Religion is irrelevant to how likely MPs are to represent minority groups’ interests

Are minority issues more likely to be raised by MPs from a religious minority background? Through analysing over 5,000 Early Day Motions, Ekaterina Kolpinskaya looks at whether there is indeed a correlation. She finds that institutional considerations make a politician’s religion largely irrelevant; instead, factors such as their seniority and the composition of their constituency are much more likely to affect their engagement with such issues

Substantive religious representation in UK Parliament: examining parliamentary questions for written answers, 1997-2012

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this record.The substantive representation of minority groups in national legislatures is a topic of significant normative, theoretical and empirical importance. Addressing this question, this article focuses on what drives Members of the UK House of Commons to raise issues on concern for Jewish and Muslim minority groups in relatively low-cost parliamentary activity, i.e. Parliamentary Questions for written answers (WPQs). Drawing on the suggested positive relationship between descriptive and substantive minority representation (e.g., Hansard, 2009a), it uses content and statistical analysis to examine if having a Jewish or Muslim background impacts on the frequency and the probability of MPs’ engagement with minority issues, and how this effect compares to that from institutional predictors, namely the party parliamentary status and the minority presence in a constituency. The findings demonstrate that a religious minority background has a limited impact on MPs’ engagement with minority issues in WPQs, being inferior to that of institutional predictors Being in Opposition, in particular, has a consistent, positive influence on the content of WPQs, whereby Opposition MPs table more WPQs on the issues of minority concern that Members from the party of Government

To Brussels via Rome: how Eurosceptical are British Christians?

Catholics tend to have a more positive view of the EU than other Christians, write Ekaterina Kolpinskaya (Swansea University) and Stuart Fox (Cardiff University), who have analysed Euroscepticism among different denominations. The religious are more likely to be Eurosceptic, with members of the Church of England and Presbyterians especially so. The authors attribute these differences to a deep-rooted suspicion of supranational institutions among ..

Heroes as harbingers of social change : Gender, race, and hero choice in the USA and Britain

The authors are grateful to the research team of ‘The Hero Project’, including Dr Abigail Garrington, Dr Berny Sebe, and Dr Sarah Evans, as well as the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland (specifically, an Education Outreach Officer, Robin Baillie) and the Royal Geographical Society. We would also like to acknowledge all the valuable feedback we have received from our reviewers and participants of the 2021 and 2023 Heroism Conferences held in Ireland and New Zealand, respectively, that has helped us to improve this manuscript.Peer reviewe

Religious representation in Parliament: examining the parliamentary behaviour of MPs from Jewish and Muslim backgrounds, 1997-2012

This research examines the parliamentary representation of Jewish and Muslim minorities. It is assessed drawing upon the behaviour of MPs from Jewish and Muslim backgrounds and their engagement with issues of concern for the respective minority in high- and low-cost parliamentary activities. The analysis is conducted on the content of 96 votes, 708,429 Parliamentary Questions for written answers (WPQs), and 5,160 Early Day Motions (EDMs). Voting divisions are examined using methods of descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis, whereas relational, computer-aided, dictionary-based content analysis with time series cross-sectional data analysis is applied to examine the content of EDMs and WPQs. The analysis demonstrates that coming from a religious minority background has a limited impact on the behaviour of MPs and is largely inferior to the institutional predictors of behaviour, such as legislative role and the party-related predictors. This suggests that MPs from Jewish and Muslim backgrounds do not necessarily act for their minority groups driven by their heritage alone. Instead, MPs’ engagement with minority issues depends on their duties, responsibilities and party affiliations, even when the party discipline is loosened. The findings of the research have significant policy implications. They show that the presence of minority politicians in a legislature does not necessarily lead to better substantive representation of these minority groups through minority MPs’ engagement with minority issues. That is because minority parliamentarians are bound by the same constraints as the rest of the House, which reduces their ability to deliver expertise on minority issues

Greater religious engagement among Millennials may protect against intergenerational inequality and conflict

Numerous studies have linked the decline of religion with falling social capital, as younger generations are deprived of a valuable source of social interaction; others have claimed the link between the two is spurious because young people have developed different ways of interacting. Stuart Fox, Ekaterina Kolpinskaya, Jennifer Hampton, Esther Muddiman, and Ceryn Evans examine how religious capital is related to social capital for Baby Boomers and Millennials Millennials (those born after 1982) in the UK. They show that while lower levels of religious capital are contributing to lower levels of social capital among Millennials, religious activity is also a more effective source of social capital for Millennials than their elders

Mandates matter: how decisive victories enhance expectations about government performance

This is the final version. Available on open access from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.Elections are the main instrument through which voters can exercise influence over public policy. However, the relationship between electoral outcomes and government policy performance is under-researched. In particular, little is known about the effect that the perceived narrowness of electoral victories has on expectations about incumbents’ policy behaviour. Drawing on the literature on electoral mandates and framing theory, we examine how the way in which election results are portrayed by the media affects citizens’ confidence that winners will enact their policy programmes, using the 2015 UK election as a case study. Based on a survey experiment conducted in the aftermath of the race, we find that victories depicted as narrow increased scepticism about the incoming government’s ability to deliver on its promises, contradicting normative theories of electoral competition. Instead, and consistent with mandate interpretations, subjects – especially less political knowledgeable ones – became more likely to trust in the government’s ability to fulfil its campaign pledges when the Conservative electoral victory was presented as decisive. Besides shedding light on the link between the framing of election results and expectations about government performance, our results have potentially relevant implications for understanding how such expectations may affect actual policy-making and the enforcement of accountability.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

The politics of heroes through the prism of popular heroism

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Palgrave Macmillan via the DOI in this record.In modern day Britain, the discourse of national heroification is routinely utilised by politicians, educationalists and cultural industry professionals, whilst also being a popular concept to describe deserving ‘do-gooders’ who contribute to British society in a myriad of ways. We argue that although this heroification discourse is enacted as a discursive device of encouraging politically and morally desirable behaviour, it is dissociated from the largely under-explored facets of contemporary popular heroism. To compensate for this gap, this paper explores public preferences for heroes using survey data representative of British adults. This analysis demonstrates a conceptual stretching in the understanding of heroism, and allows identifying age- and gender-linked dynamics which effect public choices of heroes. In particular, we demonstrate that age above all determines the preference for having a hero, but does not explain preferences for specific hero-types. The focus on gender illustrates that the landscape of popular heroism reproduces a male-dominated bias which exists in the wider political and cultural heroification discourse. Simultaneously, our study shows that if national heroification discourse in Britain remains male-centric, the landscape of popular heroism is characterised by a gendered trend towards privatisation of heroes being particularly prominent amongst women. In the conclusion, this paper argues for a conceptual revision and re-gendering of the national heroification discourse as a step towards both empirically grounded, and age- and gender-sensitive politics of heroes and heroines.AHR

Content Analysis of Media Coverage of the 2015 British General Election

These data have been collected as a part of the ESRC-funded 'Media in Context and The 2015 General Election: How Traditional and Social Media Shape Elections and Governing' project. The data allow exploring the patterns of informationa flows, agenda setting and agenda framing of the 2015 General Election and the campaign by the media. It also allows evaluating the role of media in shaping public opinions, and ultimately, the outcome of the election.The content analysis data can be linked to the British Election Survey Wave 5, which has been included in the study with additional variables at the end of the files