Daniel Devine

The image is from the docks in Southampton at the height of lockdown 2020

I’m employed as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton. I’m also an Associate at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. I was previously a Career Development Fellow* in Politics at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford (2020-2023).

I’m interested in a wide range of questions in the fields of political sociology, public opinion, and political behaviour in a comparative perspective, particularly around how citizens relate to their state and issues of representation (specifically class). Some of the broad topics I’m currently working on are under the ‘research’ tab.

My academic work has been published in journals like Political Science Research and Methods, British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, and Political Behavior, amongst others. I am also an Associate Editor of Public Opinion Quarterly. I have worked for or advised non-academic partners such as the Institute for Government, Open Society European Policy Institute, and the OECD. I also occasionally write or talk for more public outlets, in person and online.

I come from a background where I was (and still am) the only person to go to do A-levels, go to university, or have a ‘professional’ occupation. I think this matters, and so I’m keen on sharing this and mentoring others as best I can from backgrounds under-represented in academia. I have organised (with Hannah Bunting) a mentoring scheme for the EPOP group of the UK’s Political Studies Association, and am part of the PSA’s equality, diversity, and inclusion working group. I have also worked with students as part of the access programs UNIQ and UNIQ+ and helped to expand the diversity of the undergraduate cohort at the University of Oxford through the Opportunity Oxford program.

﹡Functionally like a non-tenured Assistant Professor.

selected papers

POBE

Does Political Trust Matter? A Meta-analysis on the Consequences of Trust

Daniel Devine

Political Behaviour 2023

Abs

Political trust has long been seen as fundamental for societal cooperation and democratic legitimacy. However, evidence about its consequences are partial and fragmented, and we do not currently have a systematic understanding of whether political trust warrants such vast attention. This paper conducts a systematic re- view and meta-analysis of 61 studies reporting 329 coefficients derived from over three and a half million observations globally. After synthesising the theoretical frameworks in the extant literature, the meta-analysis results show that trust is weakly to moderately related to outcomes as diverse as voter turnout, vote choice, policy preferences and compliance, but is unrelated to informal participation. These results are robust to a range considerations such as measurement of trust, modelling strategy, region of study, publication bias, and design of the study. By systemat- ically analysing the extant research, the paper provides a robust, systematic and empirical foundation to advance research on political trust.
CUP

Trust in Crisis?

Will Jennings, Daniel Devine, Gerry Stoker, and 1 more author

Cambridge University Press Forthcoming
EJPR

Stability and Change in Political Trust: Evidence and implications from six panel studies

Daniel Devine, and Viktor Valgarðsson

European Journal of Political Research 2023

Abs

Are political attitudes a stable feature of individuals or a rational response to changing circumstances and contexts? This question has long been a feature of political science, and underpins our theories of how political attitudes are formed and what their consequences might be. In this paper, we explore this perennial question with a focus on the case of political trust, a fundamental indicator of democratic legitimacy and a long-standing topic of debate. Theoretically, we devise a framework that highlights how different theories of political trust assume different levels of stability or volatility, and the implications that this has for those theories and their normative consequences. Empirically, we study within-individual stability of political trust using six panel studies that cover five countries between 1965 and 2020. Our results consistently point to trust being stable in the long-term, with potential for short-term volatility in response to changing political contexts, and for substantial changes between people’s formative years and their adulthood. Even over a period of 19 years, most people’s responses to trust questions are remark- ably similar between surveys, and significant life events such as unemployment and going to University do not significantly influence trust. Changes in the political environment, like incumbent government turnover, have larger effects but these ap- pear to return to equilibrium in a few years. The exception to this general finding is individuals who are first surveyed when they are under the age of 18, who appear much more likely to change their trust levels in subsequent waves. Overall, our results complement previous research on attitude stability, indicating that trust is approximately as stable as other attitudes, such as towards immigration and redis- tribution. These findings have fundamental implications for our understanding of the nature of political trust and of attitude formation more broadly.
BJPS

Does Media Coverage Drive Public Support for UKIP or Does Public Support for UKIP Drive Media Coverage?

Justin Murphy, and Daniel Devine

British Journal of Political Science 2020

Abs

Previous research suggests media attention may increase support for populist right-wing parties, but extant evidence is mostly limited to proportional representation systems in which such an effect would be most likely. At the same time, in the United Kingdom’s first-past-the-post system, an ongoing political and regulatory debate revolves around whether the media give disproportionate coverage to the populist right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP). This study uses a mixed-methods research design to investigate the causal dynamics of UKIP support and media coverage as an especially valuable case. Vector autoregression, using monthly, aggregate time-series data from January 2004 to April 2017, provides new evidence consistent with a model in which media coverage drives party support, but not vice versa. The article identifies key periods in which stagnating or declining support for UKIP is followed by increases in media coverage and subsequent increases in public support. The findings show that media coverage may drive public support for right-wing populist parties in a substantively non-trivial fashion that is irreducible to previous levels of public support, even in a national institutional environment least supportive of such an effect. The findings have implications for political debates in the UK and potentially other liberal democracies.