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Christopher Prosser

Biographic Data

ID1046563
NAMEChristopher Prosser
GIVEN NAMESChristopher
FAMILY NAMEProsser
SIGNATUREPROSSER C
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Manchester
ORCID0000-0002-2992-8190
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS25
TOTAL CITATIONS288
AUTHOR COUNT25
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2014
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX10
  • The rise and fall of class voting in Britain, 1885–2024

    Open Access•Oliver Heath, Humphrey Southall et al.•ARTICLE•Political Studies•2026

    Understanding when and why social cleavages shape electoral behaviour is a central concern in the study of democratic politics. While many accounts emphasise the long-term social changes, others point to the role of party strategy. We contribute to this debate by analysing the political evolution of one of the central cleavages of the twentieth century—class—in one of the world’s longest-standing democracies—Britain. Analysing a unique new datase…

  • Fragmentation revisited: The UK General Election of 2024

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2025•Cited by: 10•References: 8

    The UK General Election of 4 May 2024 produced a Labour landslide and the worst ever result for the Conservatives. The transfer of seats between the two parties belies a more complicated picture in terms of votes, which resulted in the most fragmented party system in British history. Reform UK, the Greens and Plaid Cymru all saw their highest ever general election vote shares and seats. The Liberal Democrats won their largest ever number of seats…

  • The Brexit realignment amid electoral volatility: The role of party blocs in the 2024 General Election

    Open Access•James D Griffith, Stuart Perrett et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2025•References: 40

    Brexit accelerated the long-term realignment of how demographic groups vote in Britain. However, Europe is no longer salient to voters, support for the pro-Brexit Conservatives has collapsed, and the 2024 UK General Election was the most volatile on record. So, did the Brexit realignment persist? We address this question by examining the relationship between Brexit preferences and demographic groups with vote choice. We find that the demographic …

  • Who lacks voter identification? The electoral implications of the Elections Act 2022

    Open Access•Edward Fieldhouse, R Scott et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2025•Cited by: 3•References: 17

    The Elections Act 2022 requires voters to present photo identification at general elections in Great Britain and local elections in England. In this article, we use data from the British Election Study Internet Panel to identify who does and does not own the necessary photo documents and how this affected turnout in the 2023 and 2024 local elections, as well as the 2024 General Election. We find that around 5% of the voting-age population lack va…

  • Effectively scaling assessment efforts in the evaluation of environmental risks of offshore produced water discharges using a tiered approach

    Open Access•Mathijs G D Smit, Kirit Wadhia et al.•ARTICLE•Environmental Impact Assessment…•2024•Cited by: 1•References: 53

    For offshore oil and gas production facilities, overboard disposal of treated produced water (PW) remains a principal waste management option, and regulatory frameworks have been established to manage these discharges. Risk-based assessment (RBA) of PW, which aims to quantify potential impacts on the environment, has been adopted in some regulatory systems, but is also applied by oil and gas operators as part of their risk management systems. In …

  • Regularized Regression Can Reintroduce Backdoor Confounding: The Case of Mass Polarization

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•American Political Science Review•2024•References: 5

    Regularization can improve statistical estimates made with highly correlated data. However, any regularization procedure embeds assumptions about the data generating process that can have counterintuitive consequences when those assumptions are untenable. We show that rather than simply shrinking estimates, regularization can reopen backdoor causal paths, inflating the estimates of some effects, and in the wrong circumstances, even reversing thei…

  • The 2024 General Election and the Rise of Reform UK

    Open Access•Oliver Heath, Christopher Prosser et al.•ARTICLE•The Political Quarterly•2024•Cited by: 8

    This article examines the social base of support for Reform UK. Did Nigel Farage's new party depend on the same types of ‘left behind’ voters who had previously backed UKIP? Do the results of the 2024 election suggest a hardening of the social divides that underpinned the rise of UKIP? Or has Britain's Eurosceptic and anti‐immigration movement broadened its social appeal, making these lines of conflict between different social groups less distinc…

  • Which Promises Actually Matter? Election Pledge Centrality and Promissory Representation

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser et al.•ARTICLE•Political Studies•2023•Cited by: 8•References: 48

    Parties make hundreds of campaign promises but not all are seen by voters as central to a party’s offering. Studies of government promise fulfillment accept that not all promises are equivalent but in practice treat all promises equally because they lack an appropriate means of measuring promise centrality. To demonstrate the importance of accounting for pledge fulfillment, we develop a conjoint experiment method to measure public opinion about p…

  • Volatility, Realignment, and Electoral Shocks: Brexit and the UK General Election of 2019

    Open Access•Edward Fieldhouse, G Evans et al.•ARTICLE•PS Political Science & Politics•2023•Cited by: 5•References: 25

    The 2019 UK General Election had seismic consequences for British politics. After three years of political turmoil following the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU), the 2019 election marked a victory for the Leave side of the Brexit debate, putting to rest questions of a second referendum and any chance of Parliament blocking the Withdrawal Bill. The United Kingdom left the EU on January 31, 2020. Although there we…

  • The end of the EU affair: The UK general election of 2019

    Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2021•Cited by: 26•References: 8

    The UK election of 12th December 2019 – the third election in five years and the second snap election in a row – returned a Conservative majority government led by Boris Johnson and the lowest number of Labour MPs since 1935. Three-and-a-half years after the 2016 referendum, the government finally had sufficient parliamentary support for Brexit, and at the end of January 2020 the UK left the European Union. The result of the election can largely …

  • How Do Coronavirus Attitudes Fit into Britain’s Ideological Landscape

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Jack Bailey et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2021•Cited by: 7•References: 21

    Coronavirus upended British politics in 2020 but where does it fit into the ideological map of party competition? Recent British elections have seen a shift from economic left–right competition between the major parties to competition on the cultural (liberal–authoritarian) dimension, most notably in terms of the issues of immigration and membership of the European Union. Using British Election Study data from June 2020, we find that coronavirus …

  • Correlation with Time Explains the Relationship between Survey Nonresponse and Mass Polarization

    Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2020•Cited by: 4•References: 13

    While elite polarization in US politics has been well established, there has been substantial debate about whether US mass opinion has polarized in recent decades. Amnon Cavari and Guy Freedman suggest the apparent polarization of the US public may in part be an artifact of declining survey response rates. Cavari and Freedman argue that declining response rates may have led to only the most politicized—and therefore polarized—respondents being wi…

  • Tremors but no Youthquake: Measuring changes in the age and turnout gradients at the 2015 and 2017 British general elections

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser, Edward Fieldhouse et al.•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2020•Cited by: 8•References: 13

    In the aftermath of the 2017 UK General Election, some claimed that Labour performed unexpectedly well because of a surge in youth turnout. Polling estimates for the size of this ‘youthquake’ ranged from 12 to 21 points amongst 18–24 year olds. Using conventional and Bayesian statistical methods, we analyse British Election Study and British Social Attitudes random probability surveys and find no evidence of a shift in the relationship between ag…

  • The Twilight of the Polls? A Review of Trends in Polling Accuracy and the Causes of Polling Misses

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser, Jonathan Mellon•ARTICLE•Government and Opposition•2018

    Polls have had a number of high-profile misses in recent elections. We review the current polling environment, the performance of polls in a historical context, the mechanisms of polling error, and the causes of several recent misses in Britain and the US. Contrary to conventional wisdom, polling errors have been constant over time, although the level of error has always been substantially beyond that implied by stated margins of error. Generally…

  • The strange death of multi-party Britain: The UK General Election of 2017

    Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2018•Cited by: 20•References: 10

    The UK General Election of 8 June 2017 was one of the most dramatic and unexpected in recent British history. The election was called early and came just a year after the 2016 referendum on Britain

  • Brexit or Corbyn? Campaign and Inter-Election Vote Switching in the 2017 UK General Election

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Geoffrey M Evans et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2018•Cited by: 31•References: 17

    The 2017 UK General Election saw the collapse of UKIP and an unusually influential campaign that saw Labour improving from a likely historic defeat to almost pulling level with the Conservatives, denying Theresa May a parliamentary majority. We argue that the election should be understood in two phases: first from 2015 to the start of the election campaign, and second the campaign itself. The former period was characterised by strong switching al…

  • The limits of partisan loyalty: How the Scottish independence referendum cost Labour

    Open Access•Edward Fieldhouse, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2018•Cited by: 18•References: 28

  • Twitter and Facebook are not representative of the general population: Political attitudes and demographics of British social media users

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Research & Politics•2017•Cited by: 52•References: 8

    A growing social science literature has used Twitter and Facebook to study political and social phenomena including for election forecasting and tracking political conversations. This research note uses a nationally representative probability sample of the British population to examine how Twitter and Facebook users differ from the general population in terms of demographics, political attitudes and political behaviour. We find that Twitter and F…

  • Missing Nonvoters and Misweighted Samples

    Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Public Opinion Quarterly•2017•Cited by: 25•References: 30

    Preelection polls for the 2015 UK General Election missed the final result by a considerable margin: underestimating the Conservative Party and overestimating Labour. Analyzing evidence for five theories of why the polls missed using British Election Study (BES) data, we find limited evidence for systematic vote intention misreporting, late swing, systematically different preferences among “don’t knows,” or differential turnout of parties’ suppor…

  • Dimensionality, ideology and party positions towards European integration

    Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2016•Cited by: 14•References: 45

    The rise of political contestation over European integration has led many scholars to examine the role that broader ideological positions play in structuring party attitudes towards European integration. This article extends the existing approaches in two important ways. First, it shows that whether the dimensionality of politics is imagined in a one-dimensional ‘general left‒right’ form or a two-dimensional ‘economic left‒right/social liberal-co…

  • Calling European Union Treaty Referendums: Electoral and Institutional Politics

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Political Studies•2016•Cited by: 10•References: 30

    Many European integration treaties – most notably the failed Constitutional Treaty – have faced ratification by referendum in various member states. Although the literature on voting behaviour in these referendums in now well established, the reasons why these referendums were held in the first place is under-scrutinised. This article examines the reasons EU member states decide to call referendums in order to ratify EU treaties and argues that t…

  • Second order electoral rules and national party systems: The Duvergerian effects of European Parliament elections

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•European Union Politics•2016•Cited by: 6•References: 32

    The effects of electoral rules on party systems have been well known since Duverger first proposed his famous law. Often considered ‘second order’ in terms of issues and voting behaviour, many European Parliament elections are held under different electoral rules to national elections. This article examines the consequences of these differences and hypothesizes that where a more permissive electoral system is used for European Parliament election…

  • Party system fragmentation and single-party government: The British general election of 2015

    Jane Green, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2016•Cited by: 17•References: 21

    The 2015 British general election returned a majority Conservative government after five years of coalition government – the first coalition government in Britain since 1945.1 The result defied exp

  • Do local elections predict the outcome of the next general election? Forecasting British general elections from local election national vote share estimates

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2016•Cited by: 6•References: 7

  • Building policy scales from manifesto data: A referential content validity approach

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2014•Cited by: 9•References: 28

  • Twitter and Facebook are not representative of the general population: Political attitudes and demographics of British social media users

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Research & Politics•2017•Cited by: 52•References: 8

    A growing social science literature has used Twitter and Facebook to study political and social phenomena including for election forecasting and tracking political conversations. This research note uses a nationally representative probability sample of the British population to examine how Twitter and Facebook users differ from the general population in terms of demographics, political attitudes and political behaviour. We find that Twitter and F…

  • Brexit or Corbyn? Campaign and Inter-Election Vote Switching in the 2017 UK General Election

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Geoffrey M Evans et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2018•Cited by: 31•References: 17

    The 2017 UK General Election saw the collapse of UKIP and an unusually influential campaign that saw Labour improving from a likely historic defeat to almost pulling level with the Conservatives, denying Theresa May a parliamentary majority. We argue that the election should be understood in two phases: first from 2015 to the start of the election campaign, and second the campaign itself. The former period was characterised by strong switching al…

  • The end of the EU affair: The UK general election of 2019

    Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2021•Cited by: 26•References: 8

    The UK election of 12th December 2019 – the third election in five years and the second snap election in a row – returned a Conservative majority government led by Boris Johnson and the lowest number of Labour MPs since 1935. Three-and-a-half years after the 2016 referendum, the government finally had sufficient parliamentary support for Brexit, and at the end of January 2020 the UK left the European Union. The result of the election can largely …

  • Missing Nonvoters and Misweighted Samples

    Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Public Opinion Quarterly•2017•Cited by: 25•References: 30

    Preelection polls for the 2015 UK General Election missed the final result by a considerable margin: underestimating the Conservative Party and overestimating Labour. Analyzing evidence for five theories of why the polls missed using British Election Study (BES) data, we find limited evidence for systematic vote intention misreporting, late swing, systematically different preferences among “don’t knows,” or differential turnout of parties’ suppor…

  • The strange death of multi-party Britain: The UK General Election of 2017

    Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2018•Cited by: 20•References: 10

    The UK General Election of 8 June 2017 was one of the most dramatic and unexpected in recent British history. The election was called early and came just a year after the 2016 referendum on Britain

  • The limits of partisan loyalty: How the Scottish independence referendum cost Labour

    Open Access•Edward Fieldhouse, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2018•Cited by: 18•References: 28

  • Party system fragmentation and single-party government: The British general election of 2015

    Jane Green, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2016•Cited by: 17•References: 21

    The 2015 British general election returned a majority Conservative government after five years of coalition government – the first coalition government in Britain since 1945.1 The result defied exp

  • Dimensionality, ideology and party positions towards European integration

    Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2016•Cited by: 14•References: 45

    The rise of political contestation over European integration has led many scholars to examine the role that broader ideological positions play in structuring party attitudes towards European integration. This article extends the existing approaches in two important ways. First, it shows that whether the dimensionality of politics is imagined in a one-dimensional ‘general left‒right’ form or a two-dimensional ‘economic left‒right/social liberal-co…

  • Fragmentation revisited: The UK General Election of 2024

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2025•Cited by: 10•References: 8

    The UK General Election of 4 May 2024 produced a Labour landslide and the worst ever result for the Conservatives. The transfer of seats between the two parties belies a more complicated picture in terms of votes, which resulted in the most fragmented party system in British history. Reform UK, the Greens and Plaid Cymru all saw their highest ever general election vote shares and seats. The Liberal Democrats won their largest ever number of seats…

  • Calling European Union Treaty Referendums: Electoral and Institutional Politics

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Political Studies•2016•Cited by: 10•References: 30

    Many European integration treaties – most notably the failed Constitutional Treaty – have faced ratification by referendum in various member states. Although the literature on voting behaviour in these referendums in now well established, the reasons why these referendums were held in the first place is under-scrutinised. This article examines the reasons EU member states decide to call referendums in order to ratify EU treaties and argues that t…

  • Building policy scales from manifesto data: A referential content validity approach

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2014•Cited by: 9•References: 28

  • The 2024 General Election and the Rise of Reform UK

    Open Access•Oliver Heath, Christopher Prosser et al.•ARTICLE•The Political Quarterly•2024•Cited by: 8

    This article examines the social base of support for Reform UK. Did Nigel Farage's new party depend on the same types of ‘left behind’ voters who had previously backed UKIP? Do the results of the 2024 election suggest a hardening of the social divides that underpinned the rise of UKIP? Or has Britain's Eurosceptic and anti‐immigration movement broadened its social appeal, making these lines of conflict between different social groups less distinc…

  • Which Promises Actually Matter? Election Pledge Centrality and Promissory Representation

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser et al.•ARTICLE•Political Studies•2023•Cited by: 8•References: 48

    Parties make hundreds of campaign promises but not all are seen by voters as central to a party’s offering. Studies of government promise fulfillment accept that not all promises are equivalent but in practice treat all promises equally because they lack an appropriate means of measuring promise centrality. To demonstrate the importance of accounting for pledge fulfillment, we develop a conjoint experiment method to measure public opinion about p…

  • Tremors but no Youthquake: Measuring changes in the age and turnout gradients at the 2015 and 2017 British general elections

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser, Edward Fieldhouse et al.•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2020•Cited by: 8•References: 13

    In the aftermath of the 2017 UK General Election, some claimed that Labour performed unexpectedly well because of a surge in youth turnout. Polling estimates for the size of this ‘youthquake’ ranged from 12 to 21 points amongst 18–24 year olds. Using conventional and Bayesian statistical methods, we analyse British Election Study and British Social Attitudes random probability surveys and find no evidence of a shift in the relationship between ag…

  • How Do Coronavirus Attitudes Fit into Britain’s Ideological Landscape

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Jack Bailey et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2021•Cited by: 7•References: 21

    Coronavirus upended British politics in 2020 but where does it fit into the ideological map of party competition? Recent British elections have seen a shift from economic left–right competition between the major parties to competition on the cultural (liberal–authoritarian) dimension, most notably in terms of the issues of immigration and membership of the European Union. Using British Election Study data from June 2020, we find that coronavirus …

  • Second order electoral rules and national party systems: The Duvergerian effects of European Parliament elections

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•European Union Politics•2016•Cited by: 6•References: 32

    The effects of electoral rules on party systems have been well known since Duverger first proposed his famous law. Often considered ‘second order’ in terms of issues and voting behaviour, many European Parliament elections are held under different electoral rules to national elections. This article examines the consequences of these differences and hypothesizes that where a more permissive electoral system is used for European Parliament election…

  • Do local elections predict the outcome of the next general election? Forecasting British general elections from local election national vote share estimates

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2016•Cited by: 6•References: 7

  • Volatility, Realignment, and Electoral Shocks: Brexit and the UK General Election of 2019

    Open Access•Edward Fieldhouse, G Evans et al.•ARTICLE•PS Political Science & Politics•2023•Cited by: 5•References: 25

    The 2019 UK General Election had seismic consequences for British politics. After three years of political turmoil following the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU), the 2019 election marked a victory for the Leave side of the Brexit debate, putting to rest questions of a second referendum and any chance of Parliament blocking the Withdrawal Bill. The United Kingdom left the EU on January 31, 2020. Although there we…

  • Correlation with Time Explains the Relationship between Survey Nonresponse and Mass Polarization

    Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2020•Cited by: 4•References: 13

    While elite polarization in US politics has been well established, there has been substantial debate about whether US mass opinion has polarized in recent decades. Amnon Cavari and Guy Freedman suggest the apparent polarization of the US public may in part be an artifact of declining survey response rates. Cavari and Freedman argue that declining response rates may have led to only the most politicized—and therefore polarized—respondents being wi…

  • Who lacks voter identification? The electoral implications of the Elections Act 2022

    Open Access•Edward Fieldhouse, R Scott et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2025•Cited by: 3•References: 17

    The Elections Act 2022 requires voters to present photo identification at general elections in Great Britain and local elections in England. In this article, we use data from the British Election Study Internet Panel to identify who does and does not own the necessary photo documents and how this affected turnout in the 2023 and 2024 local elections, as well as the 2024 General Election. We find that around 5% of the voting-age population lack va…

  • Effectively scaling assessment efforts in the evaluation of environmental risks of offshore produced water discharges using a tiered approach

    Open Access•Mathijs G D Smit, Kirit Wadhia et al.•ARTICLE•Environmental Impact Assessment…•2024•Cited by: 1•References: 53

    For offshore oil and gas production facilities, overboard disposal of treated produced water (PW) remains a principal waste management option, and regulatory frameworks have been established to manage these discharges. Risk-based assessment (RBA) of PW, which aims to quantify potential impacts on the environment, has been adopted in some regulatory systems, but is also applied by oil and gas operators as part of their risk management systems. In …

  • Building policy scales from manifesto data: A referential content validity approach

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2014•Cited by: 9•References: 28

  • Dimensionality, ideology and party positions towards European integration

    Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2016•Cited by: 14•References: 45

    The rise of political contestation over European integration has led many scholars to examine the role that broader ideological positions play in structuring party attitudes towards European integration. This article extends the existing approaches in two important ways. First, it shows that whether the dimensionality of politics is imagined in a one-dimensional ‘general left‒right’ form or a two-dimensional ‘economic left‒right/social liberal-co…

  • Calling European Union Treaty Referendums: Electoral and Institutional Politics

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Political Studies•2016•Cited by: 10•References: 30

    Many European integration treaties – most notably the failed Constitutional Treaty – have faced ratification by referendum in various member states. Although the literature on voting behaviour in these referendums in now well established, the reasons why these referendums were held in the first place is under-scrutinised. This article examines the reasons EU member states decide to call referendums in order to ratify EU treaties and argues that t…

  • Second order electoral rules and national party systems: The Duvergerian effects of European Parliament elections

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•European Union Politics•2016•Cited by: 6•References: 32

    The effects of electoral rules on party systems have been well known since Duverger first proposed his famous law. Often considered ‘second order’ in terms of issues and voting behaviour, many European Parliament elections are held under different electoral rules to national elections. This article examines the consequences of these differences and hypothesizes that where a more permissive electoral system is used for European Parliament election…

  • Party system fragmentation and single-party government: The British general election of 2015

    Jane Green, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2016•Cited by: 17•References: 21

    The 2015 British general election returned a majority Conservative government after five years of coalition government – the first coalition government in Britain since 1945.1 The result defied exp

  • Do local elections predict the outcome of the next general election? Forecasting British general elections from local election national vote share estimates

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2016•Cited by: 6•References: 7

  • Twitter and Facebook are not representative of the general population: Political attitudes and demographics of British social media users

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Research & Politics•2017•Cited by: 52•References: 8

    A growing social science literature has used Twitter and Facebook to study political and social phenomena including for election forecasting and tracking political conversations. This research note uses a nationally representative probability sample of the British population to examine how Twitter and Facebook users differ from the general population in terms of demographics, political attitudes and political behaviour. We find that Twitter and F…

  • Missing Nonvoters and Misweighted Samples

    Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Public Opinion Quarterly•2017•Cited by: 25•References: 30

    Preelection polls for the 2015 UK General Election missed the final result by a considerable margin: underestimating the Conservative Party and overestimating Labour. Analyzing evidence for five theories of why the polls missed using British Election Study (BES) data, we find limited evidence for systematic vote intention misreporting, late swing, systematically different preferences among “don’t knows,” or differential turnout of parties’ suppor…

  • The Twilight of the Polls? A Review of Trends in Polling Accuracy and the Causes of Polling Misses

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser, Jonathan Mellon•ARTICLE•Government and Opposition•2018

    Polls have had a number of high-profile misses in recent elections. We review the current polling environment, the performance of polls in a historical context, the mechanisms of polling error, and the causes of several recent misses in Britain and the US. Contrary to conventional wisdom, polling errors have been constant over time, although the level of error has always been substantially beyond that implied by stated margins of error. Generally…

  • The strange death of multi-party Britain: The UK General Election of 2017

    Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2018•Cited by: 20•References: 10

    The UK General Election of 8 June 2017 was one of the most dramatic and unexpected in recent British history. The election was called early and came just a year after the 2016 referendum on Britain

  • Brexit or Corbyn? Campaign and Inter-Election Vote Switching in the 2017 UK General Election

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Geoffrey M Evans et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2018•Cited by: 31•References: 17

    The 2017 UK General Election saw the collapse of UKIP and an unusually influential campaign that saw Labour improving from a likely historic defeat to almost pulling level with the Conservatives, denying Theresa May a parliamentary majority. We argue that the election should be understood in two phases: first from 2015 to the start of the election campaign, and second the campaign itself. The former period was characterised by strong switching al…

  • The limits of partisan loyalty: How the Scottish independence referendum cost Labour

    Open Access•Edward Fieldhouse, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2018•Cited by: 18•References: 28

  • Correlation with Time Explains the Relationship between Survey Nonresponse and Mass Polarization

    Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2020•Cited by: 4•References: 13

    While elite polarization in US politics has been well established, there has been substantial debate about whether US mass opinion has polarized in recent decades. Amnon Cavari and Guy Freedman suggest the apparent polarization of the US public may in part be an artifact of declining survey response rates. Cavari and Freedman argue that declining response rates may have led to only the most politicized—and therefore polarized—respondents being wi…

  • Tremors but no Youthquake: Measuring changes in the age and turnout gradients at the 2015 and 2017 British general elections

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser, Edward Fieldhouse et al.•ARTICLE•Electoral Studies•2020•Cited by: 8•References: 13

    In the aftermath of the 2017 UK General Election, some claimed that Labour performed unexpectedly well because of a surge in youth turnout. Polling estimates for the size of this ‘youthquake’ ranged from 12 to 21 points amongst 18–24 year olds. Using conventional and Bayesian statistical methods, we analyse British Election Study and British Social Attitudes random probability surveys and find no evidence of a shift in the relationship between ag…

  • The end of the EU affair: The UK general election of 2019

    Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2021•Cited by: 26•References: 8

    The UK election of 12th December 2019 – the third election in five years and the second snap election in a row – returned a Conservative majority government led by Boris Johnson and the lowest number of Labour MPs since 1935. Three-and-a-half years after the 2016 referendum, the government finally had sufficient parliamentary support for Brexit, and at the end of January 2020 the UK left the European Union. The result of the election can largely …

  • How Do Coronavirus Attitudes Fit into Britain’s Ideological Landscape

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Jack Bailey et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2021•Cited by: 7•References: 21

    Coronavirus upended British politics in 2020 but where does it fit into the ideological map of party competition? Recent British elections have seen a shift from economic left–right competition between the major parties to competition on the cultural (liberal–authoritarian) dimension, most notably in terms of the issues of immigration and membership of the European Union. Using British Election Study data from June 2020, we find that coronavirus …

  • Which Promises Actually Matter? Election Pledge Centrality and Promissory Representation

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser et al.•ARTICLE•Political Studies•2023•Cited by: 8•References: 48

    Parties make hundreds of campaign promises but not all are seen by voters as central to a party’s offering. Studies of government promise fulfillment accept that not all promises are equivalent but in practice treat all promises equally because they lack an appropriate means of measuring promise centrality. To demonstrate the importance of accounting for pledge fulfillment, we develop a conjoint experiment method to measure public opinion about p…

  • Volatility, Realignment, and Electoral Shocks: Brexit and the UK General Election of 2019

    Open Access•Edward Fieldhouse, G Evans et al.•ARTICLE•PS Political Science & Politics•2023•Cited by: 5•References: 25

    The 2019 UK General Election had seismic consequences for British politics. After three years of political turmoil following the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU), the 2019 election marked a victory for the Leave side of the Brexit debate, putting to rest questions of a second referendum and any chance of Parliament blocking the Withdrawal Bill. The United Kingdom left the EU on January 31, 2020. Although there we…

  • Effectively scaling assessment efforts in the evaluation of environmental risks of offshore produced water discharges using a tiered approach

    Open Access•Mathijs G D Smit, Kirit Wadhia et al.•ARTICLE•Environmental Impact Assessment…•2024•Cited by: 1•References: 53

    For offshore oil and gas production facilities, overboard disposal of treated produced water (PW) remains a principal waste management option, and regulatory frameworks have been established to manage these discharges. Risk-based assessment (RBA) of PW, which aims to quantify potential impacts on the environment, has been adopted in some regulatory systems, but is also applied by oil and gas operators as part of their risk management systems. In …

  • Regularized Regression Can Reintroduce Backdoor Confounding: The Case of Mass Polarization

    Open Access•Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•American Political Science Review•2024•References: 5

    Regularization can improve statistical estimates made with highly correlated data. However, any regularization procedure embeds assumptions about the data generating process that can have counterintuitive consequences when those assumptions are untenable. We show that rather than simply shrinking estimates, regularization can reopen backdoor causal paths, inflating the estimates of some effects, and in the wrong circumstances, even reversing thei…

  • The 2024 General Election and the Rise of Reform UK

    Open Access•Oliver Heath, Christopher Prosser et al.•ARTICLE•The Political Quarterly•2024•Cited by: 8

    This article examines the social base of support for Reform UK. Did Nigel Farage's new party depend on the same types of ‘left behind’ voters who had previously backed UKIP? Do the results of the 2024 election suggest a hardening of the social divides that underpinned the rise of UKIP? Or has Britain's Eurosceptic and anti‐immigration movement broadened its social appeal, making these lines of conflict between different social groups less distinc…

  • Fragmentation revisited: The UK General Election of 2024

    Open Access•Christopher Prosser•ARTICLE•West European Politics•2025•Cited by: 10•References: 8

    The UK General Election of 4 May 2024 produced a Labour landslide and the worst ever result for the Conservatives. The transfer of seats between the two parties belies a more complicated picture in terms of votes, which resulted in the most fragmented party system in British history. Reform UK, the Greens and Plaid Cymru all saw their highest ever general election vote shares and seats. The Liberal Democrats won their largest ever number of seats…

  • The Brexit realignment amid electoral volatility: The role of party blocs in the 2024 General Election

    Open Access•James D Griffith, Stuart Perrett et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2025•References: 40

    Brexit accelerated the long-term realignment of how demographic groups vote in Britain. However, Europe is no longer salient to voters, support for the pro-Brexit Conservatives has collapsed, and the 2024 UK General Election was the most volatile on record. So, did the Brexit realignment persist? We address this question by examining the relationship between Brexit preferences and demographic groups with vote choice. We find that the demographic …

  • Who lacks voter identification? The electoral implications of the Elections Act 2022

    Open Access•Edward Fieldhouse, R Scott et al.•ARTICLE•Parliamentary Affairs•2025•Cited by: 3•References: 17

    The Elections Act 2022 requires voters to present photo identification at general elections in Great Britain and local elections in England. In this article, we use data from the British Election Study Internet Panel to identify who does and does not own the necessary photo documents and how this affected turnout in the 2023 and 2024 local elections, as well as the 2024 General Election. We find that around 5% of the voting-age population lack va…

  • The rise and fall of class voting in Britain, 1885–2024

    Open Access•Oliver Heath, Humphrey Southall et al.•ARTICLE•Political Studies•2026

    Understanding when and why social cleavages shape electoral behaviour is a central concern in the study of democratic politics. While many accounts emphasise the long-term social changes, others point to the role of party strategy. We contribute to this debate by analysing the political evolution of one of the central cleavages of the twentieth century—class—in one of the world’s longest-standing democracies—Britain. Analysing a unique new datase…

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