Christopher Prosser

Party system fragmentation and single-party government: the British general election of 2015

The 2015 British general election returned a majority Conservative government after five years of coalition government – the first coalition government in Britain since 1945.1 The result defied exp...

Dimensionality, ideology and party positions towards European integration

Abstract The rise of political contestation over European integration has led many scholars to examine the role that broader ideological positions play in structuring party attitudes towards European integration. This article extends the existing approaches in two important ways. First, it shows that whether the dimensionality of politics is imagined in a one-dimensional ‘general left‒right’ form or a two-dimensional ‘economic left‒right/social liberal-conservative’ form leads to very different understandings of the way ideology has structured attitudes towards European integration, with the two-dimensional approach offering greater explanatory power. Second, existing approaches have modelled the influence of ideology on attitudes towards European integration as a static process. This article shows that the relationship between ideology and European integration has changed substantially over the history of European integration: divisions over social issues have replaced economic concerns as the main driver of party attitudes towards European integration.

Missing Non-Voters and Misweighted Samples: Explaining the 2015 Great British Polling Miss

The pre-election polls for the 2015 UK General Election missed the final result by a considerable margin: underestimating the Conservative Party and overestimating Labour. We analyse evidence for five theories of why the polls missed using British Election Study data. We find limited evidence for systematic vote intention misreporting, late swing, systematically different preferences among “don’t knows�? or differential turnout of parties’ supporters. By comparing the BES face-to-face probability sample and online panel, we show that the online survey’s polling error is primarily caused by under-sampling non-voters, then weighting respondents to represent the general population. Consequently, demographic groups with a low probability of voting are over-weighted within the voter subsample. Finally, we show that this mechanism is likely partially responsible for the over-estimate of the Liberal Democrats in 2010, showing that this is a longstanding problem with British polls.

Twitter and Facebook are not representative of the general population: Political attitudes and demographics of British social media users

A growing social science literature has used Twitter and Facebook to study political and social phenomena including for election forecasting and tracking political conversations. This research note uses a nationally representative probability sample of the British population to examine how Twitter and Facebook users differ from the general population in terms of demographics, political attitudes and political behaviour. We find that Twitter and Facebook users differ substantially from the general population on many politically relevant dimensions including vote choice, turnout, age, gender, and education. On average social media users are younger and better educated than non-users, and they are more liberal and pay more attention to politics. Despite paying more attention to politics, social media users are less likely to vote than non-users, but they are more likely to support the left leaning Labour Party when they do vote. However, we show that these apparent differences mostly arise due to the demographic composition of social media users. After controlling for age, gender, and education, no statistically significant differences arise between social media users and non-users on political attention, values or political behaviour.

Calling European Union Treaty Referendums: Electoral and Institutional Politics

Many European integration treaties – most notably the failed Constitutional Treaty – have faced ratification by referendum in various member states. Although the literature on voting behaviour in these referendums in now well established, the reasons why these referendums were held in the first place is under-scrutinised. This article examines the reasons EU member states decide to call referendums in order to ratify EU treaties and argues that they do so primarily as a result of domestic political pressure arising from three sources: electoral pressure when the EU is unpopular and elections are close, rules governing the use of referendums, and domestic institutional veto players. This theory is tested using a combination of single and multi-level logistic regression analysis, which finds support for the hypotheses developed here.

Second order electoral rules and national party systems: The Duvergerian effects of European Parliament elections

The effects of electoral rules on party systems have been well known since Duverger first proposed his famous law. Often considered ‘second order’ in terms of issues and voting behaviour, many European Parliament elections are held under different electoral rules to national elections. This article examines the consequences of these differences and hypothesizes that where a more permissive electoral system is used for European Parliament elections, the size of the party system at European Parliament elections will grow towards what we would expect from the European Parliament electoral rules in isolation, and that this will lead to a subsequent growth in the size of the national party system. Using multi-level mixed-effect growth curve modelling support is found for both these hypotheses.

The strange death of multi-party Britain: the UK General Election of 2017

The UK General Election of 8 June 2017 was one of the most dramatic and unexpected in recent British history. The election was called early and came just a year after the 2016 referendum on Britain...

Tremors But No Youthquake: Measuring Changes in the Age and Turnout Gradients at the 2015 and 2017 British General Elections

Abstract In the aftermath of the 2017 UK General Election, some claimed that Labour performed unexpectedly well because of a surge in youth turnout. Polling estimates for the size of this ‘youthquake’ ranged from 12 to 21 points amongst 18–24 year olds. Using conventional and Bayesian statistical methods, we analyse British Election Study and British Social Attitudes random probability surveys and find no evidence of a shift in the relationship between age and turnout of this scale. Using the pooled BES and BSA reported turnout data with an informative prior that there was a modest increase in 18–24 turnout (N{6, 3}), our 95% credible interval for that change is between 0.9 and 8.8 points. Even with a strong youthquake prior (N{15.5, 3.5}), our data suggest that there is only a 4% probability that the change in turnout amongst 18–24 years olds was 12 points or higher.

Authoritarianism, Social Structure and Economic Policy Preferences

While elite level and political party ideological positions broadly reflect a one dimensional structure, at the mass level ideological positions appear to be unstructured or multidimensional. In this paper we reconcile this apparent disconnect and argue that economic policy preferences among the general public arise from an interaction between universalistic (socially liberal) and particularistic (authoritarian) dispositions, and social position. The economic preferences of universalistic liberals tend to economic left-leaning regardless of social position, whereas the preferences of particularistic authoritarians reflect their standing in the social order. For example, poor authoritarians tend to favour redistribution while better off authoritarians tend to be economic right-leaning. Using British Election Study, American National Election Study and European Election Study data we demonstrate this pattern across a range of policy areas and social groups. We find a consistent pattern whereby liberals support policies that promote fairness and equality, and authoritarians support policies that benefit their own social group.

The Politics of Ratification of EU Treaties: Processes and Actors by Carlos Closa. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. 232pp., £80.00, ISBN 978 0415454896

communist parties have responded to European integration. The KKE, AKEL and RC, despite some clear specificities, all experienced a period of moderation at one time or another (p. 164). However, the crucial point is that such parties ‘regulate, and hence alter at times, the salience levels they place on their criticism of European integration, depending on whether they choose consistency or moderation’ (p. 165). Leadership, ideology and party system position are found to be conditioning factors for the responses of the parties analysed, while the dissolution of the Soviet bloc ‘has had a lasting impact’ only in the case of AKEL (p. 171). Chapter 8 discusses the wider implications of European integration for the communist movement and argues that the complex interconnections between partisan, domestic and international factors greatly undermine the prospects for coordinated action by communist parties at the supranational level. This book is a very welcome contribution for scholars of party politics and comparative politics alike, and bears great theoretical and empirical significance. Indeed, Charalambous’ book provides the analytical tools to understand how parties respond to European integration – in particular those belonging to radical and non-mainstream party families.