Some current projects

Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion Political Choice

Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (£45,048).

This is a book project re-examining the nature of mass policy opinion and the possibility for policy-based political choice in established democracies. The book is based on an original three-wave panel survey which measured the views of a nationally representative sample of British voters on 34 policy issues.  This is joint work with Chris Hanretty and Ben Lauderdale.  

Causes and Consequences of Electoral Violence: Evidence from England and Wales 1832-1914 

ESRC/AHRC-funded project (£504,077) with Patrick Kuhn (PI, Durham University) and Gidon Cohen (Co-I, Durham University).

This project uses new detailed data to examine electoral violence in England and Wales from its peak after the Great Reform Act (1832) until it all but disappeared before the Great War (1914). Based on the exceptionally detailed historical records available for Britain (1832-1914), we provide new answers to some of the most challenging questions about what leads to electoral violence, and about its effects. Our findings will be useful not just to historians but contemporary scholars of election violence and practitioners seeking to tackle this problem.

The basis of the project is the creation of a new dataset on electoral violence in England and Wales for all 20 general elections between 1832 and 1914, based on newspaper archives, government and police records. We are linking this information to existing political, economic, social, geographic, and non-election related violence data, including individual-level data from Rate and Poll books. We have also collected and analysed a wide range of qualitative evidence. We are developing a new historical account of English and Welsh election violence in the period based on more complete and systematic data. We are also working on papers examining specific claims about election violence, looking at the perpetrators and targets, economic causes, the relationship to the rise of cohesive parties, and the short-, medium- and long- term consequences of election violence. You can find out more about the project here, and explore an interactive map of historical election violence events based on our data.

Some past projects

Estimating Constituency Opinion in Britain

ESRC-funded project (£115,433) with Chris Hanretty and Ben Lauderdale 

Even though they are the basic unit of representation in British politics, each choosing a single Member of Parliament (MP) to send to Westminster, we have traditionally had very little systematic information about political opinion in individual constituencies. This is because gathering such information using traditional polling techniques is prohibitively expensive: researchers would need to survey a sufficient number of voters in each separate constituency, meaning an extremely large overall sample size. 

This project generated the first systematic constituency-level measures of public opinion on specific political issues such as the same sex marriage, immigration and European Union membership, as well as on over-arching political questions such as the appropriate balance between government taxation and spending. We did so by using Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification methods to combine information from several existing, publicly available data sources. First, we use data from the British Election Study, which records the political opinions, socio-demographic type and constituency location of a large number of survey respondents, to estimate a statistical model predicting an individual’s political opinions as a function of their socio-demographic type and constituency location. In line with prior research, we also include Ordinance Survey data on which constituencies neighbour each other, thus allowing for the tendency of people who live in constituencies near to one another to have more similar political opinions than those who live in constituencies further apart. In the second step we generate an estimate of public opinion in each constituency by combining the predictions of our statistical model with Census-based information on the number of people of each socio-demographic type living in that constituency.

Here you can find a booklet summarising of our project, which accompanied a talk we gave at the House of Commons Library in 2014. You can find the constituency opinion estimates we produced, as well as replication code and details of other project outputs, here. The estimates we produced were reported in the national media, including, for example, in The Times (paywalled). 

What do voters want from their parliamentary representatives?

Project funded by Austrian National Bank (€106,000) and British Academy (£9,900), with Markus Wagner (University of Vienna).

This project studied the preferences of constituents in Britain, Germany and Austria concerning the activities and behaviour of their Member of Parliament (MP). Our initial UK-focused work used a series of conjoint analysis survey experiments to examine what British voters want from their MPs. Our focus was, first, on how constituents want their MP to balance local constituency service and national policy work and, second, on how voters interpret MP dissent from the party line not just as a sign of the MP's policy position but also as a sign of the MP's character (joint work with Rosie Campbell and Phil Cowley). Here you can find a short summary of our main results for the UK, which were presented at a House of Commons Library seminar in 2013. As part of this project, I helped to organise a 2014 conference in London, which brought together researchers from across Europe interested in the study of 'MPs and their Constituents in Contemporary Democracies'. 

The Austrian National Bank funded us to extend this work to compare voter attitudes in the UK, Germany and Austria. We used survey experiments fielded in all three countries to examine, for example, voter attitudes to the class background of politicians (published here), and how voter reactions to MP dissent varies depending on the costs of that dissent (published here). Konstantin Glinitzer and Jakob-Moritz Eberl have worked on this research with us at various stages. 

Turnout misreporting and sensitive survey techniques

British Academy funded-project (£10,000) with Patrick Kuhn (Co-I, Durham University).

Survey researchers often  face the problem that respondents are unwilling to admit to sensitive attitudes or behaviours and therefore misreport when answering questions on such topics. This hampers our ability as social scientists to measure and analyse the determinants of important attitudes and behaviours. Focusing on election turnout as a sensitive topic prone to survey misreporting, we ran a series of survey experiments in the UK and New Zealand (as part of the New Zealand National Election Study) allowing us to evaluate new and existing 'sensitive survey techniques' aimed at reducing survey misreporting. A number of those survey experiments were accompanied by vote validation exercises, where we check the actual turnout behaviour of survey respondents using official records. As part of the project, we developed new approaches to more effectively utilise these 'true' measures of respondent turnout when validating turnout measures obtained from a particular sensitive survey techniques , the list experiment. This new approach, and the new insights it provides, are reported in an article in Political Analysis.  In another article from the project we show the problems with alternative possible survey techniques for measuring self-reported turnout.