Political Scientist Jane Green at Boston University (March 2024)
Public Lecture
Thursday, March 21, 2024 • 5 to 6:30 PM
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Family Matters: How Family Concerns Relate to Policy Preferences and Political Choices
Based on work with Zack Grant and Geoffrey Evans, Nuffield Politics Research Centre, Nuffield College
Where do people get their policy preferences from? We argue that one over-looked but important mechanism is people’s family ties, comprising a key ‘in-group’ through which emotional bonds and linked fates mean the financial well-being of close family members, and the risks of supporting them, form an important driver of policy preferences and political choices. This talk will illustrate relationships between the perceived financial well-being of young adults and support for more pro-young policies, as well as the expected prioritisation of spending on different age groups and away from spending on one’s own age-group, and associations with support for different political parties. Our findings also reveal a ‘care risk’ motivation for greater spending on older generations. We conclude that family concerns offer a potential bridge towards greater consensus in an era of intergenerational policy divides and challenges.
Workshop
Friday, March 22, 2024 • 12 to 1:30 PM (Lunch provided)
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Measuring Concepts: What We Learn from New Survey Questions about Concepts and Political Behavior
This workshop will invite students to think broadly about the concepts they’re interested in, whether those concepts are measured well, if they could be better measured, and how, and what new insights might be gained from better and novel measurement. It will provide examples from new questions fielded in the British Election Study since 2016, and in other surveys, the ‘hidden electorates’ we’ve discovered through this work, and why revealing these ‘hidden electorates’ is so important in informing political life.
Location: Pardee School of Global Studies, 121 Bay State Road
