Academic Publications
Elite Cues and Non-compliance
Dickson, Zachary P. and Sara B HoboltAmerican Political Science Review (2024)Media: APSA | PsyPost
As political leaders increasingly use social media to speak directly to voters, the degree to which elite cues influence public behavior is of great importance. In this paper, we study the effects of elite cues on non-compliant behavior during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on a series of controversial tweets sent by US President Donald Trump calling for the ``liberation’’ of Minnesota, Virginia and Michigan from state and local government COVID-19 restrictions. Leveraging the fact that Trump’s messages referred to three specific US states, we adopt a generalized difference-in-difference approach relying on spatial and temporal variation to identify the causal effects of the targeted cues. Our analysis finds that the President’s messages led to an increase in movement, a decrease in adherence to stay-at-home restrictions, and an increase in arrests of white Americans for crimes related to civil disobedience. These findings highlight the capacity of political elites to motivate non-compliant and even criminal behavior.
The Effects of COVID-19 Infection on Opposition to COVID-19 Policies: Evidence from the U.S. Congress
Dickson, Zachary P. and T. Murat Yildirim Political Communication (2024)Media: PsyPost
Elites’ skepticism of scientific consensus presents a formidable challenge in addressing critical issues like climate change and global pandemics. While extensive research has explored the capacity of events related to these challenges to act as “exogenous shocks,” motivating the general public to reassess their risk perceptions, our understanding of how elites similarly respond to such shocks remains limited. In this article, we investigate whether COVID-19 infections influenced US lawmakers’ support for COVID-19 containment measures, focusing on expressed opposition to COVID-19 policies on social media and in press releases throughout the first two years of the pandemic. Employing a staggered difference-in-difference design and matrix completion methods, our analysis reveals that COVID-19 infections caused a reduction of approximately 30% in legislators’ expressions of opposition to COVID-19 policies on social media. These findings underscore that elites are indeed responsive to policy shocks – even in highly polarized contexts – when they are personally affected by an issue.
The Gender Gap in Elite-Voter Responsiveness Online
Dickson, Zachary P. Perspectives on Politics (2024)
The extent to which women’s descriptive representation furthers the substantive representation of women have been demonstrated in countless contexts. Yet, we know less about how female representatives act as individuals to respond to the changing priorities of the electorate. In this article, I examine representatives’ dynamic responsiveness to public issue priorities in the United States and United Kingdom. After combining hundreds of repeated public opinion surveys asking voters about their issue priorities, I train a large language model to classify the universe of representatives’ social media messages on Twitter to the same issues. Findings of the analysis illustrate that women’s issue priorities receive less attention from representatives in aggregate in both countries, that female representatives are more responsive than their male colleagues to women’s priorities in both countries, and that a gender gap similarly exists in responsiveness to men’s issue priorities, with women leading the way in both countries. Results provide further evidence of the link between descriptive and substantive representation and suggest that women representatives may even go beyond furthering ``women’s interests’’ by displaying greater dynamic responsiveness in a broad sense.
Going against the Grain: Climate Change as a Wedge Issue for the Radical Right
Dickson, Zachary P. and Sara B Hobolt Comparative Political Studies (2024)
Political parties often mobilise issues that can improve their electoral fortunes by splitting existing coalitions. We argue that by adopting a distinctively adversarial stance, radical right-wing parties have increasingly politicised climate change policies as a wedge issue. This strategy challenges the mainstream party consensus and seeks to mobilise voter concerns over green initiatives. Relying on state-of-the-art multilingual large language models, we empirically examine nearly half a million press releases from 76 political parties across nine European democracies to support this argument. Our findings demonstrate that the radical right’s oppositional climate policy rhetoric diverges significantly from the mainstream consensus. Survey data further reveals climate policy scepticism among voters across the political spectrum, highlighting the mobilising potential of climate policies as a wedge issue. This research advances our understanding of issue competition and the politicisation of climate change.
Working Papers
Public Service Delivery and Support for the Populist Right
Dickson, Zachary P., Sara B Hobolt, Catherine E de Vries and Simone CremaschiWorking draft
Media: The Guardian
Slides: EPSA 2024
The rise of the populist right is extensively studied, yet relatively little attention has been paid to how the delivery of core public services may drive voter support for such parties. Given that public services are often the primary means through which citizens interact with the state, declining public service performance has the potential to create grievances that reduce trust in established political parties while increasing the appeal of anti-establishment populist parties. We examine this empirically in the British context, focusing on one the core aspects of public service provision in the UK – the publicly-funded National Health Service (NHS). We argue that reduced public health service performance has caused an increase support for populist right parties. Combining government administrative panel data on the closure of local health care facilities – General Practitioner (GP) practices – with fine-grained geo-spatial panel data on public preferences and voting intention from multiple sources, we apply a staggered difference-in-differences design to show support for our argument. Our findings illustrate the corrosive effects of declining public service performance, revealing decreased public satisfaction with public health care, decreased patient experiences in areas affected by GP practice closures, and increased support and feelings of closeness to populist right parties. Heterogeneous treatment effects show that immigration and increased registrations of migrants at local GP practices exacerbate the link between declining public service delivery and propensity to vote for the populist right. Our findings contribute to the literature on the rise of the populist right, demonstrating the role of public service delivery in driving support for populist parties, especially in local areas undergoing rapid demographic change.
From Exit to Reform Euroscepticism: The Evolution of Radical Right Opposition to the EU
Sara B Hobolt, Catherine E de Vries, Dickson, Zachary P. and Dirck De Kleer
Abstract
Euroscepticism has formed a core part of the platform of radical right parties for decades. Yet, we argue that the radical right has shifted its focus from leaving the EU (exit Euroscepticism) to repatriating powers to the nation (reform Euroscepticism) in recent years. In response to both shifting public opinion following Brexit and office-seeking ambitions, radical right parties have largely abandoned their policy of exiting the EU, focusing instead on sovereignty and stronger borders within the EU. Using a novel embedding regression approach to analyse party press releases as well as a qualitative case study, we demonstrate that the EU rhetoric of mainstream and populist right parties has converged in the last decade. Analysing survey data, we similarly find a convergence in EU attitudes among mainstream and radical rightwing supporters. Our findings thus suggest that the nature of Euroscepticism is dynamic, yet the challenge to the European project remains.
The Youth Gender Gap in Support for the Far Right
Đorđe Milosav, Dickson, Zachary P., Sara B Hobolt, Heike Klüver, and Toni Rodon
The 2024 European Parliament election showcased a surprising new trend. While progressive parties have traditionally done well among younger voters, it was far-right parties that enjoyed unprecedented electoral support among young voters in the 2024 EP elections. Analyzing data from the European Election Studies (EES) 2024, covering 27 countries and almost 25,000 voters, this paper shows that there is a sizable gender gap in voting for the far right. The electoral success of far-right parties among young voters is primarily driven by the support of young men, peaking at over 21% of all young men in 2024 compared to only about 14% among women of the same age cohort. Observational evidence from the EES shows that this gap can partially be explained by attitudinal differences, with young women holding more socially progressive views than young men. Age-Period-Cohort models based on EES data covering eight elections from 1989 to 2024 further reveal that this gender gap is unique to Millennials and Generation Z. Since political attitudes and voting behavior during the formative years may have a long-lasting effect on voting patterns and attitudes later in life, our findings have important implications for the future of European democracies.
A coordinated solution for a coordinated problem? A Civic Education experiment on climate change and attitudes towards the European Union
Irene Rodriguez, Toni Rodon and Dickson, Zachary P.
Climate change is a worldwide problem that requires both individual and coordinated solutions. The EU, as a supra-national institution, plays a crucial role in tackling the causes and consequences of the climate crisis. In this article, we ask whether people primed to think about the need for coordination become more likely to favour the EU and a coordinated solution to climate change. Collaborating with the “More in 24” campaign, which aims to educate young voters about the EU in an accessible, fun, and engaging way, as well as raising awareness to increase youth turnout, we conduct a randomised field experiment to causally identify the effects of political education (civic education) on high-school students’ attitudes about coordination in response to climate change. We find that the civic education lessons increased students’ perceived knowledge about the EU and helped them reflect on climate change differently, but yet the campaign was not enough to increase students’ opinion that the EU should have a greater role in fighting climate change. Our findings suggest that, while these programs may have other educational benefits besides what is studied here, if the goal is to change some fundamental, likely ingrained social and political attitudes, these programs probably need to devote more resources and time if they want to achieve their goal
Benchmarking Support for Climate Action
Dickson, Zachary P., Sara B Hobolt, Toni Rodon, Heike Kluver, and Theresa Kuhn
Climate change is one of the greatest collective action problems we face as a society. Yet, the costs associated with reducing carbon emissions to address the changing climate continues to constrain the degree to which governments and voters make necessary changes. In this project, we study the conditions that induce voters to accept higher costs for collective climate action. Specifically, we are interested in how benchmarking the relative vulnerability to climate change and the relative costs associated with climate change policies vis-à-vis other nations influence support for costly collective climate action in international organizations. Using a visual survey experiment fielded across all 27 European Union nations following the 2024 European Parliament elections, we examine the degree to which relatively vulnerability to the negative impacts of climate change and relative contribution to related costs shape voters’ support for costly climate change policies.
Inequality and Populism: How Relative Status Decline Fuels Support for the Populist Right
Dickson, Zachary P. and Sara B Hobolt Working draft
The rise of right-wing populism is a defining feature of contemporary politics. Whereas cultural arguments emphasize rapid demographic change, economic arguments instead point to labor market shocks and economic precarity. Crucial to both explanations, we argue, are feelings of relative status loss and perceived inequality that fuel resentment and support for parties and politicians who promise to protect the interests of aggrieved populations. We test this argument in the United Kingdom by examining the effects of wealth inequality—proxied by housing values—on support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP). We assemble a novel dataset that includes the universe of house price transactions since 1995, and leverage deep learning methods to estimate the dynamic value of every residential property in the nation. After using the estimates to construct a small-area geographic measure of housing inequality, we show that areas with higher levels of inequality are more likely to report voting for populist right parties in the British Election Panel Study and are more likely to vote for UKIP in local elections. We then leverage exogenous variation in housing transactions generated by a Stamp Duty Tax holiday for the top tax rate paid for new properties to estimate the causal effect of housing inequality on support for UKIP using an instrumental variables framework. Across several analyses, our results demonstrate that housing inequality has a causal effect on support for UKIP, and that the effect is moderated by feelings of relative status loss. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the appeal right-wing populism.
Energy Prices and Backlash to Climate Policies
Dickson, Zachary P. Working draft
Public opposition to policies that are intended to reduce the impact of climate change – such as carbon taxes or energy efficiency projects – are increasingly met with opposition from voters who associate these costs with government action. Yet, how do voters respond to increased energy costs when they are driven by events outside the control of the government? In this article, I study the impact of rising household energy costs on support for climate change policies. Relying on government administrative data on household energy efficiency for over 26 million UK households, I produce small-area geographic estimates of household energy costs from 2010 to 2024. After first showing that there is considerable spatial variation in household energy costs, I use survey panel data from the British Election Study and electoral data from the previous five general elections to estimate the impact of energy prices on climate change attitudes and voting behaviour. Using an instrumental variable approach and fixed effects panel regressions, I find that higher household energy costs are associated with reduced support for climate change policies. I further demonstrate that voters additionally punish the Green Party when energy costs consume a greater proportion of their household income. These results suggest that energy prices are an important factor in shaping public opinion on both climate change policies and party vote choice.
Dormant Projects
Elite Legislators and Unequal Representation in the UK Dickson, Zachary P. PDF | OSF
Studies identifying inequality in political representation in liberal democracies have become increasingly common. Yet, the extent to which this deficit is driven by the social class of elected representatives remains unclear. In this article, I study the effects of social class on legislative responsiveness in the United Kingdom by utilizing MPs’ attendance at one of the two Oxbridge universities – Oxford and Cambridge – as an encompassing proxy for social class. After combining 284 repeated public opinion surveys and classifying the universe of MPs’ questions and motions in the House of Commons from 2015-2023, I present evidence from multiple designs and estimation strategies that suggests that social class indeed constrains responsiveness. The results quantify unequal responsiveness in the United Kingdom and contribute to the literature on inequality in political representation.
Non-academic:
- So Hormonal. 2020. Monstrous Regiment Publishing. Horgan, E. and Dickson, Z.