Seminars and Events

The presentation will examine the use of synthetic participants—AI-generated entities designed to mimic human responses—in behavioral research. It will discuss how synthetic participants are created using attributes like personality and demographics, and highlight findings from prior studies showing their ability to replicate human responses in surveys and experiments, albeit with limitations such as cultural biases, exaggerated effects, and lack of diversity in responses. While synthetic participants show promise for piloting research and early-stage investigations, the presentation will underscores challenges in replicating qualitative insights and call for further exploration of advanced AI models to improve accuracy and representativeness in future applications.

This study analysed media discourse in Nigeria of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s first year in office. It investigates claims of media capture, the nexus of press and politics and the state of press freedom in Nigeria. It presents key results from a qualitative content analysis of media discourse of a topsy-turvy first anniversary in office following a controversial presidential election in 2023 and months of radical neo-liberal policies.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Euroscepticism as a wholesale rejection of the European Union or a rejection of aspects of European integration is common among the publics in European border regions. However, different border regions also show large differences in their electoral support for Eurosceptic parties. Is this because models of the geographical spread of Eurosceptic attitudes to date have not yet been fully specified, or are there local reasons for Euroscepticism that are not easily modelled using European election or opinion poll data? In investigating these questions, this paper speaks to the 'Agnew-King debate', in which the geographer Agnew argued that social and political processes grow out of local circumstances, whereas the political scientist King suggested treating the geographical distribution of political phenomena as 'epiphenomenal', or indicative of so-far unmodelled variation.

To flesh out the phenomenon 'Euroscepticism', this paper presents qualitative data in the shape of Eurosceptic narratives. These were drawn from three sources (regional media, interviews with candidates in the 2024 European elections and focus groups with border region residents) in four European border regions: the Franco-German, Danish-Swedish, Polish-German-Czech and Slovak-Hungarian border regions. The analysis shows that some narratives, such as the charge that the EU is overly bureaucratic, are uniform across space. However, other such narratives take on a distinctly local form, reflecting not only the special situation of border regions in Europe but also the special situation of particular border regions in Europe. In doing so, the paper suggests that Agnew's attention to local context has enduring value. 

 Prof Justin Fisher will talk about his latest research on voting behaviour: 

Rethinking strategic voting. Perceived chance of winning and strategic options in multiparty single-member plurality elections

 Edward Fieldhouse (University of Manchester) & Justin Fisher (Brunel University of London)

 Previous research on strategic voting in majoritarian systems has focussed almost exclusively on voters faced with three options. This is problematic, first because strategically minded voters may prefer candidates outside of the three leading contenders; second, they may consider voting for third (or worse) placed parties; and third, some voters might have more than one strategic option. We argue that conceptualising strategic voting in terms of strategic voters restricts our ability to accurately answer important questions about strategic voting, including the extent of strategic voting; the circumstances under which strategic choices are made; and the characteristics of candidates being strategically chosen. In this paper, we set out a new approach to strategic voting which, rather than focussing on strategic voters, identifies the strategic options available to voters. Our key contributions are (i) to introduce the concept of strategic options across multi-party contests and provide a definition to allow identification of those options; and (ii) to empirically assess the number, distribution and character of strategic options and strategic votes in four recent British general elections using data from the British Election.