Government Performance and Life Satisfaction in Contemporary Britain

This paper investigates relationships between public policy outcomes and life satisfaction in contemporary Britain. Monthly national surveys gathered between April 2004 and December 2008 are used to analyze the impact of policy delivery both at the micro and macro levels, the former relating to citizens personal experiences, and the latter to cognitive evaluations of and affective reactions to the effectiveness of policies across the country as a whole. The impact of salient political events and changes in economic context involving the onset of a major financial crisis also are considered. Analyses reveal that policy outcomes, especially microlevel ones, significantly influence life satisfaction. The effects of both micro- and macrolevel outcomes involve both affective reactions to policy delivery and cognitive judgments about government performance. Controlling for these and other factors, the broader economic context in which policy judgments are made also influences life satisfaction. © 2010 Southern Political Science Association

Leave was always in the lead: why the polls got the referendum result wrong

By analysing 121 opinion polls, Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin, and Paul Whiteley outline what happened with the EU referendum survey results. They explain why internet surveys performed substantially better than telephone ones – contrary to the post-2015 General Election ‘wisdom’ that telephone surveys should be preferred. Underlying trends showed that once methodological artefacts are controlled, Leave was almost certainly ahead of Remain over the entire last month of the campaign – and possibly throughout 2016

How the Conservatives’ austerity rhetoric won them GE2015, and almost cost them GE2017

Paul Whiteley, Harold D. Clarke, and Marianne Stewart explain why austerity is no longer an election winner – neither economically nor politically. They argue that David Cameron’s government reaped political rewards through its austerity rhetoric, but the strategy backfired in the next election, when many voters believed a Conservative government would impose more hardship on them

Was this a Brexit election after all? Tracking party support among Leave and Remain voters

How do Leave and Remain votes map on to the results of the General Election? Paul Whiteley, Harold Clarke and Matthew Goodwin (left to right) look at what happened to party support on a constituency level. They find Labour seats that voted heavily to Leave either stuck with Jeremy Corbyn’s party or shifted their support from Ukip to Labour. The Conservatives benefited too as voters abandoned Ukip. Ultimately the Brexit effect helped them much more than it harmed Labour. They also conclude that youth and education are currently on Labour’s side

Why Britain voted to leave (and what Boris Johnson had to do with it)

Some Leavers claim the referendum result was not primarily about immigration, but anxiety about Britain’s perceived loss of sovereignty to the EU. In their new book, Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin (left) and Paul Whiteley draw on data about more than 150,000 voters to analyse the factors and concerns that led people to vote Leave. The mix of calculations, emotions and cues were complex, but immigration – and the personal appeal of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson to different groups of voters – were key

The large gender gap in Trump’s support threatens his reelection. Here’s what’s driving it.

While women have tended to be more supportive of Democrats than Republicans in recent years, the gender gap in support for Donald Trump between men and women is exceptionally large, write Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, Paul Whiteley and Guy D. Whitten

Forecasting the 2015 British general election: The Seats-Votes model

This paper applies the Seats-Votes Model to the task of forecasting the outcome of the 2015 election in Britain in terms of the seats won by the three major parties. The model derives originally from the 'Law of Cubic Proportions' the first formal statistical election forecasting model to be developed in Britain. It is an aggregate model which utilises the seats won by the major parties in the previous general election together with vote intentions six months prior to the general election to forecast seats. The model was reasonably successful in forecasting the 2005 and 2010 general elections, but has to be modified to take into account the 'regime shift' which occurred when the Liberal Democrats went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010

‘Re-membering the Past’; eye-witness and post-battle artistic accounts of the Falklands War

The war to recover the Falkland Islands from invasion in 1982 has been described as the last eruption of colonial warfare to be fought by the British Empire. The short, scrappy conflict was conducted under draconian restrictions that controlled the transmission of images, texts and first-hand frontline narratives. Despite an imaginative record of commissioning war art in the 20th century, the British government, through its Artistic Records Committee, chose to send a single artist to accompany troops in the latter part of the war. Her background as a nationally recognised illustrator prepared her to depict the scenery of war, its idiosyncrasies and informal incidents. Her portfolio of line drawings reinforced positive notions of the authority of the eye-witness. First-hand visual testimony effectively trumped all. Newspaper photographers and those working on syndication to agencies produced an equally spontaneous body of raw material. This paper explores the front-line work produced at the time and the body of creative material that later emerged, as artists, art therapists and other visual commentators started to reflect, critique and celebrate the British Empire’s ‘last colonial war’

Downs, Stokes and the Dynamics of Electoral Choice

A six-wave 2005–09 national panel survey conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study provided data for an investigation of sources of stability and change in voters’ party preferences. The authors test competing spatial and valence theories of party choice and investigate the hypothesis that spatial calculations provide cues for making valence judgements. Analyses reveal that valence mechanisms – heuristics based on party leader images, party performance evaluations and mutable partisan attachments – outperform a spatial model in terms of strength of direct effects on party choice. However, spatial effects still have sizeable indirect effects on the vote via their influence on valence judgements. The results of exogeneity tests bolster claims about the flow of influence from spatial calculations to valence judgments to electoral choice.</jats:p

Prudence, Principle and Minimal Heuristics: British Public Opinion toward the Use of Military Force in Afghanistan and Libya

Research Highlights and Abstract This article shows: Clear pluralities of British survey respondents opposed their nation's military interventions in Afghanistan and Libya. Opposition to involvement in the conflicts mostly a function of the costs the missions would impose on the nation and concerns about the morality of the missions. Attitudes towards the parties and their leaders are weak predictors of the respondents' attitudes towards involving the nation's military in the conflict. Survey experiment reveals the positions leaders and parties took on sending additional British troops into Afghanistan did not prime support or opposition to such a ‘surge’. Scholarship is divided on the primary drivers of public support for the use of military force. This article addresses this controversy by comparing three competing models of British public opinion towards the use of military force in Afghanistan and Libya. Analyses of national survey data demonstrate that cost-benefit calculations and normative considerations have sizable effects, but leader images and other heuristics have very limited explanatory power. These results are buttressed by experimental evidence showing that leader cues have negligible impacts on attitudes towards participation in a military ‘surge’ in Afghanistan. The minimal role heuristics played in motivating citizen support and opposition to the conflicts in these two countries contrast with their significant relationship to citizen attitudes towards the British intervention in Iraq. These conflicting results suggest that the strength of leader and partisan cues may be animated by the intensity of inter-elite conflict over British involvement in military interventions. </jats:p