Research and Supervision Interests

I am currently conducting research in several areas of study. If you are thinking of applying for a PhD in Political Science at UCL, then please do contact me if you plan to work in any of these areas. More broadly, I would be willing to supervise projects focused on comparative political economy in advanced industrialized democracies.

The Politics of Austerity

My primary line of active research, currently, relates to the politics of austerity and fiscal policy. This work is mainly collaborative with Lucy Barnes (UCL), and has been funded by a grant by the Leverhulme Trust. We are interested in the ways in which voters think about fiscal policy, especially in the context of “austerity”.

Book Project

  • Lucy Barnes and Timothy Hicks (Expected 2026 with OUP). “Popular Austerity“.
    • Draft available on request.

Papers

  • Lucy Barnes and Timothy Hicks (2022). “Are Policy Analogies Persuasive? The Household Budget Analogy and Public Support for Austerity”. British Journal of Political Science, 52:3, pp.1296-1314.
    • Pre-publication draft.
    • Accepted manuscript journal ($).
    • Replication data available from the BJPS Dataverse.
    • Abstract

      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.

  • Barnes, Lucy and Timothy Hicks (2021). “All Keynesians Now? Public Support for Countercyclical Government Borrowing”. Political Science Research & Methods 9:1, pp.180-188.
    • Pre-publication draft.
    • Final journal publication ($).
    • Replication data available from the PSRM Dataverse.
    • Abstract

      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.

  • Barnes, Lucy and Timothy Hicks (2018). “Making Austerity Popular: The Media and Mass Attitudes Towards Fiscal Policy”. American Journal of Political Science.
    • Pre-publication draft.
    • Final journal publication ($).
    • Replication data available from the AJPS Dataverse.
    • Abstract

      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.

  • Barnes, Lucy and Timothy Hicks. “The Popular Side of Austerity: Public Support for Budget Balance in Europe”
  • Barnes, Lucy and Timothy Hicks. “Risk, Recession, and Popular Demand for the Welfare State”

The Politics of Inequality

This work is mainly collaborative with Alan Jacobs (UBC) and Scott Matthews (MUN). We are interested in whether and how economic inequality translates into political inequality. Our focus is comparative but, in many ways, we are motivated by research on the USA. Thus, we have a working paper that extends the finding by Larry Bartels that the US exhibits “class-biased economic voting”, whereby voters reward incumbent presidents for income growth at the top of the income distribution, rather than more generally. We show that the phenomenon is much more general across developed democracies. Building on this, we also have a working paper that seeks to assess whether newspaper reports of economic performance are skewed such that they are more responsive to factors correlated with top income growth.

Papers

  • J. Scott Matthews, Timothy Hicks, and Alan M. Jacobs (2024). “The News Media and the Politics of Inequality in Advanced Democracies”, in Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontusson (Eds.), Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness, and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality. Cambridge University Press. Ch.11, pp.245-275.
    • Open access draft.
    • Full ebook ($).
    • Abstract

      This chapter considers the role of economic information in generating political inequality across income groups. Income inequality across many advanced democracies has risen sharply over the last four decades (Lupu and Pontusson, this volume). Not only have market incomes become increasingly concentrated among the very rich in a wide range of national contexts; so, too, have posttax-and-transfer incomes. In other words, many elected governments, notwithstanding the formidable range of market-shaping and redistributive policy instruments at their disposal, have over an extended period of time allowed a narrow and extremely affluent segment of the population to reap a further outsized share of the fruits of economic growth. How has this happened? What has allowed inequalities in material resources to mount in political systems that, nominally, distribute votes equally across adult citizens? Why have basic mechanisms of electoral accountability not induced governments to pursue economic and social policies that better serve the distributional interests of the vast majority of the electorate?

  • Alan M. Jacobs, J. Scott Matthews, Timothy Hicks, and Eric Merkley (2021). “Whose News? Class-Biased Economic Reporting in the United States”. American Political Science Review, 115:3, pp.1016-1033.
    • Final journal publication (Open Access).
    • Pre-publication draft.
    • Abstract

      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.

  • Hicks, Timothy, Alan M. Jacobs, and J. Scott Matthews (2016). “Inequality and Electoral Accountability: Class-Biased Economic Voting in Comparative Perspective”. Journal of Politics 78:4, pp.1076–1093.

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