Will Jennings

• D.Phil
• Professor at University of Southampton

In the study of politics, many theoretical accounts assume that we are experiencing a ‘crisis of democracy’, with declining levels of political trust. While some empirical studies support this account, others disagree and report ‘trendless fluctuations’. We argue that these empirical ambiguities are based on analytical confusion: whether trust is d...

Evidence indicates that citizens widely regard politicians as untrustworthy. But do low levels of trust affect politicians’ behaviour? In this article, we draw on interviews conducted with UK political elites to understand: (a) whether they recognise a lack of public trust; (b) what they perceive as its causes and present as solutions; (c) how it a...

While the outcome of the 2024 British general election signalled a resounding repudiation of the incumbent government—returning a 231‐seat swing from the Conservatives to Labour—it did not radically overturn the geography of electoral outcomes in England and Wales. Indeed, demographic predictors of party vote for parliamentary constituencies at the...

Disaffection with democratic politics is becoming the norm and its causes more varied. Empirical work on political trust, however, almost always relies on blunt survey items measuring only ‘trust’, but it is unknown whether this adequately captures diverse trust attitudes. In this paper, we propose a tripartite distinction between trust, distrust,...

This paper examines the qualities of governments that influence their perceived trustworthiness, presenting the first experimental study of the distinct roles of ‘competence’, ‘benevolence’ and ‘integrity’ (CBI) in shaping trust in government. We empirically test the effects of these three dimensions of trustworthiness through conjoint experiments...

This paper examines the qualities of governments that influence their perceived trustworthiness, presenting the first experimental study of the distinct roles of ‘competence’, ‘benevolence’, and ‘integrity’ (CBI) in shaping trust in government. We empirically test the effects of these three dimensions of trustworthiness through con- joint experimen...

A key lesson of the coronavirus pandemic was the importance for pro-social behaviour of popular trust in key information sources. Yet existing studies rarely consider the role of people’s trust in a range of different information sources, and the relationship between such trust and particular attitudes and behaviours among individuals. This study g...

We explore the characteristics of politicians that make them trusted by citizens, fielding conjoint survey experiments in seven democracies. Studies regularly indicate that competence and integrity are key attributes in the perceived trustworthiness of politicians, but we show that displaying authenticity is also important. Authenticity is about be...

Local economic decline has been presented as an explanation for populism, political alienation and geographic polarisation. This approach risks underestimating the complexity of observing local economic decline. Using original survey questions in the British Election Study, we theorise five models to explain who is likely to perceive local economic...

In the study of politics, many theoretical accounts assume that we are experiencing a ‘crisis of democracy’, with declining levels of political trust. While some empirical studies support this account, others disagree and report ‘trendless fluctuations’. We argue that these empirical ambiguities are based on analytical confusion: whether trust is d...

The coronavirus pandemic increased the role played by scientific advisers in counselling governments and citizens on issues around public health. This raises questions about how citizens evaluate scientists, and in particular the grounds on which they trust them. Previous studies have identified various factors associated with trust in scientists,...

Why do citizens support or reject climate change mitigation policies? This is not an easy choice: citizens need to support the government in making these decisions, accept potentially radical behavior change, and have altruism across borders and for future generations. A substantial literature argues that political trust facilitates citizen support...

Alongside economic factors, regional variation in trust reflects the structure of social ties available to different regions. We support this claim by linking cross-national survey data from 22 countries in the European Social Survey with data on Facebook friendships. Regions with more local (within-region) connections exhibit lower political trust...

Previous studies of vaccine hesitancy in the context of COVID-19 have reported mixed results in terms of the role played by political and institutional trust. This study addresses this ambiguity with a global analysis of the relationship between trust and vaccine hesitancy, disentangling the effects of generalized trust orientations, trust in speci...

Trust in political actors and institutions has long been seen as essential for effective democratic governance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, trust was widely identified as key for mitigation of the crisis through its influence on compliance with public policy, vaccination and many other social attitudes and behaviours. We study whether trust did i...

Political institutions and parties define the set of choices faced by voters, and structure the evolution of electoral preferences over the election cycle. While previous research examines characteristics of institutions, here we consider the influence of political parties. We theorize ways in which they matter to the formation of electoral prefere...

Trust in political actors and institutions has long been seen as essential for effective democratic governance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, trust was widely identified as key for mitigation of the crisis through its influence on compliance with public policy, vaccination and many other social attitudes and behaviours. We study whether trust did i...

In recent decades, scholars and commentators have raised concerns about increasing citizen disengagement from politics, in particular from formal participation in liberal democracies. This trend is generally seen as indicative of declining public support for these regimes, but empirical analyses of the implications of disengagement are rare. This c...

As COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the world, there are growing concerns about the roles that trust, belief in conspiracy theories, and spread of misinformation through social media play in impacting vaccine hesitancy. We use a nationally representative survey of 1476 adults in the UK between 12 and 18 December 2020, along with 5 focus grou...

‘Levelling up’ is an expression of a realignment in British politics with the Conservatives presenting themselves as the new party of redistribution. This is not primarily concerned with redistribution between social classes, or even between regions, but rather targets communities that feel they have lost their centrality and standing. This seeming...

It is commonplace to claim that trust is essential to effective governance in many contexts, including that of a public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that trust is better understood as a family of concepts – trust, mistrust and distrust – and each of these may have different implications for the governance of COVID-19. Drawi...

A popular explanation for the recent success of right-wing populist candidates, parties and movements is that this is the ‘revenge of the places that don’t matter’ (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018). Under this meso-level account, as economic development focuses on increasingly prosperous cities, voters in less dynamic and rural areas feel neglected by the pol...

Using volunteer writing for Mass Observation, we explore how British citizens decided whether to leave the EU. The 2016 referendum was the biggest decision made by the British electorate in decades, but involved limited voter analysis. Many citizens did not have strong views about EU membership in early 2016. The campaigns did not help to firm up t...

As COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the world, there are growing concerns about the role that trust, belief in conspiracy theories and spread of misinformation through social media impact vaccine hesitancy. We use a nationally representative survey of 1,476 adults in the UK between December 12 to 18, 2020 and five focus groups conducted in t...

As COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the world, there are growing concerns about the role that trust, belief in conspiracy theories and spread of misinformation through social media impact vaccine hesitancy. We use a nationally representative survey of 1,476 adults in the UK between December 12 to 18, 2020 and five focus groups conducted in t...

Trust between governors and the governed is seen as essential to facilitating good governance. This claim has become a prominent contention during the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis also presents a unique test of key hypotheses in the trust literature. Moreover, understanding the dynamics of trust, how it facilitates and hinders policy responses,...

More urgently than ever we need an answer to the question posed by the late Mick Moran in The Political Quarterly nearly two decades ago: ‘if government now invests huge resources in trying to be smart why does it often act so dumb?’ We reflect on this question in the context of governmental responses to COVID-19 in four steps. First, we argue that...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

How are the contours of Western European politics shifting? To what extent do these shifts reflect changes in the underlying social and economic structure of European polities? In this article, we reflect on insights from the classic literature on how cleavages structure party systems and consider how the emergence and persistence of new parties an...

There are three broad sets of qualities that citizens might expect politicians to display: competence, integrity and authenticity. To be authentic, a politician must be judged to be in touch with the lives and outlooks of ordinary people and previous research has suggested that this expectation has grown more prevalent in recent times. In this pape...

We consider two criteria for evaluating election forecasts: accuracy (precision) and lead (distance from the event), specifically the trade-off between the two in poll-based forecasts. We evaluate how much "lead" still allows prediction of the election outcome. How much further back can we go, supposing we tolerate a little more error? Our analysis...

Studies using data from the British Election Study and the British Social Attitudes survey have concluded that the case for a significant rise in turnout amongst young people at the 2017 general election remains unproven. A limitation of these data sets for assessing the so-called Youthquake thesis is the small number of younger voters they contain...

Will Jennings examines the opinion polls in the 2017 election, showing how they tracked movements in voting intentions during the campaign, but also how most of them under-estimated the Labour vote on polling day, suggesting a comfortable Conservative victory when the election ended in producing no overall majority. He also notes YouGov’s successfu...

This paper argues that the agenda-setting power of protest must be understood in dynamic terms. Specifically, it develops and tests a dynamic theory of media reaction to protest which posits that features of street demonstrations – such as their size, violence, societal conflict and the presence of a “trigger” – lead protest issues to be reported a...

While the EU referendum vote put the political divide between Britain’s towns and cities into the spotlight, this divide is the product of long-term forces of social and economic change. In this chapter, we show how geographical polarisation has and continues to reshape British politics, in the diverging trends between those places that have experi...

This paper outlines a dynamic problem-detection model of legislative oversight where legislative committees engage in information-gathering to identify emerging policy problems. It is argued that activities of legislative committees are responsive to indicators of problem status across a range of policy domains. This enables committees to react to...

Fear of crime occupies a substantial area of research and theorising in criminology. Still, to our knowledge it has not been examined within a longitudinal framework of political socialisation. Using insights from generational modelling we explore how political cohorts influence the fear of crime and perceptions of antisocial behaviour. This ‘age,...

The opinion polls that were undertaken before the 2015 UK general election underestimated the Conservative lead over Labour by an average of 7 percentage points. This collective failure led politicians and commentators to question the validity and utility of political polling and raised concerns regarding a broader public loss of confidence in surv...

The result and aftermath of the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union has generated considerable attention, not just among observers of British politics. Even if some of wider context that shaped the referendum is far from unique to the UK, the road to Brexit is a product of distinct pathologies of the British state and politics t...

Surveys show a lack of trust in political actors and institutions across much of the democratic world. Populist politicians and parties attempt to capitalise on this political disaffection. Commentators worry about our current 'age of anti-politics'. Focusing on the United Kingdom, using responses to public opinion surveys alongside diaries and let...

Are election polling misses becoming more prevalent? Are they more likely in some contexts than others? In this paper we undertake an over-time and cross-national assessment of prediction errors in pre-election polls. Our analysis draws on more than 26,000 polls from 338 elections in 45 countries over the period between 1942 and 2013, as well as da...

The Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit was a major exercise in deliberative public engagement conducted in autumn 2017. It brought together fifty randomly selected members of the public for two carefully structured weekends of listening, learning, reflecting and discussing. Assembly Members considered what post-Brexit arrangements the UK should pursue, f...

A growing body of research suggests the existence of a disconnection between citizens, politicians and representative politics in advanced industrial democracies. This has led to a literature on the emergence of post-democratic or post-representative politics that connects to a parallel seam of scholarship on the capacity of deliberative democratic...

In this article, we argue for ethnography as an approach to understanding politics and government. We make three moves. First, we defend a broad approach to ethnography that encompasses more than deep immersion. Second, we build on the small literature that makes the case for political scientists doing ethnography. In doing so, we debunk common myt...

The opinion polls that were undertaken before the 2015 UK general election underestimated the Conservative lead over Labour by an average of 7 percentage points. This collective failure led politicians and commentators to question the validity and utility of political polling and raised concerns regarding a broader public loss of confidence in surv...

Much attention has been paid to government ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. National political and administrative systems have been frequently blamed for being disproportionately prone to generating mishaps. However, little systematic evidence exists on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. Based...

Much attention has been paid to government ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. National political and administrative systems have been frequently blamed for being disproportionately prone to generating mishaps. However, little systematic evidence exists on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. Based...

The general election of June 2017 revealed a continued tilting of the political axis in England that has been long in the making. This was not a Brexit ‘realignment’ – in that the vote is better seen as a symptom of a longer-term divide that is emerging between citizens residing in locations strongly connected to global growth and those who are not...

Opinion polls are central to the study of electoral politics. With modern election polling dating back to the 1936 US presidential election, and proto-straw polls going back as far as the 1824 presidential election, polls have long been employed to gauge the popularity of different political competitors and, for as long as they have been available,...

This research note considers how to track long-term trajectories of political discontent in Britain. Many accounts are either confined to using survey data drawn from recent decades or imperfect behavioural measures such as voting or party membership as indicators of political disengagement. We instead develop an approach that provides the long vie...

The current process of devolving powers within England constitutes a significant change of governance arrangements. This process of devolution has been widely criticised for including insufficient consultation. This paper assesses whether that criticism is fair. Modifying Archon Fung’s framework for the analysis of public participation mechanisms,...

Using insights from the classical sociology of deviance and social structure (notably Durkheim and Merton) we explore the enduring impact of the social and economic changes which started in the UK in the early 1980s. In the two subsequent decades the UK went through a period of radical economic restructuring, leading to lasting social change. We se...

Negativity towards the institutions of formal politics is currently a concern across much of the democratic world. It is generally agreed that such negativity increased among British citizens during the second half of the twentieth century. In this paper, we analyse a novel dataset not previously used to study this topic: Mass Observation's General...

To what extent are new generations ‘Thatcherite’? Using British Social Attitudes data for 1985–2012 and applying age-period-cohort analysis and generalized additive models, this article investigates whether Thatcher’s Children hold more right-authoritarian political values compared to other political generations. The study further examines the exte...

To study the evolution of electoral preferences, Erikson and Wlezien (2012) propose assessing the correspondence between pre-election polls and the vote in a set of elections. That is, they treat poll data not as a set of time series but as a series of cross-sections—across elections—for each day of the election cycle. This “timeline” method does n...

The study investigates the impact of media coverage of protest on issue attention in parliament (questions) in six Western European countries. Integrating several data sets on protest, media, and political agendas, we demonstrate that media coverage of protest affects parliamentary agendas: the more media attention protest on an issue receives, the...

There has been a transformation since September 2014 in the prominence of ideas around the use of deliberative mini-publics in British politics. This transformation has occurred in part because of real-world events and processes: the Scottish independence referendum was the immediate catalyst; widespread public disillusionment with established repr...

Election-oriented elites are expected to give campaign emphasis to issues on which their party possesses ‘issue ownership’. This paper extends those theories to the content of executive and legislative agendas. Arguing that executives have incentives to pursue their party's owned issues in the legislature, we theorize three conditions under which t...

This article revisits democratic engagement in post-war Britain in a context of debates about political disaffection in the current period. The study systematically reanalysed volunteer writing in the Mass Observation Archive and represents a significant methodological advance on previous studies. Little evidence was found to support common existin...

The U.K. Political Studies Association today released the results of its survey of expert predictions of the 2016 EU referendum. The survey was distributed to members of the Association as well as a large number of survey researchers from major polling companies in Britain and to journalists from the print and broadcast media. We asked respondents...

This paper makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics - between crime rates, public opinion and public policy - can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognise and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated in...

Building on blame-avoidance analysis, this paper develops a method to assess the reactivity, sequencing and efficacy of defensive responses by officeholders facing a crisis of personal blame, analysing cases drawn from four advanced democracies. It tests the hypotheses that officeholders: (i) react by positive action rather than non-engagement when...

This document was published to accompany an event of the same title. On 19 May 2016, in the Macmillan Room of Portcullis House, Westminster, a team of researchers from the University of Southampton – Nick Clarke, Will Jennings, Jonathan Moss, and Gerry Stoker – discussed the rise of anti-politics in Britain with MP and historian Tristram Hunt, jour...

The Citizens’ Assembly pilots on local democracy and devolution were the first of their kind in the United Kingdom. Organised by Democracy Matters — an alliance of university researchers and civil society organisations led by Professor Matthew Flinders — and funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Assemblies took place in South...

There are many kinds of politics, but if politics describes those institutions by which plural societies achieve collective and binding decisions (Crick 1962), then anti-politics describes negative feeling towards those institutions – including politicians, parties, councils, parliaments, and governments. This negativity is targeted towards politic...

The Citizens’ Assembly pilots on local democracy and devolution were the first of their kind in the United Kingdom. Organised by Democracy Matters — an alliance of university researchers and civil society organisations led by Professor Matthew Flinders — and funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Assemblies took place in South...

This paper makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics - between crime rates, public opinion and public policy - can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognise and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated in...

To what extent are new generations ‘Thatcherite’? Using British Social Attitudes data for 1985-2012 and applying age-period-cohort (APC) analysis and generalized additive models (GAMs) this paper investigates whether Thatcher’s Children hold more right-authoritarian political values compared to other political generations. We further examine the ex...

This paper develops a three-stage method to forecast parliamentary election results from vote preferences in British opinion polls: (1) adjusting and aggregating vote-intentions from different polling organizations; (2) forecasting how public support for parties will change in the period before election day; and (3) translating, through simulations...

A dynamic of global economic development means that many countries are experiencing uneven development and their citizens are increasingly split between those who can access high skill jobs and those that cannot. As a result some citizens are living in cosmopolitan areas of growth and others in backwater areas of decline. There is emerging out of t...

A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda-setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single-country studies has suggested a number of general agenda-setting patterns but these have...

Political discontent remains a pressing issue for UK parliamentary democracy that needs to be better understood. We offer a range of theoretical perspectives on dimensions of political disaffection and seek to measure them with substantially new survey measures that assess how citizens perceive the performance and motivation of politicians. Our res...

This paper develops an attention-based model of party mandates and policy agendas, where parties and governments are faced with an abundance of issues, and must divide their scarce attention across them. In government, parties must balance their desire to deliver on their electoral mandate (i.e. the “promissory agenda”) with a need to continuously...

Scholars characterize decision-making in the European Union (EU) as increasingly dispersed across different levels of political authority. This has implications for political representation. Yet, little is known about whether and how public opinion differs across levels of governance. In this paper, we consider evaluations of issue priorities. Spec...

However one views it, the changes to housing tenure in the 1980s were pronounced and have had enduring effects in terms of the housing market. In this paper, we throw light on the relationship between housing tenure and the experience of property crime in and around what might be referred to as domestic environments (i.e. people’s homes). In so doi...

However one views it, the changes to housing tenure in the 1980s were pronounced and have had enduring effects in terms of the housing market. In this paper, we throw light on the relationship between housing tenure and the experience of property crime in and around what might be referred to as domestic environments (i.e. people’s homes). In so doi...

Exploring long-term trends in crime and criminal justice is a multifaceted exercise. This article introduces the construction and methodological benefits of a series of new data sets that amalgamate approximately 30 years of public data on crime, victimization, fear of crime, social and political attitudes with national socio-economic indicators in...

The existing literature on polarization has focused predominantly on spatial polarization and partisanship. This paper extends the focus of polarization to the literature on issue ownership, and competence. Using ANES data from 1972 to 2012, we identify a pattern of partisan polarization in competence assessments in parallel with elite polarization...

Scholars are only beginning to understand the evolution of electoral sentiment over time. How do preferences come into focus over the electoral cycle in different countries? Do they evolve in patterned ways? Does the evolution vary across countries? This paper addresses these issues. We consider differences in political institutions and how they mi...

Margaret Thatcher changed British politics – but did her policies change our political attitudes? In a ground‐breaking new study Emily Gray, Stephen Farrall, Colin Hay, Danny Dorling and Will Jennings find that the ‘Iron Lady’ left a lasting impact on British social attitudes that is still being felt today. Margaret Thatcher changed British politic...

Scholars are beginning to understand the evolution of electoral sentiment across countries. Recent research shows that early vote intention polls – from years before Election Day – contain substantial information about the final result but that they become increasingly informative over the election cycle. The degree to which this is true varies acr...

We examine the links between public opinion and policy in the UK over the past thirty years. We show that public views about immigration are responsive to changes in immigration levels and differences between migrant groups, and that policymakers are sensitive to these changes. Policymakers look to respond to the public mood on migration, but face...

Scholars studying opinion representation often rely on a survey question that asks about the “most important problem” (MIP) facing the nation. While we know that MIP responses do reflect public priorities, less is known about their connection to policy preferences. This paper directly addresses the issue. First, it conceptualizes policy preferences...

Margaret Thatcher changed British politics – but did her policies change our political attitudes? In a ground-breaking new study Emily Gray, Stephen Farrall, Colin Hay, Danny Dorling and Will Jennings find that the ‘Iron Lady’ left a lasting impact on British social attitudes that is still being felt today.

Much attention has been paid to ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. Some argue, on the one hand, that the UK’s political and administrative system is disproportionately prone to generating disasters, but offer no systematic evidence on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. On the other hand, researc...

Bold approaches to data collection and large-scale quantitative advances have long been a preoccupation for social science researchers. In this commentary we further debate over the use of large-scale survey data and official statistics with ‘Big Data’ methodologists, and emphasise the ability of these resources to incorporate the essential social...

First working paper from the project 'Popular understandings of politics in Britain, 1945-2014', see www.antipolitics.soton.ac.uk