over the election period and that the level of political bias in content exposure varies widely across the Twitter user population.

Cameron, Deborah. and Shaw, Sylvia. (2016). Gender, Power and Political Speech: Women and Language in the 2015 UK General Election

Cameron, Deborah. and Shaw, Sylvia. (2016). Gender, Power and Political Speech: Women and Language in the 2015 UK General Election

Underlying socio-political processes behind the 2016 US election.

Recently we have witnessed a number of rapid shifts toward populism in the rhetoric and policies of major political parties, as exemplified in the 2016 Brexit Referendum, 2016 US Election, and 2017 UK General Election. Our perspective here is to focus on understanding the underlying societal processes behind these recent political shifts. We use novel methods to study social dynamics behind the 2016 Presidential election. This is done by using network science methods to identify key groups associated with the US right-wing during the election. We investigate how the groups grew on Twitter, and how their associated accounts changed their following behaviour over time. We find a new external faction of Trump supporters took a strong influence over the traditional Republican Party (GOP) base during the election campaign. The new group dominated the GOP group in terms of new members and endorsement via Twitter follows. Growth of new accounts for the GOP party all but collapsed during the campaign. While the Alt-right group was growing exponentially, it has remained relatively isolated. Counter to the mainstream view, we detected an unexpectedly low number of automated ‘bot’ accounts and accounts associated with foreign intervention in the Trump-supporting group. Our work demonstrates a powerful method for tracking the evolution of societal groups and reveals complex social processes behind political changes.

Mandates matter: how decisive victories enhance expectations about government performance

ABSTRACT Elections are the main instrument through which voters can exercise influence over public policy. However, the relationship between electoral outcomes and government policy performance is under-researched. In particular, little is known about the effect that the perceived narrowness of electoral victories has on expectations about incumbents’ policy behaviour. Drawing on the literature on electoral mandates and framing theory, we examine how the way in which election results are portrayed by the media affects citizens’ confidence that winners will enact their policy programmes, using the 2015 UK election as a case study. Based on a survey experiment conducted after the race, we find that victories depicted as narrow increased scepticism about the incoming government’s ability to deliver on its promises, contradicting normative theories of electoral competition. Instead, and consistent with mandate interpretations, subjects – especially less political knowledgeable ones – became more likely to trust in the government’s ability to fulfil its campaign pledges when the Conservative victory was presented as decisive. Besides shedding light on the link between the framing of election results and expectations about government performance, our results have potentially relevant implications for understanding how such expectations may affect actual policy-making and the enforcement of accountability.

Government policy and propaganda in the 1975 referendum on European Community membership

ABSTRACTOn 5 June 1975, 67% of the British electorate voted ‘yes’ to maintaining membership of the European Community. This historic event was the UK’s first-ever national referendum, and as such important questions were raised about the rules governing the vote. Government policy was shaped by the need to ensure fairness and access to information, and a growing realisation that the public would vote ‘yes’. This resulted in a low-key information campaign which emphasised the ‘crisis’ atmosphere of the 1970s and the ‘declinist’ narrative that had pervaded the European debate since the first application in 1961.

Leisure as an object of governmental policy in UK elections: 1945 to 1983

ABSTRACTFollowing the Second World War, most working people saw a substantial change in both the amount of leisure time they had available and how it could be enjoyed. During the 1950s the amount of paid leave that could be taken had risen substantially which, coupled with a general increase in basic disposable income, resulted in a growing demand for leisure resources. It is in this period that we find the emergence of party-political interest in addressing concerns associated with leisure, with recognition of it as a legitimate arena for governmental policy. Using a lexical frequency analysis this paper will consider how leisure was construed as an object of governmental policy between 1945 and 1983. It concludes that such an approach affords us an opportunity to view policy in general, and leisure policy in particular, in new ways, enabling us to approach familiar topics from an alternative perspective.

All aboard? Scottish and Welsh multi-level voting; competence, leadership and blame-attribution

ABSTRACTScotland and Wales went to the polls on the same day in 2016, the former in a post- independence referendum environment and the latter shortly after receiving further devolved powers. Despite this horizontal simultaneity, the results in these elections displayed considerable diversity. Sub-state elections are often classified as second-order and as such are characterized by lower turnouts, anti-government voting and small party support. However regional elections in the United Kingdom sit uncomfortably in this definition. This article focuses on the experience of Scotland and Wales, exploring regional and national factors that help to explain regional electoral outcomes. It examines valence models, multi-level blame attribution, and relative national and regional party leader support. In a second stage, a multinomial logistic regression is undertaken, finding that the relative importance of regional and national factors differs between the two regions.

Mapping Political Discussions on Twitter: Where the Elites Remain Elites

This article compares digital arenas such as Twitter with the principles prescribed by the bourgeois public sphere, to examine how close or far these arenas are from Habermas’ original concept. By focusing on one of the criteria, the current influence of elites on political debate, it discusses the Habermasian principles of general accessibility and non-dominance of the elites as prerequisites for a functioning public sphere. This study finds that even though there are few access restrictions on Twitter and despite the fact that no one, in principle, is excluded from the platform, there is no apparent elimination of privileges and the elites maintain their elite status within its borders. Methodologically, the article relies on empirical research of hashtagged exchanges on Twitter during the General Elections in the United Kingdom in 2015. Through the mapping of Twitter as a synthesis of dialogic arenas, it explores the elite-focused discourse and the vocal actors in the stream, underscoring that the presence of the elites, even in an indirect way. Drawing on these elements, the article argues for a reconceptualization of the normative perception of the public sphere, suggesting the notion of <em>exclusion </em>is a complex issue that includes expanding notions of <em>publics </em>to also include those <em>topics </em>being discussed. Finally, it focuses on the significance of journalism in relation to political dialogue and argues that the move towards less elite-centered arenas largely depends on journalism.

Exploring Political Journalism Homophily on Twitter: A Comparative Analysis of US and UK Elections in 2016 and 2017

The tendency of political journalists to form insular groups or packs, chasing the same angles and quoting the same sources, is a well-documented issue in journalism studies and has long been criticized for its role in groupthink and homogenous news coverage. This groupthink attracted renewed criticism after the unexpected victory of Republican candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election as the campaign coverage had indicated a likely win by the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. This pattern was repeated in the 2017 UK election when the Conservative party lost their majority after a campaign in which the news coverage had pointed to an overall Tory victory. Such groupthink is often attributed to homophily, the tendency of individuals to interact with those most like them, and while homophily in the legacy media system is well-studied, there is little research around homophily in the hybrid media system, even as social media platforms like Twitter facilitate the development—and analysis—of virtual political journalism packs. This study, which compares Twitter interactions among US and UK political reporters in the 2016 and 2017 national elections, shows that political journalists are overwhelmingly more likely to use Twitter to interact with other journalists, particularly political journalists, and that their offline tendencies to form homogenous networks have transferred online. There are some exceptions around factors such as gender, news organizations and types of news organization—and important distinctions between types of interactions—but overall the study provides evidence of sustained homophily as journalists continue to normalize Twitter.

Long-Term Economic Distress, Cultural Backlash, and Support for Brexit

Economic and cultural factors are often presented as alternative explanations of Brexit. Most studies have failed to recognize the interplay between contextual economic factors and individual attitudes such as nativism and Euroscepticism. We argue that both economic and cultural factors matter to explain the outcome of the referendum. Economic factors are critical because they shape cultural attitudes. British citizens who live in economically depressed and declining districts are more likely to develop anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic views. These cultural grievances, in turn, explain support for Brexit. Using both aggregate economic and electoral data at the local level (380 districts) and data from the 7th wave of the British Election Study 2014-2017 panel, we find strong support for our argument that cultural grievances mediate the effect of long-term economic decline on support for Brexit. Our results have important policy implications, and suggest targeted economic policies are necessary to protect the “losers of globalization.”

“Reports of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”: The Continuing Role and Relevance of Election Petitions in Challenging Election Results in the UK

Abstract An election petition is the only mechanism through which a UK election result can be challenged. In its current form, the election petition dates back to the Victorian period, when elector...

Can parties recruit postal voters? Experimental evidence from Britain

While easily-accessible postal voting is on the rise in many countries, the implications for electoral campaigns are largely under-researched. Indeed, parties actively try to sign supporters up to postal votes to make it easier for them to turn out. But how effective are these efforts to recruit supporters on to postal votes? We present an original, pre-registered postal voter recruitment experiment – the first conducted outside the US – completed during the May 2018 UK elections. We test the effect of a common recruitment tactic – letters and application forms sent to supporters. Despite being widely used by parties, we find that these efforts are ineffective at both recruiting and mobilising supporters. While the rewards of successfully signing supporters up to postal voting are potentially substantial, our results suggest that parties should consider the most effective ways of doing so.

Abandon Ship? An Analysis of Strategic Voting among Liberal Democrat Voters in the 2015 UK Election

AbstractStrategic voting occurs when voters make vote choices using their ex ante expectations about the results of an election in addition to their sincere candidate preferences. While there is ample theoretical reason to believe strategic voting should occur under certain electoral conditions and institutional arrangements, the evidence for it in the literature has been mixed. I theorise that the polarisation of the two main British political parties and the highly publicised predictions of defeat for Britain’s primary national third party, the Liberal Democrats, make the 2015 UK election an ideal case for studying strategic voting. I adapt established methods of identifying strategic voting to this election and find evidence that Liberal Democrat voters in the UK voted strategically for Labour and Conservative candidates to maximise their odds of affecting the electoral outcome in their constituency.

Spending, canvassing and electoral success in marginal constituencies: England and Scotland in 2017

ABSTRACT Substantial evidence shows that candidates’ and parties’ performances in constituencies at UK general elections are influenced by the intensity of their local campaigns, but that evidence is almost invariably based on analyses of voting across all constituencies. Most constituencies are unlikely to change hands, however. This paper explores whether the impact of spending varies according to seat marginality and analyses the pattern of spending and canvassing in the 123 Labour-Conservative marginals in England and all 59 constituencies in Scotland. The results are consistent with expectations: campaigning and canvassing matters most where campaigning and canvassing should matter most.

“A machine masquerading as a movement”: The 2015 UK general election labour campaign investigated through assemblage and affect

This paper explores the election strategy of a local Labour Party campaign for the UK May 7 2015 General Election. Using data gathered through an ethnography, and conceptualising the party, local campaign and election through concepts of assemblage and affect (Deleuze and Guattari 2013), I look at the relationships, connections and materials (campaign literature, as well as digital tools such as Contact Creator) that constructed the local party campaign assemblage. Following assemblage theory, I examine the effects of the campaigns door-step method within the party. I argue that an election is imbued with different intensities, understandings and results that ask not only those political actors to perform the party and State in particular ways, but also the voting population to be part of that performance. As such, I show the always-changing (always becoming) relationship between ‘society’ and political parties by witnessing, participating in and questioning how lines appear between a Labour canvassing campaign assemblage and the society it is canvassing.

10 Downing Street: who’s next? Seemingly unrelated regressions to forecast UK election results

ABSTRACT In recent years, the British polling industry has encountered difficulties in its attempts to measure voting intentions in important popular consultations, notably the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, the 2015 UK general election, and the 2016 EU membership referendum. In such a context, it is extremely valuable to explore how different forecasting models that rely on political and economic variables can be used to predict the outcome of elections. In this paper, we propose such a model by introducing a political economy equation to estimate the vote share obtained by the incumbent party in UK general elections three months before the vote as well as a set of seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) to forecast the results of the Official Opposition, the Liberal Democrats, and the remaining parties.