The United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union (EU) marked a watershed moment in the country’s history. Members of the Centre are carrying out research on the causes and potential consequences of Brexit.

Chris Hanretty has developedmethodologies for measuring public support for Brexit in different parliamentary constituencies and how this has changed since the referendum.

Oliver Heath co-authored a report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on why people voted for Brexit, examining the social and cultural divides that the vote revealed. James Sloam has been examining young people’s attitudes towards Brexit, and Giacomo Benedetto has been examining the policy challenges that Brexit presents, both to the UK and the EU. 

More widely, the Centre also has expertise in recent national elections and campaigns. In addition to his work on UK elections, Chris also has expertise in Italian politics. Nick Allen has written widely on British elections; Oliver has examined voting behaviour in India, Venezuela, Georgia, and Italy; James has worked on German elections, and Sofia and Cassie have expertise in Latin America.

Members of the Centre have also been carrying out extensive research on why people vote in the first place, and why some groups more likely to vote than others. Kaat Smets carried out a meta-analysis reviewing the results of a decade of research on the determinants of individual level turnout, which appeared in Electoral Studies .

Oliver has examined the sources of turnout decline in Britain, and the rise of working class abstention, published in the British Journal of Political Science. And Kaat and James have examined why young people have withdrawn from the political process, and what – if anything – can be done to increase their electoral participation, from civic education classes at school to electoral reform and votes at 16. The Youth Politics Unit provides a hub for much of this research.

Politics, and politicians, are widely held in low esteem by members of the public. Nick Allen has recently completed an ESRC funded project on how members of the public view the conduct of their elected representatives, and published a book on the topic with Cambridge University Press.

Kaat Smets has been working on a series of articles about the development of political interest over the lifespan, and has evaluated the extent to which civic education classes at school can foster political engagement in later life, published in Political Behavior. Kaat has also carried out empirical work researching the effects of deliberation on political attitudes.

Kaat and Nick also organised a deliberative event for young people on the future of the British constitution, which took place at Royal Holloway. They involved a group of third-year PIR students in this project, and collectively wrote up the findings which were published in Youth Voice Journal (2015).

Sofia Collginonis part of the team behind the ESRC funded Representative Audit of Britain project and Parliamentary Candidates UK. She has a particular interest in the study of candidates, elections and parties, and the harassment and intimidation of candidates.

Chris Hanretty has written on the link between what constituents think and what their representatives in Parliament do. As part of this area, he has developed methodologies for estimating public opinion in small areas

Nick Allen and Giacomo Benedetto have written on the conduct and behaviour of political elites. In a series of articles Nick has examined the difference between public attitudes and the attitudes of political elites towards political conduct and misconduct, published in outlets such as European Journal of Political Research and Political Studies.

Nick has also written about aspects of elite conduct during election campaigns. He has analysed the leaders' words in the 2010 and 2015 and 2017 televised debates, and he has written several articles that examine the content of party manifestos. He is currently developing a project on the fulfillment of manifesto pledges and the extent to which political parties keep their promises.

Members of the Centre have written widely on issues of political representation, and the ways in which the social characteristics of parties and politicians shape the behaviour of voters. Oliver Heath has examined the impact of candidate gender on voters in Britain, published in Politics & Gender; and the impact of candidate religion on voters in India, published in Electoral Studies. He has also examined the decline of working class MPs in Britain, and how this has affected both voting behaviour and turnout among the British working class. Kaat Smets has written on the costs that political candidates in the United Kingdom pay based on their racial or ethnic minority status, published in Parliamentary Affairs.

Members of the Centre have carried out research in a number of policy areas. Giacomo Benedetto has published research on the European Union's Budget and the constitutional politics of the EU and co-edited a book on the 'Reform of the European Union Budget'. He is currently conducting research on the reform of the sources of revenue in the European Union Budget.

Ursula Hackett's British Academy-funded book ‘Vouchers and the State’, provides the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of the politics of vouchers in education, housing and health in America. Vouchers offer individuals public money to pay for private services, replacing or augmenting directly-funded social provision. These rapidly expanding programmes are transforming the state by delegating responsibility for core policy functions to private actors: shifting risk, attenuating chains of accountability and energising organised interests.

Cassilde Schwartz works on migration, tax compliance, and non-electoral political behavior -- with much of this work challenging the notion that individuals obey the rules and expectations that political actors put in place for them. Her work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Comparative Political Studies, and the British Journal of Political Science.