Showing papers by "Colin Hay published in 2019"
TL;DR: The role of political socialization in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods as discussed by the authors, while most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action.
Abstract: The role of political socialization in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods. While most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action, we propose a unified theory based on the different socialization experiences of subsequent generations. We test this theory using a new dataset of collated waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey and by applying age–period–cohort models for repeated cross-sectional data and generalized additive models to identify generational effects. We show that generational effects underlie the participatory decline across repertoires. Consistent with our expectations, the results reveal that the generation of “Thatcher’s Children” are much less likely to engage in a range of repertoires of political action than “Wilson/Callaghan’s Children”, who came of age in the more politicized 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, and in line with our theoretical expectations, the “Blair’s Babies” generation is the least politically engaged of all. We reflect on these findings and highlight the concerning implications of falling levels of activism for advanced democracies.
38 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored how political cohorts influence the fear of crime and perceptions of antisocial behaviour using insights from generational modelling, and found that political socialization can have a distinctive and enduring impression on public perceptions of crime from childhood into middle age.
Abstract: Fear of crime occupies a substantial area of research and theorizing in criminology. Yet, it has not been examined within a longitudinal framework of political socialization. Using insights from generational modelling, we explore how political cohorts influence the fear of crime and perceptions of antisocial behaviour. This ‘age, period and cohort’ (APC) approach recognizes the distinct temporal processes of (1) individual ageing, (2) current contexts and (3) generational membership and is crucial to understanding the origins and shape of social change. We employ repeated cross-sectional data from the British Crime Survey in an APC analysis to explore how worry about crime and perceptions of antisocial behaviour were impacted by the sociopolitical environment in which respondents spent their ‘formative years’. Our results underline the theoretical significance of political socialization and the methodological consequence of longitudinal analyses when exploring public perceptions of crime. We find that political socialization can have a distinctive and enduring impression on public perceptions of crime from childhood into middle age.
35 citations
01 Jan 2019
TL;DR: In the early 1990s, it was de rigueur to argue that the challenge of competitiveness in an age of ever greater economic interdependence was likely to put pay to the institutional diversity of capitalism itself, certainly in the western world.
Abstract: In the early 1990s it was de rigueur to argue that the challenge of competitiveness in an age of ever greater economic interdependence was likely to put pay to the institutional diversity of capitalism itself, certainly in the western world. Globalisation, in other words, was an agent of convergence like no other—driving down taxation, regulation and welfare spending.
16 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the declining appeal of valence politics may reveal a phenomenon that goes beyond Brexit and Britain: a change in the nature and character of contemporary electoral competition that may explain the newly resurgent populism characteristic of Western liberal democracies.
Abstract: A factor that may account for the largely unanticipated victory of Brexit in 2016 is the difference in engagement, mobilization, and, ultimately, turnout between those for whom the question of Brexit was a valence issue (a dry and almost technical question of determining the policies by which uncontroversial shared ends can be achieved) and those for whom it was a positional issue (a question of raw, almost visceral, political preference). The declining appeal of valence politics may reveal a phenomenon that goes beyond Brexit and Britain: a change in the nature and character of contemporary electoral competition that may help to explain the newly resurgent populism characteristic of Western liberal democracies.
3 citations