Caitlin Milazzo

Has the British Public Depolarized Along with Political Elites? An American Perspective on British Public Opinion

In contrast to the growing elite policy polarization in the United States, the British Labour and Conservative Parties have converged dramatically on economic and social welfare policy over the past two decades. The authors ask the following question: Has there been a parallel depolarization in the British mass public’s policy attitudes and partisan loyalties, pointing to a general mechanism that extends beyond the U.S. case? The authors report analyses of election survey data from 1987 to 2001 that document significant declines in the association between British citizens’ policy positions and their partisanship (partisan sorting). However, they find only modest changes in the dispersion of British respondents’ self-placements on the policy scales (policy extremity) and in mass attitude constraint, defined as the correlations between citizens’ positions across different policy issues. These trends in the British public’s policy preferences and partisan loyalties are mirror images of the trends in the American public’s policy preferences and mass partisanship.

Are Voter Decision Rules Endogenous to Parties’ Policy Strategies? A Model with Applications to Elite Depolarization in Post-Thatcher Britain

While spatial modelers assume that citizens evaluate parties on the basis of their policy positions, empirical research on American politics suggests that citizens’ party attachments often drive their policy preferences, rather than vice versa. Building on previous findings that partisanship is less salient to British citizens than to Americans, we argue that British citizens predominantly update their partisanship to match their policy beliefs. We further argue that because policy salience declines when parties converge, citizens’ policy beliefs exert diminishing effects on their party evaluations as parties depolarize on a focal policy dimension—i.e., that voter decision rules are an endogenous function of parties’ policy strategies. We find support for these hypotheses via individual-level analyses of British election panel survey data between 1987 and 2001. We also find that the reciprocal policy-partisan effects we identify extend to different subconstituencies of British citizens including the more and less educated and politically engaged.

Taking back control? Investigating the role of immigration in the 2016 vote for Brexit:

The 2016 referendum marked a watershed moment in the history of the United Kingdom. The public vote to leave the European Union (EU)—for a ‘Brexit’—brought an end to the country’s membership of the EU and set it on a fundamentally different course. Recent academic research on the vote for Brexit points to the importance of immigration as a key driver, although how immigration influenced the vote remains unclear. In this article, we draw on aggregate-level data and individual-level survey data from the British Election Study (BES) to explore how immigration shaped public support for Brexit. Our findings suggest that, specifically, increases in the rate of immigration at the local level and sentiments regarding control over immigration were key predictors of the vote for Brexit, even after accounting for factors stressed by established theories of Eurosceptic voting. Our findings suggest that a large reservoir of support for leaving the EU, and perhaps anti-immigration populism more widely, will remain in Britain, so long as immigration remains a salient issue.

Looking Good For Election Day: Does Attractiveness Predict Electoral Success in Britain?

This article Explores the relationship between perceptions of candidate attractiveness and election outcomes in Britain. Uses a computer-based survey to evaluate subjects’ first impressions of real British candidates from the 2010 general election. Looks at the perception that Conservative candidates and candidates who are relatively young are more attractive. Concludes that attractive candidates were more moderately more successful, even when we control for other important determinants of electoral success. What do British voters look for in their candidates? We know they favour candidates who have experience serving their constituents and those with local ties. As a result, parties often emphasise these characteristics in their campaign materials. However, these materials also provide voters with the candidates’ images. Using a survey where respondents are asked to evaluate real British candidates using only rapidly determined first impressions of facial images, we demonstrate that candidates who were deemed attractive enjoyed greater electoral success in the 2010 general election. Specifically, we find that candidates who are widely perceived to be more attractive had a higher vote share, even when we take into account the candidates’ age, party, incumbency and campaign spending.

Social Diversity Affects the Number of Parties Even Under First Past the Post Rules

Nearly all systematic empirical work on the relationship between social diversity and the number of parties asserts the “interactive hypothesis”—Social heterogeneity leads to party fragmentation under permissive electoral rules, but not under single-member district, first-past-the-post (FPTP) rules. In this article, we argue that previous work has been hindered by a reliance on national-level measures of variables and a linear model of the relationship between diversity and party fragmentation. This article provides the first analysis to test the interactive hypothesis appropriately by using district-level measures of both ethnic diversity and the effective number of parties in legislative FPTP elections and considering a curvilinear relationship between the variables. We find that there is a strong relationship between social diversity and the number of parties even under FPTP electoral rules, thus suggesting that restrictive rules are not as powerful a constraint on electoral behavior and outcomes as is usually supposed.

Democratic Scepticism and Political Participation in Europe

Abstract The former Communist countries of Eastern Europe have markedly lower levels of voter turnout than Western European countries, which could be a cause for concern if it represents a rejection of democratic values. In this article, we examine what people think about democracy and how these attitudes affect their likelihood of participating in the democratic process. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems drawn from national election surveys in 22 countries in Eastern and Western Europe, we find that citizens in Eastern Europe are more likely to express doubts about democracy and be dissatisfied with how it works in practice. More importantly, while we demonstrate that attitudes about democracy do affect political participation, they cannot fully account for the low levels of turnout observed in post-communist countries. This has implications for our interpretation of the significance of low turnout in national elections.

The face of the party? Leader personalization in British campaigns

ABSTRACT The personal characteristics of political elites play an important role in British elections. While the personalization of the media’s election coverage has been the subject of much debate, we know less about the conditions under which voters receive personalized messages directly from elites during the campaign. In this paper, we use a new dataset that includes more than 3300 local communications from the 2015 general election to explore variation in the personalization of campaign messaging. We find that there is systemic variation in terms of where photographs of party leaders are included in election communications, which provides further evidence that campaign messages are deployed strategically to portray the candidate – and their party – in the best possible light.