Neighbourhood effects on voter choice

​Join us on Zoom for the first event of Campaign Lab's 2026 academic series. James Ackland takes us through research on neighbourhood effects from political psychology.

​When we see national election or polling data, there is a temptation to think about the individual voters in that data as a function of their easily measurable characteristics: age, gender, ethnicity, class, etc. But this risks overlooking the particular local context in which each of these real people make their political decisions.

​A small literature has tried to quantify these “neighbourhood effects” on voting, with recent advances in computational methods allowing us to reveal distinctive constituency dynamics without intimate local knowledge.

​James will take us through how we do this and how this work might help campaigners, and ask us to consider how we, as campaigners, think about the importance of local issues and neighbourhood context.

​James Ackland is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow. His PhD (University of Cambridge, 2021-25) focused on the intersection of political psychology, election polling, and geographical psychology.