Contact matters: voters like to be asked personally for their support

Ed Miliband has announced that to counter the Conservative party’s financial advantage during the 2015 election campaign Labour will outnumber them in supporters out on the streets engaging with voters – and will benefit accordingly. Is that a sensible strategy? David Cutts, Ed Fieldhouse, Justin Fisher, Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie have done a lot of research into the impact of local campaigns and use data from the 2010 election to assess whether Labour’s strategy will bring the hoped-for benefits

Did young voters turn out in droves for Corbyn? The myth of the 2017 youthquake election

That hordes of previously disengaged young voters turned out to support Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election has become something of an assumed fact. But the assumption has been largely based on anecdotes. Chris Prosser, Ed Fieldhouse, Jane Green, Jonathan Mellon, and Geoff Evans use the British Election Study face-to-face survey to examine the claim

Disruptive Norms:assessing the impact of ethnic minority immigration on non-immigrant voter turnout using a complex model

This article explores whether introducing an external group into a population with different characteristics to the existing population may lead to behavioral change. Specifically, we test whether introducing ethnic minority immigrants with varying levels of civic duty (commitment to voting) norms into a previously homogenous nonimmigrant ethnic majority population influences voter turnout among the nonimmigrant majority group. The findings have been produced using a complex agent-based model (“the voter model”) where the parameters and characteristics have been developed through the extensive synthesis of existing findings from real-world social science research on voter turnout. The model adopts the KIDS (“Keep It Descriptive Stupid”) approach to this form of modeling complex systems. The model puts a particular emphasis on exploring the dynamic social aspects that influence turnout by focusing on the role of networks and spatial composition factors such as ethnic diversity and levels of internal and external immigration. It uses an approach based on aggregative neighborhood dynamics to go beyond existing static models of the influence of social norms on voting similar to the classic approach of Schelling. The main findings from this article suggest that, other factors being equal, increased levels of immigration lead to a small but significant increase in turnout among the nonimmigrant population and show that higher levels of civic duty among immigrants lead to higher levels of turnout among nonimmigrants over time. This challenges the popular belief that increased immigration and diversity in a specific community will always lead to lower turnout levels

Analysing Census Microdata

The use of census microdata - which is the extremely detailed information collected through the 'ultracensusing' of a small number of households at the time of the last census - forms an important part of many research activities in subject areas as diverse as geography, demography, sociology, economics, politics and statistics. It is vital that the researchers know how the data was collected, which statistical techniques are useful and why, and how to model the data in order to draw inferences about the whole population. Analyzing Census Microdata meets and is relevant to a wide and international market. Analyzing Census Microdata - written by some of the leading authorities in the field - provides the first guide to the analysis of census microdata, with the basic statistical summary techniques presented in a clear and concise way. It contains a large number of up-to-date examples, drawing on data from the USA, the UK and a wide variety of other international contexts. I concludes with a chapter discussing applications specific to census microdata - such as the ethnic composition of families in Great Britain and in the United States, and a cross-national examination of Chinese immigrant populations