Dr Zachary Greene

Project Title: Ideological Disagreement, Issue Competition and Voter Perceptions: the case of Scotland

Political parties and politicians struggle to balance the goals of diverse supporters and party members over prominent issues such as Brexit or Scottish Independence.

This project seeks to understand the ways in which party leaders and politicians balance these goals by collecting data on their expressed priorities at major party meetings such as party conferences and through a survey of voters’ perceptions of parties’ management of these issues. The project will perform a content analysis of speeches using both hand coded and computer-assisted approaches to evaluate speakers’ goals.

The results of both the content analysis and survey will offer insights into the ways that parties make decisions in the face of internal disagreements and what voters make of those disagreements on prominent issues in the United Kingdom.