David Sanders

University of Essex · Department of Government

Recent research in the UK has shown that an authoritarian populist (AP) cluster of attitudes centring on opposition to immigration, cynicism about human rights, disapproval of the EU, support for a robust defence and foreign policy, and a right-wing ideology form a single factor that underpins a range of other political preferences. In this chapter...

This paper extends research on authoritarian populism (AP) conducted in the UK to 11 other European countries: France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Italy, Spain, Romania, Lithuania, and Holland. Representative sample surveys with a common set of questions were conducted in all twelve countries in November 2016. These data show that au...

The verdict delivered by voters in the 2015 and 2017 British General Elections and the European Union Referendum surprised pollsters, pundits, the media, and even the victors. Political choices representative of Globalist outlooks saw defeat at the polls. Liberal Democratic support was below 10% and voting to remain in the EU underperformed predict...

The paper examines the main changes in the UK party system that have occurred in recent decades. It focuses on the decline of party identification and class-based voting, and the unintended consequences of decisions made by political elites. It analyses the fragmentation of contemporary UK political opinion and describes the emergence of a new set...

Similar to a number of other right-wing populist parties in Europe, Great Britain's United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has experienced increased public support in recent years. Using aggregate data from monthly national surveys conducted between April 2004 and April 2014, time series analyses demonstrate that the dynamics of UKIP support were...

This paper responds to Evans and Kat’s critique of the valence politics model of electoral choice. Their critique is deficient in several respects. First, the authors do not test the valence politics model, which is motivated by a theory of voting rather than a claim about the relationship between generalized measures of “party preference” and “par...

This paper applies the Seats-Votes Model to the task of forecasting the outcome of the 2015 election in Britain in terms of the seats won by the three major parties. The model derives originally from the ‘Law of Cubic Proportions’ the first formal statistical election forecasting model to be developed in Britain. It is an aggregate model which util...

This article: Notes that public perceptions that governments are honest and trustworthy are surprisingly volatile over time, but they move together in a long-term equilibrium relationship with indicators of policy performance and perceptions of fairness of the decision-making process. Argues that if individuals feel that policy delivery, particular...

In the United States, active church membership among ethnic and racial minorities has been linked to higher political participation. In Europe, the influence of religious attendance on political mobilisation of ethnic minorities has so far been little explored, despite the heated public debate about the public role of religion and particularly Isla...

This article develops and tests a set of theoretical mechanisms by which candidate ethnicity may have affected the party vote choice of both white British and ethnic minority voters in the 2010 British general election. Ethnic minority candidates suffered an average electoral penalty of about 4 per cent of the three-party vote from whites, mostly b...

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 towa...

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 per...

The fallout from the 2008 financial crises has prompted acrimonious national debates in many Western democracies over the need for substantial budget cuts. Among economic and political elites there is broad agreement that substantial public sector budget cuts are necessary to address unsustainable sovereign debt and to establish long-term fiscal in...

Democratic engagement is a multi-faceted phenomenon that embraces citizens' involvement with electoral politics, their participation in ‘conventional’ extra-parliamentary political activity, their satisfaction with democracy and trust in state institutions, and their rejection of the use of violence for political ends. Evidence from the 2010 BES an...

This paper uses data from the British Election Study's Continuous Monitoring Surveys to investigate reactions of the British public to the economic crisis and the austerity policies the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government has adopted to deal with it. Multivariate models informed by competing valence and positional theories of elector...

Thorough study of the political attitudes and behaviour of ethnic minorities in Britain First study with comparison of different ethnic minority groups Based on major new academic surveys Addresses major policy debates on discrimination, exclusion, marginalisation, and multiculturalism Britain has become increasingly diverse over the last fifty...

This paper uses data gathered in the British Election Study's 2011 AV Referendum Survey to investigate the impact of party leader images on referendum voting. The emphasis on leader images accords well with research showing that leader heuristics have sizable effects on voting in major referendums and general elections in Britain and other mature d...

Using data from the 2010 UK general election, the article shows that there is a distinctive calculus of party choice among Britain's overwhelmingly Labour-supporting ethnic minorities. Ethnic minority (EM) voters are similar to whites in the importance they accord to partisanship and valence considerations in deciding which party they vote for. How...

The paper analyses the connections between elite and mass opinion in the European Union. It considers both the ways in which mass publics use heuristics supplied by political elites to form their EU opinions, and the ways in which political elites respond to the opinions of the mass publics they represent. The paper employs data from simultaneously...

Affluence, Austerity and Electoral Change in Britain investigates the political economy of party support for British political parties since Tony Blair led New Labour to power in 1997. Using valence politics models of electoral choice and marshalling an unprecedented wealth of survey data collected in the British Election Study's monthly Continuous...

This chapter starts by describing the features of domestic, national-level and European Union-level politics that the previous chapters have sought to illuminate. It then summarizes the fundamental Europe-wide trends that have been observed in recent decades concerning the basic attitudinal and behavioural phenomena analysed in the previous chapter...

This chapter focuses on European citizens' informal engagement with politics by considering the extent to which they discuss politics with other people and/or attempt to persuade them to change their political views. It uses Eurobarometer and European Social Survey data from 1975 to 2007 to explore the individual-level and macrostructural determina...

This chapter examines generalized support for the EU rather than attitudes towards specific institutions and policies. Theories about its origin are subjected to more comprehensive empirical tests than previous analyses attempted, using time-series cross-section data covering all member states from the 1970s to 2007. The dynamic relationship betwee...

This book provides a broad overview of the main trends in mass attitudes towards domestic politics and European integration from the 1970s until today. Particularly in the last two decades, the 'end of the permissive consensus' around European integration has forced analysts to place public opinion at the centre of their concerns. The book faces th...

This chapter presents the volume, its fundamental motivation, and contents. It argues that the end of 'permissive consensus' and the entry of mass publics as relevant actors in the dynamics of European integration require a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of how attitudes towards domestic and European politics are linked, especially in the c...

Deliberative Polls simulate public opinion in a given policy domain when members of the relevant mass public are better informed about the issues involved. This article reports on the results of a three-day Deliberative Poll, conducted before the June 2009 European Parliament elections, to evaluate the effects of deliberation on a representative sa...

The central concern of this book is to know and describe how far EU 'legal' citizens feel that they are actually part of a functioning European political system and how much they think of themselves as EU citizens. The chapters report evidence of the levels of European identity, sense of EU representation and preferences for EU policy scope among E...

This chapter explicitly models reciprocal causal effects, providing a comprehensive and integrated account of EU citizenship attitudes on EU support. While preceding explanatory chapters are all based on single-equation models, here a system of equations is estimated in which instrumental variables are employed to sharpen the understanding of the p...

This chapter presents our dependent variables. It discusses the ways in which the various dimensions of European citizenship and of engagement have been theorised and measured. Citizenship is mapped onto the three theoretical dimensions of citizenship (identity, representation and scope of government), thus showing that citizens' attitudes are clea...

This book is not an edited collection of interconnected but intrinsically separate essays. Rather, it is a cohesive piece of research that should read as a unified study both in terms of the way we have built and tested our hypotheses, and in the way concepts are measured and models developed. The first chapter defines the book's core substantive f...

This chapter analyses individual and national differences in the intensity of European identity, and provides an assessment of the many factors that sustain or hinder the development of a European identification among citizens of EU member states. A model of the intensity of EU identity - comprising feelings of EU belonging and their salience - is...

The purpose of this paper is to explain why voters made the choices that they did in Britain's Alternative Vote (AV) referendum on 5 May 2011. The paper utilises four alternative theoretical models to analyse individual voting behaviour. They are described as the cost–benefit, cognitive engagement, heuristics and mobilisation models. The explanator...

The Seats-Votes model forecasts party seat shares in the House of Commons using data from general elections and opinion polls between 1945 and 2009. The model is built on a generalisation of the cube rule which provided a fairly accurate method of translating votes into seats when Britain was effectively a two party system prior to the 1970s. It co...

This paper investigates whether in 2010 ethnic minorities continued to give overwhelming support to Labour or whether the Conservatives made inroads, especially among the more middle‐class or entrepreneurial sections of the ethnic minority electorate. Does ethnicity over‐ride other social cleavages such as the class cleavage? Or does religion, espe...

This paper presents the results of analyses of forces shaping electoral choice in the 2010 British general election. The analyses are based primarily on data gathered in the Campaign Internet Panel Survey (CIPS) that was conducted as part of the 2010 British Election Study (BES). Tests of rival models of electoral choice reveal that, as in earlier...

A six-wave 2005–09 national panel survey conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study provided data for an investigation of sources of stability and change in voters’ party preferences. The authors test competing spatial and valence theories of party choice and investigate the hypothesis that spatial calculations provide cues for making...

The Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition government has announced its intention to hold a referendum on the possible introduction of the Alternative Vote (AV) for future elections to the House of Commons. This paper uses survey data from the 2010 British Election Study to simulate what the effects on the seat distribution in the House of Commons...

In recent years, students of voting behavior have become increasingly interested in valence politics models of electoral choice. These models share the core assumption that key issues in electoral politicds typically are ones upon which there is a widespread public consensus on the goals of public policy. The present paper uses latent curve modelin...

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 cogn...

This paper examines the influence of institutions and other contextual variables in a set of individual-level models of political participation, using a multi-level modelling strategy. It uses data from Citizenship Survey of the International Social Survey Programme conducted in 2004, to model relationships in many of the world's democracies. It ex...

It is now nearly a half century since the publication of The American Voter. Greeted with wide acclaim, the book quickly exercised enormous influence, not only in the United States, but in many other countries as well. One of those countries was Great Britain where the British Election Study (BES) closely modeled on the American National Election S...

The claim that the 2008 presidential election was a transformative one is fast becoming part of the conventional wisdom of American politics. Despite the election’s undoubted significance, this paper argues that factors affecting voting decisions were strikingly similar to those operating in many previous presidential elections. Using data from the...

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 lea...

Anthony Downs' highly influential spatial model of electoral choice assumes that voters' ideological/policy preferences are fixed. This paper uses a national internet experiment conducted in the 2005 British Election Study to turn this assumption into a testable hypothesis. Pace Downs, results indicate that voters' preferences are not exogenous, bu...

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 conducte...

Using pooled cross-section data on over 44,000 individuals, this study simultaneously estimates the effects of individual characteristics, individual economic perceptions and macroeconomic conditions on the propensity of UK voters to support the incumbent Conservative government. The findings on the impact of individual characteristics are consiste...

It is widely believed that the Conservatives can significantly improve their chances in the next general election by ‘moving to the centre of the political spectrum'. This paper uses data from the 2005 British Election Study to simulate both the direct and indirect consequences of such a move. The simulations show that the Conservatives would undou...

This article uses newly available British Election Study (BES) survey data to analyze forces affecting party choice and voter turnout in the 2005 general election. Multivariate analyses indicate that a “post‐9/11” mix of valence issues joined with party leader images and malleable partisan orientations to exert strong effects on party choice. Opini...

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This article explores the extent to which advocacy and attack Party Election Broadcasts (PEBs) affected voters’ party preferences during the British general election campaign of 2001. The analysis uses an experimental design that involved conducting “media exposure” tests on a representative sample of Greater London voters (N = 919) during the fina...

Aggregate‐level models of party support patterns increasingly seek to evaluate both “economic” and “political” explanations of election outcomes. This paper explores the evolution of support for Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats between 1997 and 2004. A number of politico‐economic models are developed and tested against monthly ti...

The article provides a set of contingent forecasts for the forthcoming UK general election. The forecasts are based on popularity function derived from monthly time series data covering the period 1997–2004. On most likely assumptions, the forecasts produce a clear Labour victory in the early summer of 2005, with the Liberal Democrats increasing th...

This paper reports on the findings of the Internet component of the 2001 BES and compares them with those of the other BES pre-election surveys. Part 1 outlines the rationale that underpins the introduction of Internet polling as a supplement to more traditional methods of assessing mass public opinion. Part 2 describes the marginal distributions o...

The paper seeks to establish a simple three-stage argument. It is argued, first, that the critical proximate economic source of party preferences is heavily valenced—that what matters most to voters are the relative economic management capabilities of the main rival parties. Second, these “valenced” perceptions of party competence are themselves de...

Vote functions are important devices for providing a ‘big picture’ of developments in electoral politics. However, the limited degrees of freedom upon which they are typically based mean that vote functions are rarely able to properly discriminate between competing accounts of electoral outcomes. They also fail adequately to capture the impact of ‘...

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 valenc...

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 valenc...

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 valenc...

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 valenc...

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 valenc...

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 valenc...

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 valenc...

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 valenc...

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 valenc...

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 valenc...

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 valenc...

Protest activity in Britain has undergone a resurgence in recent years, exemplifed by the massive rally against the Iraq war organised by the Anti-War Coalition in 2003. This article examines actual and potential protest behaviour in Britain in recent years, using information from a new database. The evidence shows that protest behaviour has a dist...

Levels of strong partisanship are much lower in Britain than they were 30 years ago. At the same time, contemporary voters are often likened to discriminating—or fickle—consumers, who are far more likely to cast their votes on the basis of relatively short-term factors such as the condition of the economy. The relative importance of party identific...

Eve-of-election polls in Britain have a reasonably good track record in predicting the outcome of the ensuing general election. Over the 1945–1997 period the average error in estimating parties' vote share was roughly 2 percentage points. Where UK pollsters — unsurprisingly — have encountered the most difficulty has been in estimating the size of t...

To explore the impact of the press in Britain during the first New Labour administration, we used aggregate-level analysis to assess the relationship between the economic content of press and changes in the public's political and economic attitudes. We examine the effects on attitudes of economic coverage in the broadsheets, ‘black top’ and tabloid...

The paper reviews the evidence that the measure of party identification (or partisanship) routinely used in social surveys and national election studies is flawed due to the fact that it overestimates the number of party identifiers in any given sample. The results of a 12-month survey experiment are reported to show that an alternative measure of...