1,721,019 research outputs found
Political trust and redistribution preferences
No full textHow does political trust influence policy preferences? A large literature posits that trust is vital for supporting governments in managing fundamental societal challenges and investing in long-term policy making. This paper investigates the relationship between political trust and policy preferences, specifically redistribution preferences. Through four pre-registered, original survey experiments conducted over two years in the UK and long-term panel data spanning 19 years in Switzerland, I demonstrate that political trust has an insignificant and negligible impact on individuals’ preferences for redistribution, even when trust is experimentally manipulated under theoretically favourable conditions. By combining two designs with improved causal identification than the existing literature, these results challenge prevailing theories linking political trust and policy preferences and highlight the need for further examination of the complex dynamics between citizens’ attitudes and support for government policy
Replication Data for: `Political Trust and Climate Policy Choice: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment'
No full textReplication code and data for the manuscript `Political Trust and Climate Policy Choice:
Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
Does political trust matter? A meta-analysis on the consequences of trust
No full textPolitical trust has long been seen as fundamental for societal cooperation and democratic legitimacy. However, evidence about its consequences are partial and fragmented, and we do not currently have a systematic understanding of whether political trust warrants such vast attention. This paper conducts a systematic review and meta-analysis of 61 studies reporting 329 coefficients derived from over three and a half million observations globally. After synthesising the conceptual and theoretical frameworks in the extant literature, the meta-analysis results show that trust is weakly to moderately related to outcomes as diverse as voter turnout,vote choice, policy preferences and compliance, but is unrelated to informal participation. These results are robust to a range of considerations such as the measurement of trust, modelling strategy, region of study, publication bias, and design of the study. The review also highlights substantial geographical and methodological gaps, particularly the reliance on cross-sectional designs. Substantively, the results show that trust is importantly and robustly related to what people want from their political systems and how they interact with it. By systematically analysing the extant research, the paper provides a robust, systematic, and empirical foundation to advance research on political trust
Perceived government autonomy, economic evaluations, and political support during the Eurozone crisis
No full textThe Eurozone crisis and resulting economic interventions present a particular manifestation of the dilemma between globalisation and national democracy, one in which supranational involvement led to an unprecedented reduction in democratic governance. This has been linked to an erosion in support for the domestic political system, but the precise mechanism is still debated. This article tests two mechanisms proposed in the recent literature: firstly, that citizens perceived that their domestic system’s autonomy was constrained by the economic interventions, which led citizens to reduce their support for the domestic system; secondly, that the decline was due to worsening economic evaluations. This article tests these arguments together at the individual level for the first time using a multilevel analysis of European Election Study data, and replicates the results with a case study of Portugal. The analysis finds no support for the autonomy argument, but instead points to the crucial role of economic evaluations.<br/
Discrete Events and Hate Crimes: The Causal Role of the Brexit Referendum
No full textObjective: the article contributes to the literature on discrete events and behavioral change among the public by studying the link between the United Kingdom's 2016 “Brexit”referendum and racial and religious hate crime.Methods: time series intervention models on daily and monthly hate crime numbers from the UK Home Office and police forces, controlling for other events such as terror attacks. A range of robustness tests including additional vector auto-regression.Results: the Brexit referendum led to a 19–23 percent increase in hate crimes, but did not lead to a longer-term increase. The results are robust to a range of alternative specifications, and there is no evidence of a relationship between media coverage of hate crime or immigration salience and hate crimes. The results also show the consistent, large effect of terror attacks on increasing the number of hate crimes.Conclusion: the Brexit referendum caused an increase in hate crimes on par with terror attacks. Discrete political events, like referendums and elections, can play a sizeable role in prejudicial behavioral change
From convergence to congruence: European integration and citizen-elite congruence
No full textRecent research argues that European integration has led to an ideological convergence of member state party systems, which is purported to have significant consequences for democratic representation. We argue that convergence of party positions is less problematic if congruence between governed and governing is maintained. We therefore turn to test whether integration has had an effect on congruence between the public and their governing elites. Using five measures of integration, two sources of public opinion data, and expert surveys on political parties, we find little evidence that integration into the European Union reduces congruence between the public and the national party system, government or legislature either ideologically or across five issue areas. These results should assuage concerns about integration’s effect on domestic political representation
Does media coverage drive public support for UKIP or does public support for UKIP drive media coverage?
No full textPrevious research suggests media attention may cause support for populist right- wing parties, but extant evidence is mostly limited to proportional representation systems in which such an effect would be most likely. At the same time, in the United Kingdom’s first-past-the-post system, an ongoing political and regulatory debate revolves around whether the media give disproportionate coverage to the populist right- wing UK Independence Party (UKIP). We use a mixed-methods research design to investigate the causal dynamics of UKIP support and media coverage as an especially valuable case. Vector autoregression (VAR) using monthly, aggregate time-series data from January 2004 to April 2017 provides new evidence consistent with a model in which media coverage drives party support, but not vice-versa. Additionally, we identify key periods in which stagnating or declining support for UKIP is followed by increases in media coverage and subsequent increases in public support. The findings show that media coverage may drive public support for right-wing populist parties, in a substantively non-trivial fashion irreducible to previous levels of public support, even in a national institutional environment least supportive of such an effect. The findings have implications for political debates in the United Kingdom and potentially other liberal democracies
The politics of constraint: How european integration shapes the governed and the governing
No full textDoes European integration affect public support for political institutions and, if so, how? This is the broad research question this thesis poses. The central theme of this thesis is whether the long-term constraints entailed by European integration have had an impact on domestic mass politics in the European Union, and specifically on political support. That integration, European or otherwise, leads to the loss of political support has been claimed extensively within the literatures on Europeanisation, globalisation and political support, with little empirical examination. This academic interest has become more relevant as political elites and the public alike call for greater control over national decision-making and a reinvigoration of democratic participation.Building on the literatures on political support, Europeanisation and globalisation, the thesis tests the theoretical claim that European integration has had a negative impact on political support. Using a number of advanced quantitative methods which combines data from individual and aggregate level public opinion, political parties and countries, the thesis provides a rigorous empirical examination of how the purported ’politics of constraint’ shapes public opinion and the linkages between elites and their publics within the EU.The four empirical chapters provide a rebuttal to the ’constraint’ hypothesis.On the contrary, the linkages between domestic institutional changes, such as integration, and political attitudes are highly mediated by their domestic contexts. The chapters show that whilst there is some evidence of a negative effect in the nine longest-serving countries, this is heavily mediated by economic conditions. However, there is clear evidence of a growing ’support gap’: that integration is embedding a domestic cleavage between those with high and those with low education. The thesis also shows that this does not operate in a clear way through direct perceptions of constraint or through integration’s impact on public-elite congruence. On the contrary, integration has no identifiable impact on the congruence between parties, parliaments and governments on one hand and mass public opinion on the other; and, if anything, perceived constraint boosts political support. A key conclusion of the thesis therefore is that more fundamental determinants are at the domestic level, and that the core determinants of political support are how our institutions perform in producing policy. Whilst processes like integration are independently important, it is how they are refracted through domestic politics that leads to change amongst the public.<br/
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