Ethnic minority voters in the UK 2015 general election: A breakthrough for the Conservative party?

It was widely reported that the 2015 UK general election represented a breakthrough election for the Conservative party among ethnic minority voters – specifically that their vote share among minorities increased, and overtook that of Labour for the first time among some groups. I show that analysis using more representative data yields markedly different results. Looking at (i) party preference from 2010 to 2015, and (ii) reported vote shares from a nationally representative probability survey, I show that the Conservatives increased their support among Hindus - but the Labour party gained in support elsewhere. This is due to movement away from the Liberal Democrats, 2010 minority supporters of the Liberal Democrats moved to supporting Labour rather than the Conservatives in 2015 at a ratio of 2:1. There is also considerable individual-level volatility in party support among ethnic minorities, which is masked by a high level of stability at the aggregate level.     

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.     

Confused or competent? How voters use the STV ballot paper

STV is often extolled because it allows voters to express a nuanced choice, but is criticised for being too confusing. In practice the system is little used, but evidence from where it is indicates much depends on how voters choose to use it. STV was used for the first time in Scottish local elections in 2007, providing valuable new evidence on how voters respond to the system. We use survey data to examine the incidence of various indicators of apparent failure by Scottish voters to exploit STV, and compare both the levels and patterns of incidence with equivalent data for Ireland. We find little sign of confusion in either country, but significant evidence of ballot order effects in Scotland.     

Caught in the middle? How voters react to spatial indifference

According to one of the tenets of the Spatial Theory of Voting (SToV), spatial indifference is positively associated with abstention. However, the political behaviour literature has not yet fully settled whether this is always the case and, if not, why individuals still vote despite the differential utility they extract from the two closest candidates equals zero. In this letter we explore the effect of spatial indifference on political behaviour by analysing survey data from American elections since 1972 and through a survey experiment that randomizes candidates’ ideological position on different dimensions. Findings show that spatially indifferent individuals are more likely to abstain—mainly moderate voters. Yet, around two-thirds still vote for a candidate. We advance two tentative explanations: First, when spatially equidistant, individuals that vote are more likely to consider valence attributes. Second, they are more likely to resort to a directional logic. Results have implications for our understanding of the spatial models and, in particular, of the behaviour of spatially equidistant individuals, which represent a non-negligible group of the electorate.     

Agency Termination in the UK: What Explains the ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’?

In October 2010, the UK’s Coalition Government announced a radical reduction in the number of public bodies in the UK. This research tests the impact of three factors identified in the termination literature as affecting agency survival: political turnover, age and agency type. The research found that advisory Non-Departmental Public Bodies were five times more likely to have been identified for abolition or merger than other agency types. The research also found that agency age was a factor, but that political turnover was not significant.     

Intergovernmental Relations in the UK: Time for a Radical Overhaul?

Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic have put relationships between the UK government and its devolved counterparts under growing strain. Tensions generated by both of these developments have exposed the inadequacies of the existing, under-developed system for bringing governments together in the UK. The limitations of the current system include the ad hoc nature of intergovernmental meetings, and their consultative rather than decision-making character. Drawing upon an analysis of how intergovernmental relationships are structured in five other countries, the authors offer a number of suggestions for the reconfiguration of the UK model. They explore different ways of enabling joint decision making by its governments, and argue against the assumption that England can be represented adequately by the UK administration. Without a serious attempt to address this dysfunctional part of the UK’s territorial constitution, there is every prospect that relations between these different governments will continue to deteriorate.     

In the eye of the beholder: voters’ perceptions of party policy shifts

It is normatively desirable that parties’ policy positions match the views of their supporters, as citizens in Western democracies are primarily represented by and through parties. Existing research suggests that parties shift their policy positions, but as of today, there is only weak and inconsistent empirical evidence that voters actually perceive these shifts. Using individual-level panel data from Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands, this article tests the proposition that voters perceive parties’ policy shifts only on salient issues while remaining oblivious to parties’ changing positions on issues that they do not consider important. The results demonstrate that issue saliency plays a fundamental role in explaining voters’ perceptions of parties’ policy shifts: according to this logic, democratic discourse between the elites and the electorate appears to take place at the level of policy issues that voters care about.     

Is the Democratic Party’s superdelegate system unfair to voters?

Among the reasons for the historic nature of the 2008 Democratic primary race was the attention paid to the “superdelegates”. The competitiveness of the primary and the important role the superdelegates played has led to calls for reform. This paper develops a formal model that explains why superdelegates selected one candidate over the other and why some superdelegates committed early in the primary season while others waited. Hypotheses are tested using an original dataset collected during the 2008 Democratic primary. The results suggest that although some superdelegates made their decision based on personal, idiosyncratic factors, for many superdelegates, Democratic voters played the most important role in their commitment process.     

The Condorcet jury theorem and extension of?the?franchise with rationally ignorant voters

The Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT), which provides a justification for democracy, is based on voters who are imperfectly informed insofar as they know the correct policy with a probability of less than one but greater than one-half. We reassess the consequences of the CJT for democracy when extension of the franchise adds equal numbers of non-distinguishable informed and uninformed voters to the collective decision making group. Uninformed voters vote correctly with probability one-half. We show that adding equal numbers of informed and uninformed voters maintains the CJT conclusion that enlarging the group of decision makers increases the likelihood of a correct collective decision.     

Selfish and Cooperative Voting: Can the Majority Restrain Themselves?

At every scale from small committees to national elections, voters face tradeoffs between self-interest and the common good. We report three experiments in which participants vote for policies with real payoffs at stake. We manipulate self-interest by randomly assigning participants to two groups in society with different policy payoffs. Participants in the majority group are confronted by a simple choice between a policy that is better for themselves or a policy that is best for society. Overall, we find a clear effect of self-interest: Participants are more likely to choose the policy that earns them more money, compared to participants in the other group, even when the policy is detrimental to the common good. Simultaneously, we observe considerable levels of cooperative voting among participants in the majority, ranging from 47% to 79% across different payoff regimes. Finally, participants were not more cooperative when voting compared to when they chose between the same policies with a lottery or leader institution, departing from the hypothesis that voting institutions promote cooperative motives. We discuss implications for multiple literatures about voting behavior.

     

Introduction: Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap?

Journal of Chinese Political Science - Can China rise peacefully? Will China and the United States go to war? As U.S. and China face rising tensions in trade, technology, cyberspace, and the South...     

UK Devolution and the European Union: A Tale of Cooperative Asymmetry?

The post-1999 devolution project has resulted in a major recalibrationof the preexisting arrangements for making European Union policywithin the United Kingdom. The devolved administrations in Scotlandand Wales (but not the English regions) have gained in electorallegitimacy and legislative powers, and thereby have a greaterclaim to consultation with UK central government. Four key characteristicsof European Union policymaking in a devolved United Kingdomare identified. The legal contingency of the "devolveds" statushas not yet impeded traditional cooperative relations betweengovernment tiers, but the stability of the new arrangementsremains in question. The UK case is compared with European Unionregionalization in other member states and a distinction isdrawn between a cooperative regionalist approach (the devolveds)and a consultative one (the English regions).     

Recent reform of intelligence in the UK: Democratization or risk management?

The recent flurry of intelligence legislation in the UK can be taken to mean that Britain has democratized its intelligence services in line with other western democracies. However, this argument is rejected. The changing role of intelligence, particularly in the area of ‘serious and organized crime’, altered the environment in which intelligence services operate and meant that they lost their monopoly of control over information. It is more a process of risk management than democratization. The Intelligence Services Act 1994 and the role of the new oversight body, the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, are also assessed.     

Does the UK Have Influence in the EU Legislative Process?

The UK has influenced some major EU policies, such as the creation of the single market and enlargement. But how influential are the UK government and British MEPs in the day‐to‐day EU legislative process? To answer this question, this article analyses recent data from the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. The evidence is mixed. In the Council, in recent years the UK government has been outvoted more often than any other EU government, yet UK officials remain well connected ‘behind the scenes’. In the European Parliament, British MEPs are now more likely to be on the losing side than are the MEPs of any other member state, yet British MEPs still win key committee chairs and rapporteurships. The evidence suggests that if the UK votes to remain in the EU, Britain's political elites will need to re‐engage with Brussels politics if the UK is to avoid becoming further marginalised from mainstream EU politics.