London, you have a problem with women: trust towards the police in England

Following a series of high-profile incidents of violence against women by serving London Metropolitan Police Officers, questions of standards and the public’s confidence in policing are in the spotlight. Over a fifteen-month period between July 2022 and September 2023 using monthly surveys of representative English samples, this study confirms that women, in general, are more trusting in the police than men. This, however, does not hold true in London. Out of nine regions in England, London is the only region where women’s overall trust in the police is lower than men. Lower levels of trust in the police among women in London hold when controls for age, income, political environment and crime levels are considered. In line with existing literature that considers women being more sensitive to cues about trustworthiness, the concerning incidents of sexual violence by police officers against women are likely to further erode trust in police in the capital, which already ranks last among England’s nine regions in citizen trust of the police

Analysing Visits to English Museums 1850-2015: A Research Note

<p>Understanding why people visit museums is of interest to both cultural economics and museum studies. Most existing research relies on survey data concerned with visitors, their immediate background, and their experience of a particular museum. Very few studies have taken a more general perspective and analysed macro-level societal factors, such as inflation, educational attainment and unemployment, and their influence on the number of visits to museums. The conventional approach relies on visitor surveys to understand what drives visits and people’s general views on museums.</p> <p>In a departure from these conventional approaches, this article presents a macro-level approach, using a unique dataset of visit counts for 40 English museums and visitor attractions spanning the period 1850–2015. It examines the effect of socio-economic factors on visits using panel data analysis and macro-level variables. The results suggest that inflation rates, average earnings, and educational level (using the indicator of secondary school attendance) all significantly influence the number of visits made. However, the most important variable is the number of visits recorded for the previous year. These findings are discussed in relation to existing studies, and some suggestions for future research are proposed.</p

The behaviour of political parties and MPs in the parliaments of the Weimar Republic

Copyright @ 2012 The Authors. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Analysing the roll-call votes of the MPs of the Weimar Republic we find: (1) that party competition in the Weimar parliaments can be structured along two dimensions: an economic left–right and a pro-/anti-democratic. Remarkably, this is stable throughout the entire lifespan of the Republic and not just in the later years and despite the varying content of votes across the lifespan of the Republic, and (2) that nearly all parties were troubled by intra-party divisions, though, in particular, the national socialists and communists became homogeneous in the final years of the Republic.Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstan

The political dynamics of portfolio design in European democracies

Austrian Research Association (ÖFG) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant P25490

Estimating policy positions using political texts: an evaluation of the wordscores approach

This paper evaluates a recently developed method for extracting policy positions from political texts, known as Wordscores. This computerized content analysis technique is a potentially powerful tool for scholars interested in the study of political elites, since it promises an easy and efficient way of inferring policy position from texts and speeches. In this article, we provide a systematic evaluation of this promising method. Using Danish manifestos and government speeches from 1945 to 2005, we compare the policy positions extracted using Wordscores with measures of positions from the well-known Comparative Manifesto Project and cross-validate these with party expert surveys. Our analysis shows that the word scoring technique arrives at largely similar estimates to independently derived position measures and produces time series of government positions with high face validity