How Do Citizens Think About the Future? The Nature, Origins and Role of Expectations in Political Life

公民如何看待未来？

• 批准号: ES/X007367/1
• 负责人: Matthew Barnfield
• 金额: $ 12.66万
• 依托单位: University of Essex
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FX007367%2F1
• 关键词: How; Do; Citizens; Think; About

Speaking at the 2020 Democratic Convention, then presidential hopeful Joe Biden described the upcoming election as `a life-changing election that will determine America's future for a very long time'. In representative democracies, citizens are regularly confronted with such moments of choice, tasked with understanding the potential future paths that politics could take and then choosing which road to go down. The obvious question this raises is one that political psychology has yet to answer: how do people think about the political future? This question matters because the future guides what we do right now, in the present, in our personal as well as our political lives. My long-term goal is to become an internationally recognised authority in political psychology by tackling this question. I have begun to establish a research track record in this area in my ESRC-funded PhD research and in my postdoctoral research at the University of Exeter. The next step is to consolidate my early progress and initiate a broader, even more impactful programme of research. The purpose of the SeNSS Postdoctoral Fellowship, then, is twofold. First, the fellowship will be an invaluable resource in enabling me to develop my proposed programme of work and prepare grant applications for a project on the political psychology of the future. The goal is to give political scientists a whole new way to understand how people think about the future and how these expectations affect politics - to generate a new, interdisciplinary model of the nature, origins, and effects of beliefs about the political future. Exploring the implications of this model will involve introducing new methods to political science, drawing on innovations made in other fields. To support this agenda, I will produce competitive bids for major early career awards such as the ESRC New Investigator grant. Second, I will use the fellowship to produce immediate impacts, firmly establishing my credentials to lead a large-scale project of this kind. My PhD examiners noted that my doctoral research could be published in prestigious journals if supplemented with minimal additional analyses. In my postdoctoral work, I have also conducted substantial data collection for collaborative projects. The fellowship will allow me both to prepare my own solo-authored papers for submission to journals - including collecting some additional data - and to continue submitting collaborative work with my Exeter colleagues. Concretely, I envisage publishing two independent peer-reviewed journal articles and a minimum of three collaborative articles during the fellowship. To maximise the impact potential of these contributions, I will seek out opportunities for dissemination and knowledge exchange. As well as attending academic conferences, this will involve pitching articles to outlets such as The Conversation. My mentors and I will collaborate with the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex and the Democracy and Elections Centre at Royal Holloway University of London to organise a public panel event, with speakers including academics, industry stakeholders, and politicians, on a topic that is central to my research. My emphasis on such knowledge exchange serves my long-term goals of encouraging people to engage more critically with how they make their political decisions, informing political strategy, and fostering responsible reporting of opinion polls by research firms and journalists. Finally, I will pursue an ongoing programme of training. Alongside courses in quantitative and computational methods, attending writing workshops and holding regular writing feedback sessions with my mentor will support my goals of successfully communicating my research to wider audiences and of preparing competitive grant bids.

在2020年民主党全国代表大会上，当时的总统候选人乔·拜登将即将到来的选举描述为“一场改变生活的选举，将在很长一段时间内决定美国的未来”。在代议制民主国家，公民经常面临这样的选择时刻，任务是了解政治未来可能走的道路，然后选择走哪条路。这引发了一个政治心理学尚未回答的明显问题：人们如何看待政治未来？这个问题很重要，因为未来指导着我们现在、现在、个人和政治生活中所做的事情。我的长期目标是通过解决这个问题，成为国际公认的政治心理学权威。在我的ESRC资助的博士研究和我在埃克塞特大学的博士后研究中，我已经开始在这一领域建立起研究记录。下一步是巩固我早期的进展，并启动一个更广泛、更有影响力的研究计划。因此，SENSS博士后奖学金的目的有两个。首先，研究金将是一个宝贵的资源，使我能够制定我拟议的工作方案，并为一个关于未来政治心理的项目准备赠款申请。其目标是给政治学家一种全新的方式来理解人们如何看待未来以及这些期望如何影响政治--产生一种关于关于政治未来的信念的性质、起源和影响的新的跨学科模型。探索这一模式的影响将涉及将新方法引入政治学，借鉴其他领域的创新。为了支持这一议程，我将对主要的早期职业奖项进行竞争性投标，例如ESRC新调查员奖励金。其次，我将利用奖学金产生立竿见影的效果，坚定地确立我领导这类大型项目的资历。我的博士考官指出，如果补充最少的额外分析，我的博士研究可以在著名的期刊上发表。在我的博士后工作中，我还为合作项目进行了大量的数据收集。这笔奖学金将使我既可以准备自己单独撰写的论文提交给期刊-包括收集一些额外的数据-也可以继续提交与我的埃克塞特同事的合作工作。具体地说，我设想在研究金期间发表两篇独立的同行评议的期刊文章和至少三篇合作文章。为了最大限度地发挥这些贡献的影响潜力，我将寻找传播和知识交流的机会。除了参加学术会议，这还包括向《对话》等媒体推介文章。我和我的导师将与埃塞克斯大学社会经济研究所和伦敦皇家霍洛威大学民主与选举中心合作，组织一次公开小组活动，发言者包括学者、行业利益相关者和政界人士，讨论一个对我的研究至关重要的主题。我强调这种知识交流符合我的长期目标，即鼓励人们更多地批判性地参与他们做出政治决策的方式，为政治战略提供信息，并促进研究公司和记者对民意调查的负责任报道。最后，我将继续进行一项持续的培训计划。除了定量和计算方法的课程，参加写作研讨会和定期与导师举行写作反馈会议将支持我的目标，即成功地将我的研究成果传达给更广泛的受众，并准备有竞争力的拨款申请。

项目成果

Momentum in the polls raises electoral expectations

• DOI: 10.1016/j.electstud.2023.102656
• 发表时间: 2023-07-27
• 期刊: ELECTORAL STUDIES
• 影响因子: 2.3
• 作者: Barnfield，Matthew