My research focuses on the relationship between political parties and public opinion, and the implications of this for the electoral process. This relates to a number of questions of central importance to democratic theory, including where public opinion comes from. Why does it change over time? Do elections compel parties to adopt policies consistent with public opinion? How do parties adapt to changes in public opinion over time? How do long term relationships develop between political parties and particular groups of voters? My research on these questions can be grouped into three general themes: (1) party competition and electoral representation; (2) the historical development of party systems; and (3) the nature and origins of public opinion.
PUBLICATIONS
[1] ' Bridging Spatial and Saliency Theory: Party Size and Issue Selection in Campaigns.' 2020. Political Science Research and Methods 8(3): 444-458.
I propose a unified explanation for parties' joint policy and emphasis decisions which bridges saliency theory and spatial analyses of party campaigns. Party platforms are anchored by the policy preferences of activists, core supporters and target voters, leading parties to disproportionately emphasize issues where their policies are popular with all key constituencies. However, which voters a party targets relates to its historical electoral performance (“party size”). Traditionally successful (“major”) parties emphasize issues where the policies preferred by activists and core supporters are generally popular, but smaller (“minor”) parties emphasize issues where their preferred policies may be unpopular but are distinctive. Using recent European data and various empirical strategies, I show that this account has significant explanatory power beyond existing party typologies and theories of issue selection.
[1] 'The Revelation Incentive for Issue Engagement in Campaigns', with Matthew Knowles.
How do parties choose issues to emphasize in campaigns, and when does electoral competition force parties to address issues important to voters? Empirical studies have found that although parties focus disproportionately on favourable issues in campaigns, they also spend much of the ‘short campaign’ addressing the same issues – and especially if these are salient issues. We write a model of multiparty competition with endogenous issue salience, where, in equilibrium, parties behave in line with these patterns. In our model, parties’ issue emphases have two effects: influencing voter priorities, and also informing voters about their issue positions. Thus, parties trade off two incentives when choosing issues to emphasize: increasing the importance of favorable issues (‘the salience incentive’), and revealing their positions on salient issues to sympathetic voters (‘the revelation incentive’). The relative strength of these two incentives determines how far elections constrain parties to respond to voters’ initial issue priorities.
[2] 'Democratizing from Within: British Elites and the Expansion of the Franchise', with Carles Boix, Sonia Giurumescu and Paulo Serodio.
Awarded the 2019 James B. Christoph prize for best conference paper presented by a junior faculty member in the British Politics Group section of the American Political Science Association.
We develop a theory of democratization that integrates both electoral calculations and economic incentives to explain the institutional choices of political actors. Left-leaning (liberal) politicians, who, given their location in the policy space, are more likely to receive the support of newly enfranchised voters, favor a broader franchise than conservative ones. Their preferences are conditional on the distributional effects of the franchise: when inequality is higher, policymakers are more reluctant to expand it because it is harder to reconcile the policy demands of existing and new voters. We evaluate this theory by estimating the franchise preferences of British MPs based on their votes on franchise-related parliamentary divisions between 1830 and 1918, and linking these preferences to their personal and constituency characteristics. Our results, which are consistent with our theory, show that declining inequality and the First World War were crucial factors in the democratization of Britain in this period.
[3] 'How the Media Matters for the Economic Vote: Evidence from Britain.'
This study uses data from the 2005–10 British Election Panel Study to examine the effect of media coverage on voter evaluations of the incumbent government following the 2007-8 financial crisis. By combining sentiment analysis with an instrumental variables approach, I show that newspapers’ coverage of these events influenced how readers evaluated the Labour government’s handling of the crisis and also the economy in general – but not who voters blamed for the financial crisis. I also show that newspaper coverage influenced readers’ vote intention as late as 2010, weakening over the course of the ‘short campaign’. Formal sensitivity analyses provide further evidence that these effects are not driven by readers’ previous assessments of the Labour party. I thus demonstrate that media framing of economic events, through its effects on voters’ evaluations of incumbents’ economic performance, can durably affect vote intention – even if not ultimately vote choice.
[1] 'Preference Endogeneity and the Problem of Electoral Representation.'
How can we evaluate the quality of electoral representation if voter preferences, priorities and beliefs are partly shaped by elite political communication? I consider six approaches commonly used to evaluate electoral representation, and argue that all are problematic if public opinion both influences and is influenced by elite behavior. I propose and defend a new measurable criterion for effective popular influence over elected representatives (and therefore effective electoral representation), 'communicative representation': the degree to which speech by elected legislators represents, as well as responds to, the entire distribution of voter preferences (communicative congruence and communicative responsiveness, respectively). Low (high) communicative representation implies that political actors with certain preferences and priorities have disproportionate (proportionate) presence and influence in public debate, and so disproportionate (proportionate) political power. I illustrate the feasibility and value of this approach by analyzing communicative congruence on immigration and welfare spending in the United Kingdom between 2010 and 2015.
[2] 'Realignment on the Left: From Liberalism to Socialism', with Carles Boix, Jordi Munoz and Sonia Giurumescu.
In this paper, we explore the mechanisms that triggered the rise of social democracy, the collapse of liberalism, and, as a result, the overall transformation of the Left. We claim that social democracy was electorally successful when two conditions obtained: the franchise had been extended to a significant fraction of the working class; and socialist candidates could count on the organizational support of labor unions. In turn, we stress the importance of the strategic and institutional choices made by non-socialist (mainly, liberal) politicians: whenever they preferred to cater to the interests of the middle classes over the demands of urban workers and/or could not find a way to construct a supra-class electoral strategy including all non-conservative voters, unions backed, sponsored or promoted socialist parties and candidates. We present an empirical analysis of the rise of the Labour party in England and Wales between 1900 and 1935 based on a novel, longitudinal constituency-level dataset that includes information on electoral returns, class composition of the electorate and the union density. We provide evidence of the class basis of the electoral success of the Labour party, but also of the important role played by the unions.