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Evidence suggests that as public opinion towards immigration becomes more negative, so the descriptive representation of ethnic minority groups is increasingly restricted. Recently, some initial research into the causal mechanism hinted that this effect is driven by patterns of candidacy. This suggests that political parties are creating an 'ethnic penalty' of their own in the selection stage. This paper investigates the relationship between patterns of candidacy, party strategy, and public opinion in Great Britain from 1997 to 2019, and proposes that 'punitive parties' are strongly responsible for shaping the representational outcomes of minority groups. I find support for earlier suggestions that parties are increasingly likely to place ethnic minority candidates away from 'winnable' contests as anti-immigrant hostility rises. These findings are important for our conceptions of ethnic penalties, of party behaviour in selection processes, and for the study and cause of improving political representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the state of the art of the Brexit negotiations in the area of financial services. It uses a two‐level game model to first explain the positions of UK and EU negotiators on the basis of the domestic constraints they face, and second, to consider the scope for final agreement based on the 'win‐set' of both sides. The paper analyses the preferences and power of three main groups of players within the UK and EU: the political authorities, financial regulators, and the financial industry. We argue that the scope for agreement on financial services has been severely hampered by political and regulatory constraints which forced UK and EU negotiators to adopt early hawkish negotiating positions, and by the absence of a unified position from the financial industry. After the 2017 general election, the position of the UK government and UK financial industry briefly converged, thereby narrowing the domestic win‐set, but also increasing the scope for agreement. However, the July 2018 'Chequers' deal represents a hardening of the UK government's position on financial services. We argue that this reflects the fact that the twin pressures facing UK negotiators—acute political constraints at home and bargaining weakness in Brussels—has become more, not less, acute over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who do you think will win in your constituency? Most citizens correctly answer this question, and groups are even better at answering it. Combining individual forecasts results in the 'wisdom of crowds' explained by Condorcet's jury theorem. This paper demonstrates the accuracy of citizen forecasts in seven British General Elections between 1964 and 2010, and reports what citizens interviewed in February and March forecasted for the election in May 2015. 'Citizen forecasting' predicts vote shares and winners in constituency elections, and seat numbers and governments in national elections. The paper also introduces a new method for predicting vote shares from citizen forecasts. Citizen forecasts are direct, accurate, and comprehensible. Pollsters should collect them and communicate their results more often. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No established liberal democracy has achieved sex balance in its national legislature. Scholars agree skewed candidate pools put forward by parties during elections cause sex-disproportionate seat distribution, but disagree as to whether disproportionality is caused by too few women aspirant candidates coming forward (supply) or party selectors preferring men (demand). This paper uses a multistage method to explore supply and demand during the British Labour party's candidate selection process. Rare data from three elections and 4622 aspirants allow for an unobstructed look inside the secret garden of politics and reveal the party is not fully feminized insofar that women aspirants are disproportionally filtered out of its selection process and are disproportionally underrepresented in its candidate pool. Testing reveals a lack of selector demand for women aspirants has a greater impact on women's underrepresentation than an undersupply of women aspirants, a finding which supports using sex quotas to level imbalanced candidate slates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the traditional functions of party members is to campaign on behalf of their party at general elections. However, they are not the only people who volunteer for the job. In the context of the growing literature on ‘multi-speed membership’ parties, it is important to ask what non-members do for parties they support. This paper examines how different actors contributed to the electoral campaigns of six parties at the 2015 UK General Election, using survey data covering not only members of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, United Kingdom Independence, Scottish Nationalist, and Green parties, but also voters who identified themselves as being close to one of those parties but did not formally belong to them. As well as exploring how much work they do during campaigns, we ask whether the two groups choose different activities and are differently motivated. We find that, at the individual level, party members do more than non-member supporters, and that this is especially true of more intensive forms of activity. We also find that constituency context and political attitudes influence levels of activity in similar ways for members and supporters. However, we find no consistent impact from demographic factors or ideological incongruence. At the aggregate level, we estimate that the campaign work done by supporters may match or even exceed that done by party members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a study of the changing nature of the narrative contents and production formats of Party Election Broadcasts (PEBs) produced by the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democratic parties for UK general elections from 1979 to 2010. This analysis tracked production changes that might signal a movement on the part of the political parties toward using marketing-oriented techniques of the kind found in televised advertising. Although PEBs are not technically classified as advertisements by the broadcasting industry, but rather as programs, they nevertheless present an opportunity to political parties to promote themselves and their policies. Using content analysis, it was found that PEBs have grown progressively shorter from 1979 to 2010 and become faster paced. They have become more sophisticated as productions with wider use of dramatized documentary formats rather than talking heads, popular music, and professional performers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper outlines several methods for forecasting the next British general election on a daily basis from 20 months prior using opinion polls. It discusses their performance for previous electoral cycles and shows that the two models with the best historical record lead to substantially different predictions for 2015, but they can be averaged. The historical relationship between the polls and the vote suggests that government support rises substantially in the run up to elections, that Conservatives outperform but Labour underperform relative to the polls, and parties generally recover from low points or decline from high ones. Approximate prediction intervals and probabilities for key events are also generated. Despite the Conservatives trailing in the polls by 7 points in early October 2013, the models suggest a substantial Conservative lead at the 2015 election with a 64% chance of being the largest party and 42% chance of an overall majority. The estimated probability of a hung parliament (40%) is instructive for understanding the operation of the electoral system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]