Maria Sobolewska
Biographic Data
| ID | 78320 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maria Sobolewska |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maria |
| FAMILY NAME | Sobolewska |
| SIGNATURE | SOBOLEWSKA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9858-5091 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 507 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Theories and measurement of political values and under-represented groups: The case of women in the UK
This paper argues that the primary divide in values (Inglehart, 1977; 1990) between safety and self-expression lies in a different place for discriminated-against groups. For these groups, certain values classified as self-expression instead speak to security. This affects both theories and the measurement of the main value cleavages that are used as predictors of voting behaviour. We show this with the example of women in the UK and the commonly…
What drives welfare chauvinism in Europe
This article examines exclusionary reactions to welfare claimants based on their identity using two studies conducted in Great Britain and the Netherlands. The first employs repeated observations in a panel dataset to identify discriminatory responses to ethnic cues at the individual level. Three individual predispositions shape responses to ethnic cues in different ways. First, ethnocentric respondents respond negatively to ethnic cues. Second, …
Ethnic Minority Representation After the 2024 General Election: Does Ethnicity No Longer Matter
With a new record of ethnic minority MPs elected in 2024, Westminster is nearly fully representative of voters of ethnic minority origins. This outcome was not entirely dependent on Labour's landslide, with pre‐election analyses showing that diversity of MPs would have improved with all possible election results. The question is: does this parity in descriptive representation mean that race and ethnicity no longer matter for electoral outcomes? U…
Left out of the left behind? Ethnic minority support for Brexit
The Brexit referendum was a seismic electoral event with far-reaching consequences, but ethnic minority voters' decisions in the referendum remain under-researched. We examine what differentiates ethnic minority Remainers from Leavers in two large social surveys. Ethnic minority voters were divided along ethnocentric and generational lines, similarly to majority voters. Those who were born overseas were more likely to support Brexit; meanwhile, y…
Ethnic minority MPs as reputational shields? How Western European political parties respond to public opinion shifts on immigration policy
In recent decades, representation of ethnic minorities increased significantly across Europe, while concurrently many political parties moved to the right on multiculturalism and immigration, a seeming paradox. We explain it by arguing that often it is the same parties that move to the right and simultaneously increase representation. They use this dual strategy in an attempt to positionally converge to the median voter, where the increased minor…
Ticking Two Boxes, Fighting Two Battles: Intersectional Experiences of Ethnic Minority Women Councillors in UK Local Government
When the analytical lens of intersectionality was first applied to descriptive representation, it documented the increased level of disadvantage for those belonging to more than one underrepresented group. Although ethnic minority women have been slow to benefit from drives to boost ethnic minority or women’s representation, increasingly, political parties seeking to diversify see them as “ticking two boxes,” resulting in a new positive story of …
The End of the Ethnic Bloc Vote? Ethnic Minority Leavers After the Brexit Referendum
The 2016 referendum on UK membership in the European Union (EU) led to a realignment of voters along their referendum position (Fieldhouse et al. 2021; Sobolewska and Ford 2020). By December 2019, both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party received approximately 80% of their support from voters who had been on “their” side during the referendum (Fieldhouse et al. 2021). Brexit identities were akin to partisanship, with affective polarizatio…
Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics
Long-term social and demographic changes - and the conflicts they create - continue to transform British politics. In this accessible and authoritative book Sobolewska and Ford show how deep the roots of this polarisation and volatility run, drawing out decades of educational expansion and rising ethnic diversity as key drivers in the emergence of new divides within the British electorate over immigration, identity and diversity. They argue that …
British Culture Wars? Brexit and the Future Politics of Immigration and Ethnic Diversity
Is British society truly divided enough to warrant the claim of a US-style “culture war”? We explore two identity issues at the fore of British politics: immigration and ethnic diversity. We argue that in the post-Brexit Britain, the less often acknowledged conflicts over diversity loom just as large in the electorate as immigration, which became less salient after the referendum. We show that the British are divided by racial resentment and colo…
Political realignment of British Jews: Testing competing explanations
Explaining motivation to represent: How Does Descriptive Representation Lead to Substantive Representation of Racial and Ethnic Minorities
Empirical studies show a link between substantive and descriptive representation of racial and ethnic minorities. However, our understanding of the mechanisms through which this association operates comes almost exclusively from normative arguments. This article examines three of these proposed mechanisms: two intrinsic mechanisms operationalised as perceptions of shared experience and a motivation to represent, and an extrinsic mechanism of elec…
Explaining electoral fraud in an advanced democracy: Fraud vulnerabilities, opportunities and facilitating mechanisms in British elections
Explanatory theories of electoral fraud are usually developed for new and failing democracies. However, while rarer, electoral fraud does happen in advanced democracies. Because data on fraud in advanced democracies are scarce, single instances of fraud are studied in isolation and offer very little generalisability. This study uses a unique comparative dataset of 35 in-depth, semi-structured interviews from eight locations, only half of which ex…
Is ethnic prejudice declining inBritain?Change in social distance attitudes among ethnic majority and minorityBritons
Most literature on racial prejudice deals with the racial attitudes of the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities separately. This paper breaks this tradition. We examine the social distance attitudes of white and non-white British residents to test if these attitudes follow the same trends over time, whether they are driven by the same social processes and whether they are inter-related. We have three main findings. Firstly, social distance from …
The public view of immigrant integration: Multidimensional and consensual. Evidence from survey experiments in the UK and the Netherlands
Despite the growing interest in immigrant integration in a wide range of scholarly literature, there is less interest in how integration might be understood by the public. Using a survey-embedded conjoint experiment in the Netherlands and the UK, we ask the public what they think constitutes successful immigrant integration. We show that the public has a multidimensional view of integration, which goes beyond a simple preference for cultural assi…
Who speaks for Muslims? The role of the press in the creation and reporting of Muslim public opinion polls in the aftermath of London bombings in July 2005
Muslim public opinion polls are mostly taken at face value as the direct and unbiased voice of British Muslims, but, as this article argues, most of the public opinion polls are commissioned by the media and suffer from similar framing effects to those seen in the general media coverage of Muslims. At a time of national crisis, following the London terrorist attacks in 2005, it has become especially clear that the media have been following their …
Europe’s Contending Identities: Supranationalism, Ethnoregionalism, Religion, and New Nationalism
Understanding the effects of religious attendance on political participation among ethnic minorities of different religions
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 Islam. This study uses the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study to theorise the relationship betw…
Candidate Ethnicity and Vote Choice in Britain
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 because those with anti-immigrant feelings were less willing to vote for Muslims. Ethnic minority vot…
The Calculus of Ethnic Minority Voting in Britain
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. However, EM voters place less emphasis on ideological spatial calculations. Additionally, across all et…
The democratic engagement of Britain's ethnic minorities
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 and EMBES shows that there are important variations in patterns of democratic engagement across Britain…
The Political Integration of Ethnic Minorities in Britain
This book analyses the extent and nature of the political integration of Britain’s main ethnic-minority groups (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, black Africans, and black Caribbeans). The issues covered include political knowledge and interest, political values and policy preferences, perceptions of parties, preferences for parties, representation and what parties offer ethnic minorities, voter registration, electoral behaviour (turnout and vot…
Party Strategies and the Descriptive Representation of Ethnic Minorities: The 2010 British General Election
The 2010 election proved critical for ethnic minority representation in Britain. The number of minority Members of Parliament reached an unprecedented high. Furthermore, the virtual monopoly of the Labour party on minority parliamentary representation ended. In explaining this development, this article moves away from the traditional discussion of disadvantages facing minority candidates and turns to the role of the political parties. It argues t…
Taking Minorities for Granted? Ethnic Density, Party Campaigning and Targeting Minority Voters in 2010 British General Elections
There are many reasons why political parties can take the racial and ethnic minority voters for granted in Britain. They vote overwhelmingly and loyally for the left-wing parties, have fewer resources than white voters and they mostly live in geographical clusters giving them electoral leverage in a limited number of seats. Yet, minorities participate as much as the white population and seem to do more so in areas of ethnic concentration. Using t…
Introduction: Are British Ethnic Minorities Politically Under-represented
Obamas 2008 presidential victory in the USA triggered a debate in Europe and the UK as to whether someone from an ethnic minority could achieve similar success in national politics. The 2010 General Election saw a small increase in ethnic minority candidates, but a near doubling of the number of black and Asian members of parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons. During 2010 and 2011, the University of Manchester organised a seminar series on eth…
Pariah Politics: Understanding Western Radical Islamism and What Should be Done
The question of how to simultaneously deal with a potential threat of terrorism and not undermine the integration of British Muslims in the process is one that everyone is asking, but hardly anyone is answering. In Pariah Politics, Saggar (2008) sticks his neck out and gives a number of proposals directed at British policy-makers on how to fix the problems in the Muslim community and by extension, in his view, the problem of the terror threat. Hi…
Party Strategies and the Descriptive Representation of Ethnic Minorities: The 2010 British General Election
The 2010 election proved critical for ethnic minority representation in Britain. The number of minority Members of Parliament reached an unprecedented high. Furthermore, the virtual monopoly of the Labour party on minority parliamentary representation ended. In explaining this development, this article moves away from the traditional discussion of disadvantages facing minority candidates and turns to the role of the political parties. It argues t…
Candidate Ethnicity and Vote Choice in Britain
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 because those with anti-immigrant feelings were less willing to vote for Muslims. Ethnic minority vot…
Explaining motivation to represent: How Does Descriptive Representation Lead to Substantive Representation of Racial and Ethnic Minorities
Empirical studies show a link between substantive and descriptive representation of racial and ethnic minorities. However, our understanding of the mechanisms through which this association operates comes almost exclusively from normative arguments. This article examines three of these proposed mechanisms: two intrinsic mechanisms operationalised as perceptions of shared experience and a motivation to represent, and an extrinsic mechanism of elec…
The public view of immigrant integration: Multidimensional and consensual. Evidence from survey experiments in the UK and the Netherlands
Despite the growing interest in immigrant integration in a wide range of scholarly literature, there is less interest in how integration might be understood by the public. Using a survey-embedded conjoint experiment in the Netherlands and the UK, we ask the public what they think constitutes successful immigrant integration. We show that the public has a multidimensional view of integration, which goes beyond a simple preference for cultural assi…
Is ethnic prejudice declining inBritain?Change in social distance attitudes among ethnic majority and minorityBritons
Most literature on racial prejudice deals with the racial attitudes of the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities separately. This paper breaks this tradition. We examine the social distance attitudes of white and non-white British residents to test if these attitudes follow the same trends over time, whether they are driven by the same social processes and whether they are inter-related. We have three main findings. Firstly, social distance from …
The Calculus of Ethnic Minority Voting in Britain
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. However, EM voters place less emphasis on ideological spatial calculations. Additionally, across all et…
The democratic engagement of Britain's ethnic minorities
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 and EMBES shows that there are important variations in patterns of democratic engagement across Britain…
Understanding the effects of religious attendance on political participation among ethnic minorities of different religions
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 Islam. This study uses the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study to theorise the relationship betw…
Explaining electoral fraud in an advanced democracy: Fraud vulnerabilities, opportunities and facilitating mechanisms in British elections
Explanatory theories of electoral fraud are usually developed for new and failing democracies. However, while rarer, electoral fraud does happen in advanced democracies. Because data on fraud in advanced democracies are scarce, single instances of fraud are studied in isolation and offer very little generalisability. This study uses a unique comparative dataset of 35 in-depth, semi-structured interviews from eight locations, only half of which ex…
British Culture Wars? Brexit and the Future Politics of Immigration and Ethnic Diversity
Is British society truly divided enough to warrant the claim of a US-style “culture war”? We explore two identity issues at the fore of British politics: immigration and ethnic diversity. We argue that in the post-Brexit Britain, the less often acknowledged conflicts over diversity loom just as large in the electorate as immigration, which became less salient after the referendum. We show that the British are divided by racial resentment and colo…
Taking Minorities for Granted? Ethnic Density, Party Campaigning and Targeting Minority Voters in 2010 British General Elections
There are many reasons why political parties can take the racial and ethnic minority voters for granted in Britain. They vote overwhelmingly and loyally for the left-wing parties, have fewer resources than white voters and they mostly live in geographical clusters giving them electoral leverage in a limited number of seats. Yet, minorities participate as much as the white population and seem to do more so in areas of ethnic concentration. Using t…
Ethnic minority MPs as reputational shields? How Western European political parties respond to public opinion shifts on immigration policy
In recent decades, representation of ethnic minorities increased significantly across Europe, while concurrently many political parties moved to the right on multiculturalism and immigration, a seeming paradox. We explain it by arguing that often it is the same parties that move to the right and simultaneously increase representation. They use this dual strategy in an attempt to positionally converge to the median voter, where the increased minor…
Ticking Two Boxes, Fighting Two Battles: Intersectional Experiences of Ethnic Minority Women Councillors in UK Local Government
When the analytical lens of intersectionality was first applied to descriptive representation, it documented the increased level of disadvantage for those belonging to more than one underrepresented group. Although ethnic minority women have been slow to benefit from drives to boost ethnic minority or women’s representation, increasingly, political parties seeking to diversify see them as “ticking two boxes,” resulting in a new positive story of …
Introduction: Are British Ethnic Minorities Politically Under-represented
Obamas 2008 presidential victory in the USA triggered a debate in Europe and the UK as to whether someone from an ethnic minority could achieve similar success in national politics. The 2010 General Election saw a small increase in ethnic minority candidates, but a near doubling of the number of black and Asian members of parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons. During 2010 and 2011, the University of Manchester organised a seminar series on eth…
Political realignment of British Jews: Testing competing explanations
The End of the Ethnic Bloc Vote? Ethnic Minority Leavers After the Brexit Referendum
The 2016 referendum on UK membership in the European Union (EU) led to a realignment of voters along their referendum position (Fieldhouse et al. 2021; Sobolewska and Ford 2020). By December 2019, both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party received approximately 80% of their support from voters who had been on “their” side during the referendum (Fieldhouse et al. 2021). Brexit identities were akin to partisanship, with affective polarizatio…
What drives welfare chauvinism in Europe
This article examines exclusionary reactions to welfare claimants based on their identity using two studies conducted in Great Britain and the Netherlands. The first employs repeated observations in a panel dataset to identify discriminatory responses to ethnic cues at the individual level. Three individual predispositions shape responses to ethnic cues in different ways. First, ethnocentric respondents respond negatively to ethnic cues. Second, …
Left out of the left behind? Ethnic minority support for Brexit
The Brexit referendum was a seismic electoral event with far-reaching consequences, but ethnic minority voters' decisions in the referendum remain under-researched. We examine what differentiates ethnic minority Remainers from Leavers in two large social surveys. Ethnic minority voters were divided along ethnocentric and generational lines, similarly to majority voters. Those who were born overseas were more likely to support Brexit; meanwhile, y…
Pariah Politics: Understanding Western Radical Islamism and What Should be Done
The question of how to simultaneously deal with a potential threat of terrorism and not undermine the integration of British Muslims in the process is one that everyone is asking, but hardly anyone is answering. In Pariah Politics, Saggar (2008) sticks his neck out and gives a number of proposals directed at British policy-makers on how to fix the problems in the Muslim community and by extension, in his view, the problem of the terror threat. Hi…
Ethnic Minority Representation After the 2024 General Election: Does Ethnicity No Longer Matter
With a new record of ethnic minority MPs elected in 2024, Westminster is nearly fully representative of voters of ethnic minority origins. This outcome was not entirely dependent on Labour's landslide, with pre‐election analyses showing that diversity of MPs would have improved with all possible election results. The question is: does this parity in descriptive representation mean that race and ethnicity no longer matter for electoral outcomes? U…
Europe’s Contending Identities: Supranationalism, Ethnoregionalism, Religion, and New Nationalism
Pariah Politics: Understanding Western Radical Islamism and What Should be Done
The question of how to simultaneously deal with a potential threat of terrorism and not undermine the integration of British Muslims in the process is one that everyone is asking, but hardly anyone is answering. In Pariah Politics, Saggar (2008) sticks his neck out and gives a number of proposals directed at British policy-makers on how to fix the problems in the Muslim community and by extension, in his view, the problem of the terror threat. Hi…
The Political Integration of Ethnic Minorities in Britain
This book analyses the extent and nature of the political integration of Britain’s main ethnic-minority groups (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, black Africans, and black Caribbeans). The issues covered include political knowledge and interest, political values and policy preferences, perceptions of parties, preferences for parties, representation and what parties offer ethnic minorities, voter registration, electoral behaviour (turnout and vot…
Party Strategies and the Descriptive Representation of Ethnic Minorities: The 2010 British General Election
The 2010 election proved critical for ethnic minority representation in Britain. The number of minority Members of Parliament reached an unprecedented high. Furthermore, the virtual monopoly of the Labour party on minority parliamentary representation ended. In explaining this development, this article moves away from the traditional discussion of disadvantages facing minority candidates and turns to the role of the political parties. It argues t…
Taking Minorities for Granted? Ethnic Density, Party Campaigning and Targeting Minority Voters in 2010 British General Elections
There are many reasons why political parties can take the racial and ethnic minority voters for granted in Britain. They vote overwhelmingly and loyally for the left-wing parties, have fewer resources than white voters and they mostly live in geographical clusters giving them electoral leverage in a limited number of seats. Yet, minorities participate as much as the white population and seem to do more so in areas of ethnic concentration. Using t…
Introduction: Are British Ethnic Minorities Politically Under-represented
Obamas 2008 presidential victory in the USA triggered a debate in Europe and the UK as to whether someone from an ethnic minority could achieve similar success in national politics. The 2010 General Election saw a small increase in ethnic minority candidates, but a near doubling of the number of black and Asian members of parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons. During 2010 and 2011, the University of Manchester organised a seminar series on eth…
The Calculus of Ethnic Minority Voting in Britain
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. However, EM voters place less emphasis on ideological spatial calculations. Additionally, across all et…
The democratic engagement of Britain's ethnic minorities
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 and EMBES shows that there are important variations in patterns of democratic engagement across Britain…
Who speaks for Muslims? The role of the press in the creation and reporting of Muslim public opinion polls in the aftermath of London bombings in July 2005
Muslim public opinion polls are mostly taken at face value as the direct and unbiased voice of British Muslims, but, as this article argues, most of the public opinion polls are commissioned by the media and suffer from similar framing effects to those seen in the general media coverage of Muslims. At a time of national crisis, following the London terrorist attacks in 2005, it has become especially clear that the media have been following their …
Europe’s Contending Identities: Supranationalism, Ethnoregionalism, Religion, and New Nationalism
Understanding the effects of religious attendance on political participation among ethnic minorities of different religions
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 Islam. This study uses the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study to theorise the relationship betw…
Candidate Ethnicity and Vote Choice in Britain
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 because those with anti-immigrant feelings were less willing to vote for Muslims. Ethnic minority vot…
Explaining electoral fraud in an advanced democracy: Fraud vulnerabilities, opportunities and facilitating mechanisms in British elections
Explanatory theories of electoral fraud are usually developed for new and failing democracies. However, while rarer, electoral fraud does happen in advanced democracies. Because data on fraud in advanced democracies are scarce, single instances of fraud are studied in isolation and offer very little generalisability. This study uses a unique comparative dataset of 35 in-depth, semi-structured interviews from eight locations, only half of which ex…
Is ethnic prejudice declining inBritain?Change in social distance attitudes among ethnic majority and minorityBritons
Most literature on racial prejudice deals with the racial attitudes of the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities separately. This paper breaks this tradition. We examine the social distance attitudes of white and non-white British residents to test if these attitudes follow the same trends over time, whether they are driven by the same social processes and whether they are inter-related. We have three main findings. Firstly, social distance from …
The public view of immigrant integration: Multidimensional and consensual. Evidence from survey experiments in the UK and the Netherlands
Despite the growing interest in immigrant integration in a wide range of scholarly literature, there is less interest in how integration might be understood by the public. Using a survey-embedded conjoint experiment in the Netherlands and the UK, we ask the public what they think constitutes successful immigrant integration. We show that the public has a multidimensional view of integration, which goes beyond a simple preference for cultural assi…
Explaining motivation to represent: How Does Descriptive Representation Lead to Substantive Representation of Racial and Ethnic Minorities
Empirical studies show a link between substantive and descriptive representation of racial and ethnic minorities. However, our understanding of the mechanisms through which this association operates comes almost exclusively from normative arguments. This article examines three of these proposed mechanisms: two intrinsic mechanisms operationalised as perceptions of shared experience and a motivation to represent, and an extrinsic mechanism of elec…
British Culture Wars? Brexit and the Future Politics of Immigration and Ethnic Diversity
Is British society truly divided enough to warrant the claim of a US-style “culture war”? We explore two identity issues at the fore of British politics: immigration and ethnic diversity. We argue that in the post-Brexit Britain, the less often acknowledged conflicts over diversity loom just as large in the electorate as immigration, which became less salient after the referendum. We show that the British are divided by racial resentment and colo…
Political realignment of British Jews: Testing competing explanations
Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics
Long-term social and demographic changes - and the conflicts they create - continue to transform British politics. In this accessible and authoritative book Sobolewska and Ford show how deep the roots of this polarisation and volatility run, drawing out decades of educational expansion and rising ethnic diversity as key drivers in the emergence of new divides within the British electorate over immigration, identity and diversity. They argue that …
The End of the Ethnic Bloc Vote? Ethnic Minority Leavers After the Brexit Referendum
The 2016 referendum on UK membership in the European Union (EU) led to a realignment of voters along their referendum position (Fieldhouse et al. 2021; Sobolewska and Ford 2020). By December 2019, both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party received approximately 80% of their support from voters who had been on “their” side during the referendum (Fieldhouse et al. 2021). Brexit identities were akin to partisanship, with affective polarizatio…
Ethnic minority MPs as reputational shields? How Western European political parties respond to public opinion shifts on immigration policy
In recent decades, representation of ethnic minorities increased significantly across Europe, while concurrently many political parties moved to the right on multiculturalism and immigration, a seeming paradox. We explain it by arguing that often it is the same parties that move to the right and simultaneously increase representation. They use this dual strategy in an attempt to positionally converge to the median voter, where the increased minor…
Ticking Two Boxes, Fighting Two Battles: Intersectional Experiences of Ethnic Minority Women Councillors in UK Local Government
When the analytical lens of intersectionality was first applied to descriptive representation, it documented the increased level of disadvantage for those belonging to more than one underrepresented group. Although ethnic minority women have been slow to benefit from drives to boost ethnic minority or women’s representation, increasingly, political parties seeking to diversify see them as “ticking two boxes,” resulting in a new positive story of …
Ethnic Minority Representation After the 2024 General Election: Does Ethnicity No Longer Matter
With a new record of ethnic minority MPs elected in 2024, Westminster is nearly fully representative of voters of ethnic minority origins. This outcome was not entirely dependent on Labour's landslide, with pre‐election analyses showing that diversity of MPs would have improved with all possible election results. The question is: does this parity in descriptive representation mean that race and ethnicity no longer matter for electoral outcomes? U…
Left out of the left behind? Ethnic minority support for Brexit
The Brexit referendum was a seismic electoral event with far-reaching consequences, but ethnic minority voters' decisions in the referendum remain under-researched. We examine what differentiates ethnic minority Remainers from Leavers in two large social surveys. Ethnic minority voters were divided along ethnocentric and generational lines, similarly to majority voters. Those who were born overseas were more likely to support Brexit; meanwhile, y…
Theories and measurement of political values and under-represented groups: The case of women in the UK
This paper argues that the primary divide in values (Inglehart, 1977; 1990) between safety and self-expression lies in a different place for discriminated-against groups. For these groups, certain values classified as self-expression instead speak to security. This affects both theories and the measurement of the main value cleavages that are used as predictors of voting behaviour. We show this with the example of women in the UK and the commonly…
What drives welfare chauvinism in Europe
This article examines exclusionary reactions to welfare claimants based on their identity using two studies conducted in Great Britain and the Netherlands. The first employs repeated observations in a panel dataset to identify discriminatory responses to ethnic cues at the individual level. Three individual predispositions shape responses to ethnic cues in different ways. First, ethnocentric respondents respond negatively to ethnic cues. Second, …
Law (23 works) · Political science (23 works) · Politics (22 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Ethnic group (18 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Gender Politics and Representation (10 works)