Publications

Public opinion on complex policy questions is shaped by the ways elites simplify the issues. Given the prevalence of metaphor and analogy as tools for cognitive problem-solving, the deployment of analogies is often proposed as a tool for this kind of influence. For instance, a prominent explanation for the acceptance of austerity is that voters understand government deficits through an analogy to borrowing by households. Indeed, there are theoretical reasons to think that the household finance analogy represents a most likely case for the causal influence of analogical reasoning on policy preferences. This paper examines this best-case scenario using original survey data from the United Kingdom. In both observational and experimental analyses we find no evidence of a causation running from the household analogy to preferences over the government budget. Rather, endorsement of the analogy is invoked ex post to justify support for fiscal consolidation.

There is substantial evidence that voters’ choices are shaped by assessments of the state of the economy and that these assessments, in turn, are influenced by the news. But how does the economic news track the welfare of different income groups in an era of rising inequality? Whose economy does the news cover? Drawing on a large new dataset of U.S. news content, we demonstrate that the tone of the economic news strongly and disproportionately tracks the fortunes of the richest households, with little sensitivity to income changes among the non-rich. Further, we present evidence that this “class bias” emerges not from pro-rich journalistic preferences but, rather, from the interaction of the media’s focus on economic aggregates with structural features of the relationship between economic growth and distribution. The findings yield a novel explanation of distributionally perverse electoral patterns and demonstrate how the structure of the economy conditions economic accountability.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, macroeconomic policy returned to the political agenda, and the influence of Keynesian ideas about fiscal stimulus rose (and then fell) in expert circles. Much less is known, however, about whether and when Keynesian prescriptions for countercyclical spending have any support among the general public. We use a survey experiment, fielded twice, to recover the extent to which UK respondents hold such countercyclical attitudes. Our results indicate that public opinion was countercyclical — Keynesian — in 2016. We then use Eurobarometer data to estimate the same basic parameter for the population for the period 2010-2017. The observational results validate our experimental findings for the later period, but also provide evidence that the UK population held procyclical views at the start of the period. Thus, there appear to be important dynamics in public opinion on a key macroeconomic policy issue.

What explains variation in individual attitudes towards government deficits? Although macroeconomic stance is of paramount importance for contemporary governments, our understanding of its popular politics is limited. We argue that popular attitudes regarding austerity are influenced by media (and wider elite) framing. Information necessary to form preferences on the deficit is not provided neutrally, and its provision shapes how voters understand their interests. A wide range of evidence from Britain between 2010 and 2015 supports this claim. In the British Election Study, deficit attitudes vary systematically with the source of news consumption, even controlling for party identification. A structural topic model of two major newspapers’ reporting shows that content varies systematically with respect to coverage of public borrowing – in ways that intuitively accord with the attitudes of their readerships. Finally, a survey experiment suggests causation from media to attitudes: deficit preferences change based on the presentation of deficit information.

Do electorates hold governments accountable for the distribution of economic welfare? Building on the finding of “class-biased economic voting” in the United States, we examine how electorates in advanced democracies respond to alternative distributions of income gains and losses. Drawing on individual-level electoral data and aggregate election results across 15 countries, we examine whether lower- and middle-income voters defend their distributive interests by punishing governments for concentrating income gains among the rich. We find no indication that non-rich voters punish rising inequality and substantial evidence that electorates positively reward the concentration of aggregate income growth at the top. Our results suggest that governments commonly face political incentives systematically skewed in favor of inegalitarian economic outcomes. At the same time, we find that the electorate’s tolerance of rising inequality has its limits: class biases in economic voting diminish as the income shares of the rich grow in magnitude.

I present a theoretical account of the politics of privatization that predicts left-wing support for the policy is conditional on the proportionality of the electoral system. In contrast to accounts that see privatization as an inherently right-wing policy, I argue that, like trade policy, it has the feature of creating distributed benefits and concentrated costs. Less proportional electoral systems create incentives for the Left to be responsive to those who face the concentrated costs, and thus for them to oppose privatization more strongly. More proportional systems reduce these incentives and increase the extent to which distributed benefits are internalized by elected representatives. Hypotheses are derived from this theory at both the individual and macro-policy level, and then tested separately. Quantitative evidence on public opinion from the 1990s and privatization revenues from Western European countries over the period 1980–2005 supports the argument.

It is argued in this article that the marketisation of schools policy has a tendency to produce twin effects: an increase in educational inequality, and an increase in general satisfaction with the schooling system. However, the effect on educational inequality is very much stronger where prevailing societal inequality is higher. The result is that cross-party political agreement on the desirability of such reforms is much more likely where societal inequality is lower (as the inequality effects are also lower). Counterintuitively, then, countries that are more egalitarian – and so typically thought of as being more left-wing – will have a higher likelihood of adopting marketisation than more unequal countries. Evidence is drawn from a paired comparison of English and Swedish schools policies from the 1980s to the present. Both the policy history and elite interviews lend considerable support for the theory in terms of both outcomes and mechanisms.

This article demonstrates that party-political orientations within governance communities can have strong effects on policy implementation. Empirical evidence is drawn from the Academy conversion scheme for secondary schools in England that was recently pursued by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government. The opt-in nature of the reform makes it possible to discern the impact that nominally apolitical school governors have on the implementation of the policy. Academy conversion is disproportionately found in more Conservative-voting constituencies due to varying school-level propensities to apply to convert, rather than varying propensities for the Department for Education to authorize conversions. Further, applications to convert are significantly more likely from schools in Conservative parliamentary seats that are under the control of Labour local authorities. Thus, nominally apolitical policy participants appear to act in rather political ways, which has implications for our understanding of the involvement of civil society in the provision of public services.

Why did a highly redistributive, nationalized health care system emerge in the UK, where the Left was comparatively weak, while a more redistributively neutral, cash-centric, insurance-based system was pursued in Sweden, where the Left was strong? The explanation is two fold. First, in contrast to the Swedish Social Democrats, the weakness of the British Labour Party constrained it to pursue redistribution via health policy. Second, given the redistributive goals of the National Health Service, it became imperative for the Labour Party to construct a system that would be difficult for future Conservative governments to retrench. More generally, this formulation posits rational actors operating in the kinds of processes typically studied by historical institutionalists. The result is a tendency for a type of path dependence by design.