In recent electoral contests, political observers and media outlets increasingly report on the level of "authenticity" of political candidates. However, even though this term has become commonplace in political commentary, it has received little attention in empirical electoral research. In this study, we identify the characteristics that we argue make a politician "authentic". After theoretically discussing the different dimensions of this trait, we propose a survey battery aimed at measuring perceptions of the authenticity of political candidates.Testing our measure using data sets from different countries, we show that the answers to our items load on one latent concept that we call "authenticity". Furthermore, perceptions of candidate authenticity seem to correlate strongly with evaluations of political parties and leaders, and with vote intention, while they are empirically distinguishable from other traits.We conclude that candidate authenticity is an important trait that should be taken into account by future research.
Striking territorial variations in the 2016 Brexit referendum are neglected in the explanatory literature, a gap our analysis of British Election Study helps to fill. Rather than modelling Britain as one political system, we present parallel models for England, Scotland and Wales.Typical in other multi-national states, this approach is innovative for 'British politics'. To analyse complex multi-level national identities, we develop a Relative Territorial Identity (RTI) measure. Substantively, RTI predicts Brexit vote-choice. Since voters who prioritise English identity tended to vote Leave, while the obverse was true in Wales and Scotland, RTI helps to explain territorial differentiation.
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For Scottish Labour to be reduced to a single MP in Scotland once might seem like misfortune: that in 2019 they suffered the same fate looks like carelessness. While much focus of the 2019 UK General Election in Scotland will be on the SNP, an equally interesting puzzle is the electoral performance of the once dominant party in Scotland. In this article we explore what helps to explain why formerly successful parties fail, identifying explanations that may account for the current electoral fortunes of Labour in Scotland. To this end we rely on data from the 2019 round of the Scottish Election Survey.
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