Research

What are the effects of reason-giving on political attitudes? Both political philosophers and political scientists have speculated that defending proposals with reasons may change voters’ preferences. However, while models of attitude formation predict that the explicit justification of one’s political views may result in attitudes that are more ideologically consistent, less polarized, and more stable, empirical work has not assessed the connection between reason-giving and attitudes. Implementing a survey experiment in which some respondents provide reasons before stating their opinions on six issues in UK politics, I find that reason-giving has very limited effects on the constraint, stability, or polarization of the public’s political attitudes. These findings have important implications for our understanding of deliberative conceptions of democracy – in which reason-giving is a central component – as well as for our understanding of the quality of voters’ political opinions.

What drives ideological division about political problems? When prioritizing which problems are most in need of redress, voters might disagree about the severity of individual outcomes that constitute such problems; the prevalence of those problems; or whether such problems are amenable to solution by government action. We field a large survey experiment in the United Kingdom and the United States and develop a new measurement approach that allows us to evaluate how ideological disagreements change when respondents consider the individual badness, social severity, and priority for government action of a set of 41 political problems. We find that large ideological divergences are observed in beliefs about social severity and priority for government action, not individual problem badness, and only in the United States. An important implication of these results is that perceptions of problem prevalence are a key source of polarization over problem-prioritization in the United States.

Scholarship on past major crises, such as wars and depressions, argues that these events transformed mass attitudes about the role of the state. Motivated by these claims, we theorize reasons why the COVID-19 pandemic might have shifted citizens’ ideological beliefs and investigate whether it has. Using original panel data from the United Kingdom, we find no evidence that the pandemic affected beliefs about the role of government, even for those directly experiencing economic losses or new forms of state relief. In a follow-up survey experiment, we also find that voters do not change their opinions on redistribution or the role of government even when exposed to elite cues that frame the crisis as revealing the need for state expansion. Our findings suggest that crises may more commonly exert their effects on mass beliefs via the long-term feedback effects of elite-driven policy changes than through direct exposure to crisis conditions.

How do citizens want to be represented in politics? We investigate citizens’ multidimensional preferences regarding six conceptions of representation that are derived from political theory. Using original item batteries and a conjoint experiment, we elicit the relative importance of the dimensions and the types of representation people prefer on each dimension. Our results from surveys fielded in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany show that 1) descriptive representation has comparatively limited appeal for citizens at large, but is more important for historically marginalized groups; 2) citizens do not focus on local politicians when thinking about who represents them, but also seek representation from politicians in other districts; 3) while citizens strongly value substantive representation, they are largely indifferent as to whether their representatives are responsive to electoral sanctions. Our findings have important implications for how political scientists study democratic representation.

Applications of moral foundations theory in political science have revealed differences in the degree to which liberals and conservatives explicitly endorse five core moral foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and sanctity. We argue that differences between liberals and conservatives in their explicit ratings of abstract and generalized moral principles do not imply that citizens with different political orientations have fundamentally different moral intuitions. We introduce a new approach for measuring the importance of the five moral foundations by asking U.K. and U.S. survey respondents to compare pairs of vignettes describing violations relevant to each foundation. We analyze responses to these comparisons using a hierarchical Bradley–Terry model which allows us to evaluate the relative importance of each foundation to individuals with different political perspectives. Our results suggest that, despite prominent claims to the contrary, voters on the left and the right of politics share broadly similar moral intuitions.

This study examined the application, feasibility, and validity of supervised learning models for text classification in appraisals for rare disease treatments (RDTs) in relation to uncertainty, and analyzed differences between appraisals based on the classification results. We analyzed appraisals for RDTs (n = 94) published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) between January 2011 and May 2023. We used Naïve Bayes, Lasso, and Support Vector Machine models in a binary text classification task (classifying paragraphs as either referencing uncertainty in the evidence base or not). To illustrate the results, we tested hypotheses in relation to the appraisal guidance, advanced therapy medicinal product (ATMP) status, disease area, and age group. The best performing (Lasso) model achieved 83.6 percent classification accuracy (sensitivity = 74.4 percent, specificity = 92.6 percent). Paragraphs classified as referencing uncertainty were significantly more likely to arise in highly specialized technology (HST) appraisals compared to appraisals from the technology appraisal (TA) guidance (adjusted odds ratio = 1.44, 95 percent CI 1.09, 1.90, p = 0.004). There was no significant association between paragraphs classified as referencing uncertainty and appraisals for ATMPs, non-oncology RDTs, and RDTs indicated for children only or adults and children. These results were robust to the threshold value used for classifying paragraphs but were sensitive to the choice of classification model. Using supervised learning models for text classification in NICE appraisals for RDTs is feasible, but the results of downstream analyses may be sensitive to the choice of classification model.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a large shock to the risk of acquiring a disease that represents a meaningful threat to health. We investigate whether individuals subject to larger increases in objective health risk – operationalized by occupation-based measures of proximity to other people – became more supportive of increased government healthcare spending during the crisis. Using panel data that track UK individuals before (May 2018–December 2019) and after (June 2020) the outbreak of the pandemic, we implement a fixed-effect design that was pre-registered before the key treatment variable was available to us. While individuals in high-risk occupations were more worried about their personal risk of infection and had higher COVID-19 death rates, there is no evidence that increased health risks during COVID-19 shifted either attitudes on government spending on healthcare or broader attitudes relating to redistribution. Our findings are consistent with recent research demonstrating the limited effects of the pandemic on political attitudes.

Research on political style suggests that where women make arguments that are more emotional, empathetic and positive, men use language that is more analytical, aggressive and complex. However, existing work does not consider how gendered patterns of style vary over time. Focusing on the UK, we argue that pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years. To test this argument, we describe novel quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data. Analysing UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019, we show that the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication. Our findings imply that prominent gender-based stereotypes of politicians' behaviour are significantly worse descriptors of empirical reality now than they were in the past.

Which types of political rhetoric are most persuasive? Politicians make arguments that share common rhetorical elements, including metaphor, ad hominem attacks, appeals to expertise, moral appeals, and many others. However, political arguments are also highly multidimensional, making it difficult to assess the relative persuasive power of these elements. We report on a novel experimental design which assesses the relative persuasiveness of a large number of arguments that deploy a set of rhetorical elements to argue for and against proposals across a range of UK political issues. We find modest differences in the average effectiveness of rhetorical elements shared by many arguments, but also large variation in the persuasiveness of arguments of the same rhetorical type across issues. In addition to revealing that some argument-types are more effective than others in shaping public opinion, these results have important implications for the interpretation of survey-experimental studies in the field of political communication.

It is difficult to measure public views on trade-offs between spending priorities because public understanding of existing government spending is limited and the budgetary problem is complicated. We present a new measurement strategy using a continuous treatment, multivariate choice experiment. The experiment proposes deficit-neutral bundles of changes in spending and taxation, allowing us to investigate attitudes toward modifications to the existing budget. We then use a structural choice model to estimate public preferences over spending categories and the taxation level, on average and as a function of respondent attributes. In our application, we find that the UK public favors paying more in tax to finance large spending increases across major budget categories, that spending preferences are multidimensional, and that younger people prefer lower levels of taxation and spending than older people.

By making it easier for citizens to communicate their preferences, online forms of political participation have the potential to strengthen the representational link between politicians and voters. However, we know little about the effects of online advocacy on politicians’ behavior. Using new data from an e-petition system in the United Kingdom, I show that support for a petition among a Member of Parliament’s constituents is associated with a substantial increase in the probability that the MP advocates for the petition in parliamentary debate, even when compared to MP behavior in counterfactual non-petition debates which focus on the same policy issues. However, MP responsiveness is conditioned both by party discipline and electoral competition. These findings have important implications for our understanding of dyadic representation in parliamentary systems.

We describe the institutional setting of parliamentary debate in the UK House of Commons and assess the determinants of participation using data on more than two million speeches from 1979 to 2019. We show that the main determinant of participation is whether an MP holds an institutionally powerful position. The speech-making bonus enjoyed by those in leadership positions has decreased over time, while MPs have increasingly employed constituency-oriented language in their parliamentary speeches over the past 40 years.

We describe a strategy for applying multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) methods to pre-election polling. Using a combination of contemporaneous polling, census data, past election polling, past election results, and other sources of information, we are able to construct probabilistic, internally consistent estimates of national votes and the sub-national electoral districts that determine seats or electoral votes in many electoral systems. We report on the performance of the general framework in three applications that were conducted and released publicly in advance of the 2016 UK Referendum on EU Membership, the 2016 US Presidential Election, and the 2017 UK General Election.

Do female leaders amplify the voices of other women in politics? The author addresses this question by examining parliamentary debates in the UK House of Commons. In the context of a difference-in-differences design that exploits over-time variation in the gender of cabinet ministers, the article demonstrates that female ministers substantially increase the participation of other female MPs in relevant debates, compared to when the minister is male. It also uses a measure of debate influence, based on the degree to which words used by one legislator are adopted by other members, to show that female ministers also increase the influence of female backbenchers. To explore the mechanisms behind these results, the author introduces a new metric of ministerial responsiveness and shows that female ministers are significantly more responsive than their male counterparts to the speeches of female backbenchers.

The European Union’s policy response to the recent global economic crisis transferred significant powers from the national to the European level. When exogenous shocks make status quo policies less attractive, legislators become more tolerant to proposed alternatives, and the policy discretion of legislative agenda setters increases. Given control of the EU agenda-setting process by pro-integration actors, we argue that this dynamic explains changes in voting patterns of the European Parliament during the crisis period. We observe voting coalitions increasingly dividing legislators along the pro-anti integration, rather than the left-right dimension of disagreement, but only in policy areas related to the crisis. In line with more qualitative assessments of the content of passed legislation, the implication is that pro-integration actors were able to shift policy further toward integration than they could have without the crisis.

Which parties benefit from open-list (as opposed to closed-list) proportional representation elections? This article shows that a move from closed-list to open-list competition is likely to be more favorable to parties with more internal disagreement on salient issues; this is because voters who might have voted for a unified party under closed lists may be drawn to specific candidates within internally divided parties under open lists. The study provides experimental evidence of this phenomenon in a hypothetical European Parliament election in the UK, in which using an open-list ballot would shift support from UKIP (the Eurosceptic party) to Eurosceptic candidates of the Conservative Party. The findings suggest that open-list ballots could restrict support for parties that primarily mobilize on a single issue.