Research

Around 20% of people in our societies are disabled, but they remain vastly underrepresented in politics. My research explores the barriers that disabled people face in engaging in politics at the citizen and elite level, and how their views are represented. 

My article in Political Behavior analyses the disability gaps in political orientations in Europe and some of their potential explanations. The conclusions are summarised in this blog post. 

Linking voter and candidate survey data, I examine to what extent the disability gaps in policy preferences among citizens are reflected among political elites. In my article in the British Journal of Political Science I show that being disabled is linked to political views in similar ways amongst citizens and candidates in the UK.

Together with Elizabeth Evans, I take a mixed-methods approach to examining the role of disability in political representation. In our forthcoming book Disability and Representation with Oxford University Press (publication in March 2024) we provide an analysis of disabled people's access to politics and the barriers they face, from voting in elections to standing for office. We also analyse whether and how disabled representatives speak for and share the views of disabled citizens. 

Our article in the International Political Science Review discusses the barriers to elected office that disabled people face, drawing on over 50 interviews with former candidates and elected representatives. We also wrote two reports for the UK Government Equalities Office, one on the barriers to elected office that disabled people face and one evaluating the EnAble Fund, which supported disabled candidates run their election campaigns in the 2019 local elections in England. In our European Journal of Politics and Gender article we explore the particular experiences of being engaged in parties and seeking elected office of disabled women in the UK.

In my project "How do voters evaluate disabled politicians?", funded by a New Investigator Grant from the ESRC and a Research Incentive Grant from the Carnegie Trust, I study how voters perceive politicians with disabilities. Using conjoint experiments, I examine the effects of different disability types, intersections with other characteristics such as gender (with Sarah Liu), campaign strategies (with Yulia Lemesheva), and voters' characteristics. My first article from the project appeared in a special issue on health and political behaviour in Frontiers in Political Science and shows that citizens in the UK stereotype disabled candidates primarily in positive ways. The second paper from the project, "Voting for Disabled Candidates" (conditionally accepted by the Journal of Politics), suggests that voters in the UK and US do not discriminate against disabled candidates, and in fact left-wing voters are inclined to support them in order to improve the political representation of an under-represented group. To complement this experimental evidence, Mikko Mattila and I use candidate survey data from Finland to determine whether disabled candidates are favoured or punished at the ballot box by voters in an open-list PR system. 

Long-term mental health conditions can be disabling, and are associated with negative stereotypes. Together with Luca Bernardi and Rob Johns I explore how voters perceive representatives who openly disclose mental health conditions and mental distress. 

In a project on citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of policy-making processes, Anne Rasmussen and I examine how citizens evaluate the consultation of interest groups and citizens in the policy-making process. In the first paper, published in the British Journal of Political Science, we find that citizens perceive policy-making processes as more legitimate when the key interest groups concerned with the policy issue are consulted, and when different group types are consulted to equal degrees. We also study the role of group ties and the effects of levels of deliberation with citizens.

Deliberative democratic innovations such as Citizen Assemblies have been on the rise. In order for these to be democratic and legitimate, I argue (together with Ruth Lightbody, Marco Reggiani, Jen Roberts and Hannah Salamon) that it is crucial that the expert witnesses who are invited to inform participants represent a diverse and inclusive group. In a policy brief we outline our findings, namely that climate-related deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) in the UK provide no information about EDI criteria in the witness recruitment and selection process or about diversity among their witness panels.

In my doctoral research, I showed that citizens whose policy priorities receive more attention from political elites are more satisfied with democracy and more likely to turn out in elections. These findings highlight that it is important to citizens that not only their policy positions but also their policy priorities are reflected by representatives. This work has been published in the European Journal of Political Research, Electoral Studies, and the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. You can find my blog post about the EJPR article in democratic audit UK. 

Together with my colleagues from the GovLis project, I investigated the link between public opinion and public policy in Europe. One innovative aspect of this project is the focus on a diverse set of specific policy issues, from the minimum wage to adoption by same-sex couples. We investigate a range of potential predictors of policy representation. Our findings on the (non-)effects of institutions are published in the European Journal of Political Research (with Anne Rasmussen and Dimiter Toshkov). 

Citizens' engagement in civil society organisations and interest groups can interact with public opinion to influence policy in different ways. We show how public opinion affects interest groups' advocacy success in our Comparative Political Studies article (with Anne Rasmussen and Lars Mäder). In another article in Comparative Political Studies, we demonstrate that in addition to competing for influence with the general public, civil society organisations also strengthen the link between public opinion and policy, no matter whether their views are aligned with those of the public.

I am also interested in whether policy represents the preferences of different social groups to equal degrees. In a recent article in the European Political Science Review, I show that women's preferences are not mirrored in public policy to the same degree as men's across Europe.