Political Choice in Britain uses data from the 1964 to 2001 British election studies (BES), 1992 to 2002 monthly Gallup polls, and numerous other national surveys conducted over the past four decades to test the explanatory power of rival sociological and individual rationality models of electoral turnout and party choice. Analyses endorse a valence politics model that challenges the long-dominant social class model. British voters make their choices by evaluating the performance of parties and party leaders in economic and other important policy areas. Although these evaluations may be largely products of events that occur long before an election campaign officially begins, parties’ national and local campaign activities are also influential. Consistent with the valence politics model, partisan attachments display individual- and aggregate-level dynamics that reflect ongoing judgements about the managerial abilities of parties and their leaders. A general incentives model provides the best explanation of turnout. Calculations of the costs and influence-discounted benefits of voting and sense of civic duty are key variables in this model. Significantly, the decline in turnout in recent elections does not reflect more general negative trends in public attitudes about the political system. Voters judge the performance of British democracy in much the same way as they evaluate its parties and politicians. Support at all levels of the political system is a renewable resource, but one that must be renewed.

What matters most to voters when they choose their leaders? This book suggests that performance politics is at the heart of contemporary democracy, with voters forming judgments about how well competing parties and leaders perform on important issues. Given the high stakes and uncertainty involved, voters rely heavily on partisan cues and party leader images as guides to electoral choice. However, the authors argue that the issue agenda of British politics has changed markedly in recent years. A cluster of concerns about crime, immigration and terrorism now mix with perennial economic and public service issues. Since voters and parties often share the same positions on these issues, political competition focuses on who can do the best job. This book shows that a model emphasizing flexible partisan attachments, party leader images and judgments of party competence on key issues can explain electoral choice in Britain and elsewhere.

Introduces the principal questions–why British citizens vote, why they make the party choices that they do, to what extent do they engage with the political process beyond participation in elections, and what does the pattern of engagement over the last four decades tell us about the health of contemporary British democracy–that structure the analyses in various chapters. Chapter 1 also presents an overview of the two major competing theoretical frameworks, the sociological and individual-rationality frameworks, and various specific models located in these frameworks, which are used to answer these questions. The 2001 BES data set and various other data sets employed in the analyses are described, and the content of the several chapters that follow is summarized.

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This paper investigates forces that shaped the decisions voters made in the June 23, 2016 referendum on the UK's continued membership in the European Union. Using data gathered in a national panel survey conducted before and after the referendum, multivariate models informed by previous research on voting in major 'polity-shaping' referendums are used to assess factors affecting the choices voters made. Analyses document that both economic-and immigration-focused benefit-cost calculations strongly influenced voters' decisions.Combined with risk assessments, emotional reactions to EU membership and leader image cues, these calculations were major proximate forces driving referendum voting. National identities were at work too, operating further back in the set of forces affecting attitudes towards the EU. Taken together, the findings indicate that the narrow Brexit decision voters made on June 23rd reflected a complex mixture of calculations, emotions and cues. Why Britain Voted for Brexit: An Individual-Level Analysis of the 2016 Referendum VoteOn June 23 2016 the British electorate made a historic decision to leave the European Union. This article employs data gathered in a national panel survey conducted just before and immediately after the June 23rd referendum to investigate the forces that shaped the choices voters made in the referendum. Analyses of the survey data enable us to address several important questions. Was the vote to leave the EU motivated primarily by instrumental considerations regarding the perceived costs and benefits of EU membership and risks that would be encountered should the UK decide to leave? Or were decisions driven more strongly by feelings of national identity and anxiety over perceived threats to the native in-group, from immigration and the free movement of EU nationals? How influential were cues from prominent politicians, such as David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, in motivating people to vote, either for remain or leave? After providing a brief overview of major issues in the referendum campaign, we answer these questions using existing research on public attitudes towards the European Union to guide the specification of a model of factors affecting voting in the EU referendum. Next, we report the results of empirical analyses of this referendum voting model and associated models of key predictor variables. In the conclusion, we summarize major findings and discuss their implications for understanding why a majority of voters opted for Brexit. Key Issues in the Referendum CampaignWhen all the referendum votes were counted 51.9 percent of those voting had opted to leave providing a lead over the Remain vote that extended to almost 7 percentage points in England. 1 The vote for Brexit followed a campaign by several Eurosceptic groups-notably Vote Leave, Leave EU, Leave.EU and Grassroots Out-that had focused heavily on

Although political scientists have begun to investigate the properties of Internet surveys, much remains to be learned about the utility of the Internet mode for conducting major survey research projects such as national election studies. This paper addresses this topic by presenting the results of an extensive survey comparison experiment conducted as part of the 2005 British Election Study. Analyses show statistically significant, but generally small, differences in distributions of key explanatory variables in models of turnout and party choice. Estimating model parameters reveals that there are few statistically significant differences between coefficients generated using the in-person and Internet data, and the relative explanatory power of rival models is virtually identical for the two types of data. In general, the in-person and Internet data tell very similar stories about what matters for turnout and party preference in Britain. Determining if similar findings obtain in other countries should have high priority on the research agenda for national election studies.

Elections constitute a principal avenue of citizen involvement in political life, and knowledge of their effects on public attitudes towards the polity and the role of the individual therein has important implications for theories of democratic governance. One sucli attitude is political efficacy, ‘the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact on the political process’. Although many studies have documented that political efficacy is positively associated with electoral participation, the causal mechanisms involved are not well understood. Most researchers have simply assumed that the ‘causal arrow’ runs from efficacy to participation, i.e. from the attitude to the behaviour. Investigations of the hypothesis that the behaviour (participation) affects the attitude (efficacy) are rare. Rarer still are enquiries focusing on the impact of election outcomes on efficacy, and studies that examine both effects are virtually non-existent. In this Note covariance structure analysis is used to investigate the effects of voting, campaign activity and the outcomes of the 1984 national elections on political efficacy in the American electorate.