Researcher

Chris Butler

Research Expertise:Dr Butler is an expert in the behaviour of political elites, particularly their perceptions of, and responses to public opinion. His doctoral thesis investigated the extent to which UK governments ‘rationally’ respond to public opinion. This involved a mixture of quantitative analysis into whether their governing agendas responded to their supporters’ preferences and qualitative investigation into three cases where governments defied public opinion. His main finding was that governments’ responses to public opinion are not rational, and indeed are affected by cognitive biases such as motivated reasoning and the use of heuristics. Dr Butler has also undertaken research into how political elites conceive of and respond to levels of political trust, how the UK polling industry responded to the failure of polling companies to accurately predict the 2015 general election results, and how UK political elites evaluate the impact of think tanks. Further, Dr Butler is interested in how political parties respond to information gathered by their privately commissioned public opinion research. He is in the process of establishing an ECPR research network on this subject with colleagues from across Europe.

Keywords:POLITICAL ELITES, PUBLIC OPINION, POLITICAL DECISION-MAKING, REPRESENTATION, Political and social sciences

Disciplines:Comparative politics, Party politics, Political representation, executive and legislative politics

Research techniques:Dr Butler has considerable experience of elite interviewing and analysing qualitative data to understand how political elites evaluate public opinion. Additionally, Dr. Butler has expertise in using quantitative methods. He has compiled and analysed data on UK political elites, and used statistical analysis to test how government policies respond to findings from opinion polls, and to understand motivations of selectorates.