Jon Schubert
@jonschu.bsky.social
590 followers 238 following 301 posts
Political & urban anthropology: infrastructures, extractives authoritarianism and climate crisis, esp. in #Angola and #Mozambique; find me @allegralab.bsky.social and at critical urbanisms @unibas D/F/E/P
![The timing of this highly salient event during ongoing fieldwork for the British Election Study (Fieldhouse et al., 2025) enables us to leverage an ‘unexpected event during survey design’ (UESD) identification strategy (Munoz et al.,2020) to identify the causal effects of exposure to Labour’s
rhetorical shift. By exploiting both the as-good-as-random variation in survey timing and a panel data framework, we estimate within-individual
changes in immigration attitudes, party perceptions, and vote intentions attributable to treatment. **Our identification strategy thus offers a rare combination of internal and external validity: exogenous assignment to a real-world treatment in a large-N survey.** [yeah baby]
Our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we show that Starmer’s speech caused a sharp increase in the salience of immigration, evidenced by increased media reporting as well as spikes in internet search activity and online political discussion. Second, we demonstrate that exposure to the speech caused voters to update their perceptions of
the UK Labour Party, identifying the social democratic party as more anti-immigration and right-leaning. This re-evaluation of the party’s position, however, coincided with more negative assessments of the party’s handling of the issue alongside a spike in the overall assessment of immigration as the most important issue of the day. Rather than neutralising the issue, Labour’s accommodation made it more salient. Finally, we demonstrate that Labour’s shift right-ward on immigration provided zero electoral rewards. Instead, we find robust evidence that treatment induced within-individual declines in Labour support across several measures. On average, treatment decreased voting intentions for Labour by 1.2 percentage-points (p<0.05) and resulted in a
3.9 percentage-point (p<0.05) haemorrhage in support from Labour’s
own former voters without attracting any new supporters.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:wdpjj5tlztbjxcematya2o5p/bafkreid2fssnxwbgsvh3zlzsmldxzqih64byadyzxfumeopbrs563yfuwa)