Matthew Barnfield | British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

I’m a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.

I also create short-form video content as @drmatthewbarnfield.

Academic work

Electoral Hope

It is well established in political science that those who favour an election outcome tend to say it has a higher chance of success than those who oppose it. This tendency towards so-called ‘wishful thinking’ is often treated as a problem for democracy because it shows that voters are, as the term suggests, irrational. In this article, I make the case that partisan electoral expectations are significant not because they demonstrate widespread irrationality, but because they show how voters make sense of their role in democracies. I provide an alternative account of partisan electoral expectations as following a principle of electoral hope. On this account, partisan electoral expectations are rational in a practical, if not necessarily theoretical, sense.

Hope, Optimism, and Expectations for the Political Future

Expectations of what the future holds are a significant driver of political behavior. It is therefore important to understand the sources of those expectations. In this paper, we explore the psychological dispositions driving positivity about the political future. We draw on psychologists’ distinction between optimism—a dispositional belief that good things will happen, come what may—and hope—a trait of envisioning, pursuing and believing one’s goals to be achievable. We assess pre-registered hypotheses about the distinct influences of optimism and hope on valence expectations—beliefs about whether there will be good or bad societal outcomes—and electoral expectations—beliefs about likely election outcomes—in a representative-sample survey experiment in the United Kingdom. We find that optimism drives positive valence expectations, but hope drives partisan electoral expectations. Indeed, partisan bias in electoral expectations is exhibited only by those scoring higher in hope. We show experimentally that positive information from polls and expert commentary dampens this impact of hope by raising the expectations of the otherwise unhopeful. Our findings suggest that so-called ‘wishful thinking’ about election outcomes might stem from a sense of agency around electoral politics, but that this sense of agency does not extend to how citizens envision society’s prospects.

Misinformation in Experimental Political Science

The American Political Science Association recently cautioned against the use of misinformation(giving research participants false information about the state of the world) in research with human subjects. This recommendation signals a growing recognition, as experimental research itself grows in prevalence in political science, that deceptive practices pose ethical problems. But what is wrong with misinformation in particular? I argue that while this question certainly has an ethical dimension, misinformation is bad for inference too. Misinformation moves us away from answering questions about the political world effectively. I propose a straightforward, intuitive solution to this twofold problem: tell the truth.