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This paper will examine the different funding streams associated with the levelling up agenda pursued by the Conservative government elected in the United Kingdom in 2019. It will explore in detail a number of funding streams that this government has associated with levelling up to understand their relationship to the levelling up agenda. The article will also analyse the relationship between the levelling up missions and the funding associated with levelling up. The Levelling Up White Paper released in February 2022 included 12 missions that were intended to provide a 'targeted, measurable and time-bound objective, or set of objectives, from which a programme of change can then be constructed or catalysed'. The analysis of the funding streams outlined in this paper shows that the relationship with the missions is overall a tangential one. The lack of clarity on what is and is not a levelling up fund, coupled with the loose relationship with the levelling up missions may diminish the impact that the levelling up agenda will have on regional inequality in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section offers news briefs on politics and education in the United Kingdom as of September 1, 2022. It includes the results of the Northern Ireland Assembly elections held on May 5, 2022, the launch of consultation on the proposals for local area special education needs and disabilities provision reviews, and the announcement of a national discussion on education in Scotland.

A unifying setup for opinion models originating in statistical physics and stochastic opinion dynamics are developed and used to analyze election data. The results are interpreted in the light of political theory. We investigate the connection between Potts (Curie–Weiss) models and stochastic opinion models in the view of the Boltzmann distribution and stochastic Glauber dynamics. We particularly find that the q-voter model can be considered as a natural extension of the Zealot model, which is adapted by Lagrangian parameters. We also discuss weak and strong effects (also called extensive and nonextensive) continuum limits for the models. The results are used to compare the Curie–Weiss model, two q-voter models (weak and strong effects), and a reinforcement model (weak effects) in explaining electoral outcomes in four western democracies (United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany). We find that particularly the weak effects models are able to fit the data (Kolmogorov–Smirnov test) where the weak effects reinforcement model performs best (AIC). Additionally, we show how the institutional structure shapes the process of opinion formation. By focusing on the dynamics of opinion formation preceding the act of voting, the models discussed in this paper give insights both into the empirical explanation of elections as such, as well as important aspects of the theory of democracy. Therefore, this paper shows the usefulness of an interdisciplinary approach in studying real world political outcomes by using mathematical models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Duverger's law holds that single member district rules produce two-party systems, but third party voting remains an important feature of these institutional contexts. To explain the discrepancy between theory and empirical reality, Gary Cox specified four conditions that are necessary for the theoretical expectations to bear out. Yet, subsequent research has focused mostly on just one of these conditions, namely, that voters have correct information about the competitiveness of their preferred party in the district. The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of all four conditions. Using original survey data from the 2015 United Kingdom general election, the analysis suggests that violations of the information condition matter, but that violations of the short-term instrumental rationality condition can be a significant factor as well. Consequently, future research should pay more attention to this condition when seeking to explain third party voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various research have been directed towards investigating the behaviour of political parties engaging in attacks. However, this topic has predominantly been studied in campaigning venues while focusing only on the attacker (parties that are attacking). This study contributes to the existing literature by (i) studying attack behaviour in the parliamentary venue, and (ii) analysing the interactions between both the attacker and the target. To this end, this paper uses longitudinal data on attacks during question time sessions in the parliaments (2010 to 2020) of Belgium, Croatia and the United Kingdom. More specifically, I investigate the conditions that make parties engage in mutual attacks. These conditions can be characterised along three dimensions: time (proximity to elections), status (government vs. opposition), and ideology (close vs. distant). The results confirm the overarching argument that: (i) more attacks in parliaments happen closer to election day; (ii) opposing parties are more likely to attack the government rather than vice‐versa; (iii) governing parties equally attack the opposition and themselves; and finally, (iv) the larger the ideological distance between parties, the more likely attacks happen (with mainstream parties engaging equally in attack behaviour compared to radical parties). As such, these findings contribute to our understanding of attack strategies between parties in regular day‐to‐day politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political science asks how women navigate gender on the campaign trail – do they run "as women" or do they exhibit more "masculine" behaviours to increase credibility. The role of masculinity in men's campaigns has received less attention. Yet, men "play the gender card" too. This paper analyses the use of gender in the campaign imagery of the two male party leaders in the 2019 UK General Election campaign via an examination of their campaign tweets. It finds that the male leaders did, indeed, "play the man card". Both leaders overwhelmingly used masculine visuals on Twitter during the campaign. Johnson demonstrated elements of "hypermasculinity" exaggerating his strength and dominance in images of traditional, working-class masculinity. Despite calls for more compassionate, read feminine, politics, Corbyn's campaign remained located in masculine imagery through consistent displays of agency. This paper makes three main contributions to current understandings of gender and election campaigning. Firstly, it offers the beginnings of a framework of types of masculinity in campaigning. Secondly, it adds support to the thesis that men play the gender card, and that it can take different forms. Thirdly, it raises questions about the use of binary frameworks in studying gender's role in campaigning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accepting defeat in the aftermath of elections is crucial for the stability of democracies. But in times of intense polarization, the voluntary consent of electoral losers seems less obvious. In this paper, I study whether affective and perceived ideological polarization amplify the winner–loser gap in political support. Using multilevel growth curve modelling on pre and post-election panel data from the British Election Study Internet Panel collected during the 2015 and 2019 UK general elections, I show that the winner–loser gap is indeed more pronounced amongst voters with higher levels of affective and perceived ideological polarization. Moreover, the results illustrate that polarized voters experience a stark decrease in their support for the political system following their electoral loss. Given the high and, in some Western democracies, rising polarization levels, these findings have important implications for losers’ consent and the stability of democracies in election times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens' trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent – giving voters a chance to 'have their say' – can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)‐invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi‐experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust‐inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent‐triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust‐inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum – those most inclined to support the incumbent May‐led Conservative government in 2017 – became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left‐wing or non‐Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, many scholars, mainly those focusing on populism, have analysed the role of 'the people' in politics. This has allowed us to understand how many political actors emphasize the central position of this term. Today, 'the people' has different meanings depending on how politicians use it in specific contexts. In this paper, the reference to 'the people' was measured using the following question: How do political leaders use the word 'people'? The analysis was conducted on Twitter through the study of the accounts of the foremost political leaders in the UK during the 2019 general election campaign. The results highlight three key attitudes related to the use of 'people': a direct and immediate relationship between a leader and a wide people; a calling to a specific people, described as a strong and cohesive group; an appropriation of the voice of the people, grouping people without borders into the classic contraposition between a pure people and the corrupt elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine three forms of regret in relation to the UK's hugely significant referendum on EU membership that was held in June 2016. They are: (i) whether 'leave' voters at the referendum subsequently regretted their choice (in the light of the result), (ii) whether non-voters regretted their decisions to abstain (essentially supporting 'remain') and (iii) whether individuals were more likely to indicate that it is everyone's duty to vote following the referendum. We find evidence in favor of all three types of regret. In particular, leave voters and non-voters were significantly more likely to indicate that they would vote to remain given a chance to do so again; moreover, the probability of an individual stating that it was everyone's duty to vote in a general election increased significantly in 2017 (compared to 2015). The implications of the findings are discussed in the context of the referendum's outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in electoral integrity and the validity and accuracy of election results has come to the fore as a topic of concern both among politicians and academic researchers in the last twenty years. The literature has identified a number of key variables and processes associated with electoral fraud, and lower levels of integrity. However, one deficiency with this research is that it has relied on the perceptions of fraud and malpractice, rather than first-hand data on the extent of such behaviour. In this paper we report on the results of a novel small-scale survey of people in Britain in which respondents reported some of their direct experiences of electoral fraud in recent national elections. The results indicate that the rates of electoral fraud are currently around six to eight per cent, but that this rises for members of some ethnic minority groups. We end by raising another question: if we can identify victims of electoral fraud, how are we to redress this victimisation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countries with populist radical right governments are the exception rather than the rule. This paper uses the Australian case of Pauline Hanson's One Nation (PHON) and the UK case of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) – and its effective successor, the Brexit Party – to help explain a puzzle: how do populist radical right parties in the absence of any likely route to winning office or even holding legislative influence achieve policy payoffs? Tracing the political factors that have driven policy influence in these two cases reveals that an entrepreneurial leader with agenda-setting influence can have policy impact, despite disadvantageous structural conditions, through the following: leveraging electoral influence over both social democratic and mainstream right parties; gaining credibility through sub-national elections; and achieving (or threatening to achieve) defections from centre-right parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been no shortage of literature that has focused on the role of money in politics. While the majority has focused squarely on the fundraising activities and spending preferences of parties and candidates, far less has paid attention to the spending habits of corporations, unions and interests that often register as non-parties. Yet these actors have gained prominence across general elections and referendum campaigns in the past decade owing to the increase in funds spent to influence election outcomes. Little is known about what the public thinks about the participation of these actors in campaigns. Yet public opinion toward non-party campaign spending is important to the degree that it effects perceptions of electoral integrity and might compel policy change. This paper uses new survey data collected from Canada and the UK to answer questions about how citizens perceive non-party campaign spending and what informs attitudes toward non-parties. We find that the public in both countries have mixed views on the participation of non-parties, but that there is some evidence that core concerns about electoral interiority and perceptions toward the role of money in politics drives opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online Social Networks (OSNs) offer new means for political communications that have quickly begun to play crucial roles in political campaigns, due to their pervasiveness and communication speed. However, the OSN environment is quite slippery and hides potential risks: many studies presented evidence about the presence of d/misinformation campaigns and malicious activities by genuine or automated users, putting at severe risk the efficiency of online and offline political campaigns. This phenomenon is particularly evident during crucial political events, as political elections. In the present paper, we provide a comprehensive description of the networks of interactions among users and bots during the UK elections of 2019. In particular, we focus on the polarised discussion about Brexit on Twitter, analysing a data set made of more than 10 millions tweets posted for over a month. We found that the presence of automated accounts infected the debate particularly in the days before the UK national elections, in which we find a steep increase of bots in the discussion; in the days after the election day, their incidence returned to values similar to the ones observed few weeks before the elections. On the other hand, we found that the number of suspended users (i.e. accounts that were removed by the platform for some violation of the Twitter policy) remained constant until the election day, after which it reached significantly higher values. Remarkably, after the TV debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, we observed the injection of a large number of novel bots whose behaviour is markedly different from that of pre-existing ones. Finally, we explored the bots' political orientation, finding that their activity is spread across the whole political spectrum, although in different proportions, and we studied the different usage of hashtags and URLs by automated accounts and suspended users, targeting the formation of common narratives in different sides of the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The final days of the Trump presidency and its aftermath brought into sharp focus the issue of political lying. Politicians have historically employed rhetoric and rhetorical spin to embellish the truth and hide damaging information. However, outright lying has traditionally been deemed politically too risky, resulting in resignation and the undermining of public trust. In contrast, recent electoral successes —the 2016 Brexit Referendum and the 2019 general election in the United Kingdom, and Trump's victory in 2016 and his increased electoral support in 2020—point to an apparent growing tendency for politicians caught lying not to be punished at the ballot box. Using the U.K. Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election as its case study, this conceptual paper argues that strategic political lying has been designed as a priming device to set the news agenda. As an effective campaigning tactic "strategic lying" represents a development of political spin—first evident in the mass media era—that has been intensified by the increasing professionalization of political communications and the rise of social media. In doing so, the concept of "strategic lying" theorized here contributes to deepening our understanding of the ongoing evolution of "spin" in the digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it comes to gender and voting behaviour Britain had become something of an outlier. Whilst more countries shifted along Inglehart and Norris' "rising tide" continuum from traditional gender gaps, to realignment, into modern gender gaps (Inglehart and Norris 2000, "The Developmental Theory of the Gender gap: Women and Men's Voting Behaviour in Global Perspective." International Political Science Review 21 (4): 441–462, 2003, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Britain remained at the realignment stage. But in 2017 a modern gender gap emerged with a greater proportion of women than men voting for Labour, and a greater proportion of men than women voting Conservative. In this paper we examine the 2019 European Parliament and General elections to assess whether the modern gender gap persists in Britain. We show that whilst in the 2019 General election we again observed a modern gender gap, it nevertheless is rooted in the specifics of the political context in Britain, specifically post-EU referendum cleavages. Moreover, the gender gaps in the European Parliament election reveal a more nuanced picture, and demonstrate how the electoral context shapes the gender vote gaps we see. Our results indicate that the presence of the modern gender gap in Britain is contingent, rather than the result of long-term realignment, as well as provide evidence for key processes that may cause gender gaps to vary across time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election coverage is often assumed to be different to everyday political coverage. We argue that this depends on political institutions. In majoritarian countries, where elections choose governments, election coverage should decisively move towards political competition and away from policy. In consensual countries, where coalitions are based on policy negotiations, there should be a less pronounced shift towards political competition and away from policy. To test this argument, we use an automatic coding system to study 0.9 billion words in Die Welt for 12 years and in the Financial Times for 30 years. The results support our institutional hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Using long panels of industry-specific offshoring information and subjectively reported well-being datasets mainly from Germany, which is also supported by datasets from the UK and Australia, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between offshoring and workers' subjective well-being in the source country. We employ panel data fixed-effects models with time-variant personality measures and industry-specific measures to alleviate the bias stemming from the non-random sorting of individuals in industries. Our findings suggest that offshoring negatively relates to workers' subjective well-being. The result is unexceptionally consistent across Germany, the UK, and Australia, and the effect is larger in business services and among high-skilled workers. We extensively discuss how contextual "fear-factors" prevailing in the source countries interact with the angst generated by the negative framing of offshoring. To single out such angst, we first show that objective and subjective job security concerns, job characteristics, and labor market conditions only marginally relate to the well-being effect of offshoring. Then, we investigate how the effect of offshoring on well-being is amplified by a larger set of contextual factors pertaining to temporary economic shocks, negative narratives about offshoring during electoral cycles, partisan political preferences, and high immigration rates. Finally, we show that a recent skill upgrade significantly diminishes the negative effect of offshoring on well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The willingness of voters on the losing side to accept electoral outcomes – losers' consent – is essential to democratic legitimacy. This article examines the role of emotions in shaping people's perceptions of electoral fairness, arguing that voters on the losing side who feel angry are less willing to accept democratic outcomes. This is examined in the context of the 2016 Brexit referendum, as well as the 2019 UK general election, using original survey data and an experiment in which specific emotional responses (anger and happiness) are induced to test the causal effect of emotions. The results show that losers who felt angry about an electoral outcome are less likely to accept the legitimacy of the democratic process and that anger has a causal effect in reducing losers' consent. These findings suggest that politicians may be able to influence voters' faith in democracy by mobilising emotional responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a mixed-methods, comparative analysis of the development of the urban-rural electoral cleavage in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States from the early 20th century to the present. Using aggregate election results, electoral district boundary files, and electoral district population measures, we construct a new comparable dataset of district election results and urbanity for the lower house of the legislature in each country. We use this dataset to measure the importance of the urban-rural divide for election outcomes across countries and time. We find that the cleavage has widened over time in each country, each arrived at its current urban-rural divide via a distinct developmental trajectory, which we interpret with reference to secondary literature. We conclude by discussing the significance of our findings for theories of both the causes and consequences of urban-rural divides and discuss the implications of our work for the comparative study of urban-rural cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequality among people has several unwanted effects, in humanistic, social and economic contexts. Several studies address distributional preferences among groups, but little is known about when inequality issues are focused and when and why inequality abatement measures are brought on the political agenda. We show that during the period 2004 to 2023, inequality issues were focused during elections to the EU and UK parliament and with greatest strength during the elections to the EU parliament in May 2004 and to the UK parliament in May 2015. Periods with high unemployment and inflation cause the discussion on inequality to be followed by discussions on inequality measures. However, when the discussion of inequality is followed very closely by the discussions of abatement measures, inequality aversion becomes more strongly associated with the macroeconomic variables inflation and GDP (recessions) than with unemployment and more strongly associated with the concerns for fairness than concerns with war and crime. The results were obtained examining Google Trends and scholarly studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We define two indices with which to measure the concentration and fragmentation of political power. Concentration (or fragmentation) indices comply with the cardinality property if they are based on mathematical distance, which makes homogeneous comparisons possible because the indices maintain proportions of values. These indices also operate under the unit interval, so the measurements can be interpreted as percentages, and the differences and ratios between measurements have an understandable meaning. Our indices indeed comply with the cardinality property, which allows us to reinterpret the well-known Gallagher disproportionality index as the transformation of mathematical distance. Our concentration index can be interpreted as the large political party's share of power, while our fragmentation index determines the smaller parties' share. We apply both indices to election results over the last four decades from the UK, Germany and Spain, revealing that vote fragmentation has significantly increased in Germany and Spain, but it does not have a steady trend in the UK. Further, whilst seat fragmentation has been observed in Germany and the UK since 2000, this phenomenon is more recent in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to research on citizenship and belonging in the post-Brexit white East European migration to the UK. It explores wearing a garment as an act of citizenship and an embodied methodology. It is formed of two interrelated parts: the first presents the argument that wearing a particular garment at a specific spatio-temporal juncture can be considered an act of citizenship. The second part proposes wearing as an affective method in researching citizenship that has the potential to explore the sensory and emotional dimensions of (non)belonging. White embodiments and discomfort are two threads that connect the main arguments. The article builds on autoethnographic notes made after preparing for a job interview as a white East European woman wearing a Victorian male costume while travelling from East to South London in the wake of the General Election on 12 December 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some individuals support nationalist policies while others don't? The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis in evolutionary psychology suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values whereas less intelligent individuals may be more likely to hold evolutionarily familiar values. Nationalism is evolutionarily familiar, so the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis suggests that less intelligent individuals may be more likely to be nationalist. The analyses of the General Social Survey (GSS) data in the US and the National Child Development Study (NCDS) data in the UK confirmed the prediction. Less intelligent Americans were more likely to have nationalist attitudes, and less intelligent British voters were more likely to support nationalist parties in five general elections over three decades. The tendency of less intelligent individuals to be more nationalist and belligerent may, among other things, form the microfoundation of democratic peace in international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that electoral context affects the projection mechanisms inherent within polling. This insight applies both to the estimation of party vote shares by pollsters and to poll-based seat projections. To test this argument, we analyse 794 in-campaign polls covering the UK's 21 post-war general elections, as well as an updated version of Jennings and Wlezien's (Jennings, Will, and Christopher Wlezien. 2018. "Election Polling Errors Across Time and Space." Nature Human Behaviour 2 (4): 276–283) international polling dataset. We demonstrate that the election level houses a substantial portion of the observed variance within polling error. This finding is valid across several modelling approaches and a range of measures of polling accuracy both within and beyond the UK. Within the UK, we show that the election level is a particularly important locus of variance when it comes to analysing whether polls give rise to misleading expectations concerning seat distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can centre–right parties in majoritarian systems adapt to threats from the radical right? Using a long-term inter-election panel study, we identify a remarkably stable constituency of support for Britain's recent radical-right parties – the UK Independence Party and the Brexit Party. We show also how these same voters defected from the Conservatives across elections. In response, the government used a combination of the election of a new leader, Boris Johnson, and a hardline position on Brexit to reincorporate these voters into its support base, helping to lead to a large Conservative majority in 2019. Cross-party evaluations of Johnson were even more important in influencing this success than the issue of Brexit itself. Effective centre–right adaption to radical-right challenges is not simply about strategic issue positioning, it can also derive from centre–right leaders with populist appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaining an understanding of the concerns and aspirations of a country's diaspora can help domestic politicians to better connect with this community and gain their support in elections. The United Kingdom's diaspora is large and spread among many countries, and currently has the right to vote in UK general elections only for a limited time. However, there are proposals to abolish these time limits and this will make this community of increasing interest to politicians. This study uses signatories to the UK Parliaments e-petitions platform to gain an understanding of the foreign and domestic political concerns of this community. The analysis uses Latent Dirichlet allocation to identify common topics among the e-petitions and hierarchical clustering to identify commonalities among countries, territories and regions. It is found that there are five meaningful groups of such, and they are diverse in the topics that are of most concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: People with intellectual disabilities' voting rate within the United Kingdom remains significantly below the population average despite government enacted voting promotion measures. No published academic literature directly involves people with intellectual disabilities when considering their UK general election experiences – this study aims to address this omission. Methods: Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with people with intellectual disabilities (N = 20) about their election experiences during the 2017 (n = 18) and 2019 (n = 8) general elections. Six participants were interviewed around both elections. Data was analysed with template analysis. Results: Eight themes were produced – election information, political knowledge, political opinions, voting choice process, polling station experience, voting outcome, capacity and support. Theme interactions impacted on election experiences. Conclusions: While acknowledging diverse experiences, voting outcomes and experiences were particularly impacted by factor interactions concerning election information and/or polling station accessibility, capacity and support. Voting promotion interventions and future research should consider these areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties often seek to appeal to women voters through policy pledges. However, little is known about how – or whether – these policies influence women's voting behavior. Drawing on focus groups conducted with women voters, I explore how women perceive, experience, and negotiate gendered policies in their voting behavior using the 2015 British General Election as a case study. Overall, I find that "class-based" economic policies pertaining to the sexual division of labor matter to women voters, whereas policies seeking to tackle discrimination against women ("gender status" policies) are comparatively less salient. Crucially, attitudes toward class-based policies differ by life-stage. Taken together, I argue that studies on gender and vote choice should devote greater attention to the electoral context in addition to socioeconomic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare the patterns of adjustment of government policy to changes in public opinion in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. These countries are similar in many ways, except that the United Kingdom has plurality elections and single‐party government, while the Netherlands has proportional representation (PR) and coalition government. This provides the first application of the Macro Polity approach to a country with PR elections. We find that government policy in the Netherlands is highly responsive to public opinion. This cannot be the result of alternation of government, but instead must be the result of some other process, such as coalition bargaining. In the United Kingdom, however, the dynamic of adjustment is far more complex. Alternation of government does not produce responsiveness, but rather seems to get in the way of it. This leads to an over‐correction dynamic in which policy can be out of line with public opinion for long periods of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is politics dominated by wealthy men, and how do gendered and class barriers to running for office intersect? This article addresses these questions using the UK as a case study. Drawing on interview data, I highlight the formal and informal institutions that shape the class and glass ceilings in electoral politics. I identify how the high personal costs of running for office, especially in relation to candidates' time, present a barrier to those without significant financial resources. These costs are gendered, as women typically have less time and money than men. These resource barriers are compounded by additional gendered obstacles including discrimination, abuse and gendered family roles. I find that the intersection of the class and glass ceilings creates cumulative barriers that are particularly prohibitive for working-class women. The findings extend our understanding of class and gender gaps within politics and, crucially, the intersection between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alongside the growth of online campaigning has been an increased anxiety around its effects on democratic institutions and processes. Many have suggested that in a (new) media environment that privileges choice, citizens will increasingly segment themselves into echo chambers, tuning out dissenting voices. But the debate on the existence of echo chambers is mixed, and the extent to which political parties campaign to easily persuadable (and pre-disposed) electorates is unclear. In this article, we present a case study of the Facebook campaign activity of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats at the UK's parliamentary general election in 2019. Utilising an analysis of the Facebook Ad Archive's Graph Application Programming Interface (API), we find that political parties do not consistently campaign to their easily persuadable electorates—often chasing votes as much as they mobilise supporters. The evidence that parties campaign to specific echo chambers online is therefore, at best, mixed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As men continue to dominate in executive office, male leadership remains the norm and has structured how we see leadership. Yet, current understandings of gender bias in political leadership too often refer to bias against women. To fully understand gender's role in political leadership, it is vital to remember that 'men have a gender too'. Accordingly, this article provides an inter- and intra-sex comparison of the media coverage both male and female leadership candidates running for party leadership in the UK. The results show how the leadership environment was gendered for both men and women. Gendering is found in nuanced gendered framings which worked for and against both men and women running for party leadership in the UK. Furthermore, both male and female candidates 'played the gender card' when negotiating the gendered norms of leadership, using their gender in their campaign imagery. The results beg key questions on the conscious use of gender in candidate strategy and the possible effect on voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the relationship between ideology and affective polarisation highlights ideological disagreement as a key driver of animosity between partisan groups. By operationalising disagreement on the left–right dimension, however, existing studies often overlook voter–party incongruence as a potential determinant of affective evaluations. How does incongruence on policy issues impact affective evaluations of mainstream political parties and their leaders? We tackle this question by analysing data from the British Election Study collected ahead of the 2019 UK General Election using an instrumental variable approach. Consistent with our expectations, we find that voter–party incongruence has a significant causal impact on affective evaluations. Perceived representational gaps between party and voter drive negative evaluations of the in-party and positive evaluations of the opposition, thus lowering affective polarisation overall. The results offer a more nuanced perspective on the role of ideological conflict in driving affective polarisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliamentary candidates face choices about the extent to which they personalise their election campaigns. They must strike a balance between promoting their party's message and their own personal appeal, and they must decide how much effort to invest in developing personalised campaign activities. These decisions determine the nature of the campaigns that candidates run, and therefore, voters' experience during elections. In this article, we use individual-level survey data from the British Representation Study to explore the extent to which candidates personalise their election campaigns in terms of messaging focus and activities. We find that candidates who live in the area they seek to represent, and those who are more positive about their electoral chances, run more personalised campaigns, in terms of focus and activities. Incumbents' campaigns, meanwhile, are more personalised in their focus only, while candidates who have held national party office tend to use a greater range of personalised campaign activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that those who supported the winning side in elections report greater specific democratic support – they are more satisfied with the functioning of their democracy – than those who supported the losing side. This literature, however, has focused almost exclusively on winning the presidency or premiership. This project extends that literature to incorporate the effect of district election victories and defeats on citizens' democratic opinions using post-election surveys in three Westminster-style democracies: Australia, Canada, and Great Britain. It also includes two indicators of democratic institutional support: believing it matters for whom people vote and believing it matters who is in power. It finds that district-level results moderate the win-loss satisfaction gap induced by national election results. Winning in the constituency offsets the negative effect of electoral defeat; among national winners, however, the district result has limited impact on democratic attitudes. Constituency-level victories are less effective at mitigating the effect of national defeat on more diffuse democracy support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the determinants of the massive vote shift that characterised the UK's 2019 elections. To do so, this study firstly investigated opinions expressed by pro-Labour social groups about the hot issues of the political campaign; secondly, it conducted a cross-constituency analysis on the 2019 vote. The present findings reveal that the issues emphasised by the Conservative manifesto tallied with the opinions of traditional left-wing social groups. The cross-constituency statistical analysis confirmed this point and found a significant association between Labour's losses and the territorial distribution of the abovementioned social groups. These findings suggest that the crucial aspect of the vote shift was the Conservatives' appeal to the sociocultural conservativism of part of Labour's traditional voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Brexit's promise of restoring UK sovereignty and retrieving regulatory autonomy from the EU from the perspective of the UK Parliament. It argues that while the prospects of post-Brexit regulatory alignment remain high, they are to some extent counterbalanced by those of targeted divergence. A twofold argument is put forward to demonstrate this. The first argument builds on the literature on the Brussels effect and argues that the strength of economic interdependence between the UK and the EU and the size and influence of the latter's market generate significant pressures for UK regulatory alignment with EU standards. This is demonstrated through a qualitative empirical examination of the contents of UK parliamentary scrutiny of the projected impact of Brexit on the key UK export industry sectors: automotive, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and financial services. It is shown that select committees in both Houses of Parliament, including the Eurosceptic ones, have consistently advocated close alignment with EU regulatory standards across the export-intensive economic sectors. As such, these findings relativise the prospects of taking back control to the extent that the substance of Westminster's post-Brexit legislative activity may continue to be significantly influenced by EU regulation and policy. This is reinforced by the sanctioning mechanism foreseen in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the economic benefits of adhering to the EU's adequacy and equivalence regimes. These factors therefore facilitate the future Europeanisation of UK law after Brexit. The second argument nuances the first argument by showing that UK legislative and regulatory divergence is not an abstract possibility, but rather a political reality grounded in strong government majority following the 2019 election, the scrutiny approaches that favour assessment of regulatory impacts, and the UK's willingness to take unilateral action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost all academic literature about the causes and consequences of fairness of elections and referenda is based on retrospective evaluations. One of the strongest findings of such studies is that nonvoting is higher among citizens who retrospectively perceived an election as unfair. However, on logical grounds, it is impossible to attribute lower rates of voting to retrospectively perceived unfairness because at the time of the vote citizens can only rely on their prospective expectations of fairness. Moreover, it is well documented that retrospective evaluations are strongly influenced by the outcome of the election which is, at the time of voting, still unknown. In view of the dearth of earlier studies on prospective views of electoral fairness, this article presents the first major exploratory analyses of determinants and consequences of prospective expectations of electoral fairness. Using data from Britain about expectations of fairness of three general elections and two referenda in the period between 2014 and 2019, it shows that the public hold mixed views about the fairness they expect to find when voting. The article demonstrates that these prospective fairness beliefs are sometimes noticeably different to retrospective beliefs in terms of their predictors. Moreover, in sharp contrast to literature based on retrospective evaluations, this article also finds that prospective evaluations do not importantly affect the decision to vote. These findings have important implications for how we understand and evaluate the inclusiveness of elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by recent successes in model-based pre-election polling, we propose a kinetic model for opinion formation which includes voter demographics and socio-economic factors like age, sex, ethnicity, education level, income and other measurable factors like behaviour in previous elections or referenda as a key driver in the opinion formation dynamics. The model is based on Toscani's kinetic opinion formation model (Toscani G. 2006 Kinetic models of opinion formation. Commun. Math. Sci.4, 481–496.) and the leader–follower model of Düring et al. (Düring B. et al. 2009 Boltzmann and Fokker–Planck equations modelling opinion formation in the presence of strong leaders. Proc. R. Soc. A465, 3687–3708.), and leads to a system of coupled Boltzmann-type equations and associated, approximate Fokker–Planck-type systems. Numerical examples using data from general elections in the UK show the effect different demographics have on the opinion formation process and the outcome of elections. This article is part of the theme issue 'Kinetic exchange models of societies and economies'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether citizens are better represented by politicians 'like them' has been the subject of much debate and analysis. Yet, this scholarship has largely ignored the 1 in 5 people who are disabled and experience economic, social and political marginalization. Linking voter and candidate data from the 2015 British general election, this study examines whether disabled citizens are better represented by disabled elites. It analyses the effects of disability on both preferences and preference congruence. The findings reveal that disabled citizens and candidates are more supportive of healthcare and general public spending, even within parties. At the same time, the views of disabled citizens are rarely more congruent with the positions of disabled candidates than those of non-disabled candidates, except on healthcare spending. The study provides ground-breaking insights into the role of disability in policy preferences and political representation while also highlighting broader implications of how the descriptive–substantive representation link is analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]