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

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“一场改变人生的选举，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，他们的任务是了解政治可能采取的未来道路，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，因为未来指引着我们现在、现在、个人生活和政治生活的行动。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esrc资助的博士研究和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研究记录。下一步是巩固我早期的进展，启动一个更广泛、更有影响力的研究项目。因此，SeNSS博士后奖学金的目的是双重的。首先，奖学金将是一个宝贵的资源，使我能够制定我拟议的工作计划，并为一个关于未来政治心理学的项目准备拨款申请。我们的目标是为政治科学家提供一种全新的方式来理解人们如何思考未来以及这些期望如何影响政治——产生一个关于政治未来信念的性质、起源和影响的新的跨学科模型。探索这一模式的含义将涉及到引入政治科学的新方法，并借鉴其他领域的创新。为了支持这一议程，我将为主要的早期职业奖（如ESRC新研究者奖）提供竞争性投标。其次，我将利用奖学金产生立竿见影的效果，为我领导这样一个大型项目奠定坚实的基础。我的博士审查员指出，如果我的博士研究补充了最少的额外分析，就可以在著名期刊上发表。在我的博士后工作中，我也为合作项目进行了大量的数据收集。这项奖学金将使我既可以准备自己的个人论文，提交给期刊——包括收集一些额外的数据——也可以继续与埃克塞特大学的同事们合作提交论文。具体来说，我设想在奖学金期间发表两篇独立的同行评审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，我将寻找机会进行传播和知识交流。除了参加学术会议，这还包括向The Conversation等媒体投稿。我的导师和我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，组织一次公众小组活动，演讲者包括学者、行业利益相关者和政治家，讨论我研究的核心主题。我对这种知识交流的强调有助于实现我的长期目标，即鼓励人们更批判性地参与他们如何做出政治决策，为政治战略提供信息，并促进研究公司和记者对民意调查进行负责任的报道。最后，我将继续进行培训。除了定量和计算方法的课程外，参加写作研讨会和与导师定期举行写作反馈会议，将有助于我成功地将我的研究成果传达给更广泛的受众，并为竞争性拨款投标做准备。

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.