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

Given its likely adverse political effects, the problem of social care funding is unlikely to be solved any time soon

Paul Whiteley, Harold Clarke, and Marianne Stewart write that a large increase in funding for social care would mean a significant hike in taxation, largely paid for by the young and the middle-aged with the elderly being the beneficiaries. This would create political problems for all parties

Vulnerable Americans rally around a president in a crisis. but polarization means this hasn’t happened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Historically in times of crisis, presidents experience a polling boost as Americans ‘rally around the flag’, but this has not been the case during President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. In new analysis, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart and Paul Whiteley find that the massive partisan and ideological differences in the electorate meant that the expected spike in Trump’s support did not occur – especially among the most vulnerable, who would ordinarily be more likely to rally around the president

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

In Canada’s snap election, Justin Trudeau and the Liberals were both victims and beneficiaries of the COVID-19 crisis

Last month, Canada held its second election in less than two years as Liberal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau sought a new mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Trudeau’s gamble that Canadians would reward his party for its handling of the pandemic did not pay off, and he now still leads a minority government. Using new survey data, Harold Clarke, Thomas J. Scotto and Marianne C. Stewart find that while Canadian voters did approve of the government’s pandemic response, concerns about its handling of the economy and inflation deprived the Liberal party of an election majority

Gender Biases in (Inter) Action: The Role of Interviewers’ and Applicants’ Implicit and Explicit Stereotypes in Predicting Women’s Job Interview Outcomes

Although explicit stereotypes of women in the workplace have become increasingly positive, negative stereotypes persist at an implicit level, with women being more likely associated with incompetent-and men with competent-managerial traits. Drawing upon work on self-fulfilling prophecies and interracial interactions, we investigated whether and how implicit and explicit gender stereotypes held by both male interviewers and female applicants predicted women's interview outcomes. Thirty male interviewers conducted mock job interviews with 30 female applicants. Before the interview, we measured interviewers' and applicants' implicit and explicit gender stereotypes. The interviewers' and applicants' implicit stereotypes independently predicted external evaluations of the performance of female applicants. Whereas female applicants' higher implicit stereotypes directly predicted lower performance, male interviewers' implicit stereotypes indirectly impaired female applicants' performance through lower evaluations by the interviewer and lower self-evaluations by the applicant. Moreover, having an interviewer who was at the same time high in implicit and low in explicit stereotypes predicted the lowest performance of female applicants. Our findings highlight the importance of taking into account both implicit and explicit gender stereotypes in mixed-gender interactions and point to ways to reduce the negative effects of gender stereotypes in job interviews. Additional online materials for this article are available to PWQ subscribers on PWQ's website at http://pwq.sagepub.com/supplemental

The effects of images of party leaders on electoral choice in Canada.

Dept. of History, Philosophy, and Political Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1980 .S848. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 40-07, page: . Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1980

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