ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES IN RECENT BRITISH AND CANADIAN ELECTIONS
The 2019 elections in Britain and Canada illustrate the difficulties in communication between a concerned public and ...prospective office-holders on the most critical set of issues of our times. An increased level of public awareness and concern about the state of the environment has been expressed in public opinion polls, social movement activity has increased, and Green parties have expanded their appeal. Despite these developments in recent years, environmental issues have not been able to exert a major impact on individual voting behaviour in elections, or on overall election outcomes. Issues related to the environment are usually treated, by both politicians and the public, in valence terms. Valence issues are ones upon which there is broad consensus about the goals of public policy, and political debate focuses not on "what to accomplish" but rather on "how to do it" and "who is best able." Regarding the environment, general formulations like global warming and climate change prompt politicians to offer concerned rhetoric and engage in virtue signaling, but specific policy proposals are often absent.
This paper examines four reasons why environmental/climate change issues did not have a major impact on the 2019 Canadian and British elections. First, environmental concern in society at large was imperfectly translated into election issues. Second, the major political parties produced inadequate and unconvincing environmental manifestos. Third, environmental issues were not central to most voting decisions. Fourth, environmental issues had limited impacts on election outcomes.
Britain has a long and often celebrated history of progressively expanding the electoral franchise. In recent years, the idea has been advanced to allow 16-year-olds to vote in general elections. ...This article uses data from a July 2013 national survey to examine public attitudes on this topic. These data show that less than one person in six favours lowering the voting age, with a large majority preferring the status quo. Younger-but not the youngest-people, men, working class and lower income persons, self-identified members of the ethnic majority and Scots tend to be most favourably disposed towards lowering the voting age. Multivariate analyses confirm these socio-demographic relationships and demonstrate that views about reducing the voting age covary in theoretically expected ways with several attitudinal variables prominent in the literature on voting, political participation and support for democratic political systems. Although statistically significant, none of the relationships of interest is especially strong. Thus, an effort to lower the age of majority would lack widespread popularity and be only weakly leveraged by the demographics of the British electorate. If franchise change occurs, it likely will be the result of an elite-driven project that succeeds because of widespread public indifference.
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.
Studies have long shown the existence of an age gap in voting behavior. We argue that the influx of immigrants can influence the size of this gap. Young people can become more apprehensive toward ...immigrants than older people because of the former's greater exposure to more competition from immigrants in the labor market and susceptibility to anti-immigrant sentiments in society. The age gap in attitudes toward immigrants can carry over to vote choice. We illustrate our argument with a comparative study of Hong Kong and Taiwan. While the two societies share many similarities, Hong Kong has experienced a significantly larger influx of immigrants from mainland China. Based on two election surveys in 2016, we find a distinct generational gap in attitudes toward immigrants in Hong Kong, but not in Taiwan. The age gap in Hong Kong also manifests itself in electoral support of China-resisting political parties.
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.
Making political choices Clarke, Harold D; Kornberg, Allan; Scotto, Thomas J
Making political choices,
2009, 20081101, 2019, 2013, 2008, 2013-04-29, 2008-11-01, 20090101
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"A timely and important contribution to voting literature. Both Canadians and Americans will develop a better understanding of their neighbours' elections, but will also gain many new insights into ...the politics of their own country." - Larry LeDuc, University of Toronto.
This paper examines the structure and domestic political relevance of foreign policy beliefs in contemporary Britain. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) of data gathered in five national surveys ...conducted between May and September 2008 show that the British public's foreign policy beliefs are organized by two latent factors, which we label Liberal Internationalism and British Militarism. These factors closely resemble those reported in studies of the foreign policy beliefs of the American public. Analyses reveal significant covariation between the two foreign policy belief factors and voting intentions, as well as with partisanship and feelings about party leaders—key predictor variables in voting behavior models. These relationships remain significant in the presence of several controls, including measures of incumbent government performance in domestic and foreign policy domains. Demonstrating that foreign policy beliefs matter for the fates of political parties and their leaders helps to explain how public opinion in democratic politics affects the conduct of international relations.
Politics Symposium: Canadian Politics at the 150th Anniversary of Confederation INTRODUCTION Canada's 2015 federal election was an exiting and consequential contest. After nearly a decade in office, ...Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party of Canada suffered defeat at the hands of a resurgent Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau. The factors that were crucial for Liberal success in both elections are key components in the valence politics model of electoral choice, a model that was strongly influenced by early research on Canadian voting behavior.3In the next section, we discuss key valence political forces at work in the 2015 federal election.4 VALENCE VOTING IN 2015 Issues In 2015, the economy--a quintessential valence issue--dwarfed all other concerns.5When asked about the most important issue facing the country, a full 47% of the Abacus survey respondents chose unemployment or the economy more generally, with an additional 7% referring to taxes or government debt. Adding to the gloom, the price of oil on world markets had crashed, thereby sharply reducing the flow of petro-dollars that had bolstered Canada's prosperity in recent decades. The country's economic mood had darkened considerably since Prime Minister Harper and the governing Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) had last faced reelection and escaping the attendant negative political consequences would not be easy. The country's economic mood had darkened considerably since Prime Minister Harper and the governing Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) had last faced reelection... Decades of research on Canadian voting behavior testify that favorable party performance judgments on...
This article examines the relationship between electoral support and the economy over the period 2004-2013, paying particular attention to the impact of the economic strategy pursued by the Coalition ...government in Britain since the 2010 general election. This involves modelling the relationship between voting intentions, perceptions of economic performance and a variety of other variables using survey data collected from 2004. The evidence shows that when Labour was in office, support for the party was strongly influenced by the state of the economy, as was support for the opposition parties. However, since the Coalition came to power, the relationship between the economy and political support has changed, with neither the Conservatives nor the Liberal Democrats gaining from a fairly rapid growth in economic optimism which has taken place since early 2013. The article explains this change in terms of a growing perception among the public that none of the major parties can effectively manage Britain's economic problems. Optimism about the national economy has not significantly percolated down to the level of the individual voter. So individuals may be more optimistic about the future of the national economy but they are still being badly affected by the recession.
This paper uses mixed Markov latent class models and data from multiwave national panel surveys to investigate the stability of individual-level party identification in three Anglo-American ...democracies—the United States, Britain, and Canada. Analyses reveal that partisan attachments exhibit substantial dynamism at the latent variable level in the American, British, and Canadian electorates. Large-scale partisan dynamics are not a recent development; rather, they are present in all of the national panel surveys conducted since the 1950s. In all three countries, a generalized “mover–stayer” model outperforms rival models including a partisan stability model and a “black–white” nonattitudes model that specifies random partisan dynamics. The superiority of generalized mover–stayer models of individual-level party identification comports well with American and British studies that document nonstationary, long memory in macropartisanship. The theoretical perspective provided by party identification updating models is consistent with the mix of durable and flexible partisans found in the United States and elsewhere.
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