Ekaterina Kolpinskaya, Ph.D.
e.kolpinskaya3@exeter.ac.uk
Lecturer
University of Exeter
Year of PhD: 2015
Address: University Of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive
City: Exeter, England - EX4 4RJ
Country: United Kingdom
About Me:
I have joined the University of Exeter as Lecturer in British Politics following my earlier tenures at Swansea University and the University of Exeter. I was awarded a PhD in Politics by the University of Nottingham in 2015, as well as a Candidate in World History degree from Tomsk State University (Russia). My research interests include political participation and representation of ethnic and religious minorities and women in Britain. In particular, I explore how identity-based predictors (i.e. religion, ethnicity, gender) shape parliamentary behaviours and public behaviours and attitudes using quantitative and mixed methods methodologies. Most recently, I have been examining how religion affects Euroscepticism in Britain and the intergenerational analysis of religion and social capital in the UK, as well as conducting a study of inspirational persons (heroes and role models) in Britain. I currently hold a Parliamentary Academic Fellowship examining how to make parliamentary working environments more inclusive for disabled politicians and parliamentary staff, in colaboration with the Centre of Excellence for Procedural Practice of the UK Parliament.
Research Interests
Religion & Politics
Race, Ethnicity and Politics
Representation and Electoral Systems
Legislative Politics
Political Parties and Interest Groups
Research Methods & Research Design
Religion & Politics
Religion And Euroscepticism
Substantive Political Representation
Symbolic Political Representation
Heroes
Political Accountability
Ethnicity And Politics
Role Models
Countries of Interest
United Kingdom
My Research:
My research interests include political participation and representation of under-represented groups such as women, ethnic and religious minorities in Western democracies, especially in Britain. The influence of religion and ethnicity of political behaviour and attitudes, including Euroscepticism, civic engagement and voting. I predominantly use quantitative and mixed methods to analyse survey and text data, though I have been involved in research using experiments. I currently hold a Parliamentary Academic Fellowship examining how to make parliamentary working environments more inclusive for disabled politicians and parliamentary staff in colaboration with the Centre of Excellence for Procedural Practice of the UK Parliament. Over the past few years, I have been researching the effects of religious affiliation on Eurosceptic attitudes and on social capital in Britain with the WISERD team at Cardiff University, and conducted studies of symbolic representation in Britain through the lens of heroes and role models with Dr Laszlo Horvath (Birkbeck) and Dr Nataliya Danilova (Aberdeen). I have also been collaborating with the colleagues from Exeter (part of the ESRC-funded 'Media in Context' project) on a research focusing on electoral mandates, and how the perceived magnitude of an electoral victory shape expectations of government performance - and media effects in British elections in general.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Intergenerational inequalities in economic security, health and political participation are frequently associated with inequalities in access to social capital. Millennials (those born after 1982) are often regarded as the least civically active generation, suggesting that they have less access to social capital, compared to other generations. Numerous studies have linked the decline of religion with falling social capital, as younger generations are deprived of a valuable source of social interaction; others, however, have claimed the link between the two is spurious because Millennials have developed different ways of interacting with social institutions and each other. Despite various studies exploring links between forms of religious and social capital, the role of religious decline in contributing to the intergenerational inequalities of today remains unclear. This study examines how religious capital is related to social capital for Baby Boomers and Millennials in the UK. Our analysis shows that while lower levels of religious capital are contributing to lower levels of social capital among Millennials, religious activity is also a more effective source of social capital for Millennials than their elders. We discuss possible interpretations of our data, including exploring whether greater religious engagement among Millennials may protect against intergenerational inequality and conflict.
Elections are the main instrument through which voters can exercise influence over public policy. However, the relationship between electoral outcomes and government policy performance is under-researched. In particular, little is known about the effect that the perceived narrowness of electoral victories has on expectations about incumbents’ policy behaviour. Drawing on the literature on electoral mandates and framing theory, we examine how the way in which election results are portrayed by the media affects citizens’ confidence that winners will enact their policy programmes, using the 2015 UK election as a case study. Based on a survey experiment conducted after the race, we find that victories depicted as narrow increased scepticism about the incoming government’s ability to deliver on its promises, contradicting normative theories of electoral competition. Instead, and consistent with mandate interpretations, subjects – especially less political knowledgeable ones – became more likely to trust in the government’s ability to fulfil its campaign pledges when the Conservative victory was presented as decisive. Besides shedding light on the link between the framing of election results and expectations about government performance, our results have potentially relevant implications for understanding how such expectations may affect actual policy-making and the enforcement of accountability.
This article examines how religious affiliation shapes support for European Union membership. While previous research has shown that Protestants are typically more Eurosceptic than Catholics, little is known about the nature of this relationship: specifically, whether religion affects one's utilitarian assessments of the costs and benefits of membership, or one's affective attachment to the EU. Using the 2016 British Election Study Referendum Panel, this article shows that religious affiliation influences both sets of attitudes, suggesting that the values and shared history associated with one's religion shapes how a voter perceives the performance of the EU in delivering its policy objectives, and its operation as a legitimate institution. Moreover, some findings from previous research are challenged: Protestants are not as unified in their scepticism of the EU as is widely assumed, and the positive relationship between Catholicism and support for EU integration is not apparent in the UK.
In modern day Britain, the discourse of national heroification is routinely utilised by politicians, educationalists and cultural industry professionals, whilst also being a popular concept to describe deserving ‘do-gooders’ who contribute to British society in a myriad of ways. We argue that although this heroification discourse is enacted as a discursive device of encouraging politically and morally desirable behaviour, it is dissociated from the largely under-explored facets of contemporary popular heroism. To compensate for this gap, this paper explores public preferences for heroes using survey data representative of British adults. This analysis demonstrates a conceptual stretching in the understanding of heroism, and allows identifying age- and gender-linked dynamics which effect public choices of heroes. In particular, we demonstrate that age above all determines the preference for having a hero, but does not explain preferences for specific hero-types. The focus on gender illustrates that the landscape of popular heroism reproduces a male-dominated bias which exists in the wider political and cultural heroification discourse. Simultaneously, our study shows that if national heroification discourse in Britain remains male-centric, the landscape of popular heroism is characterised by a gendered trend towards privatisation of heroes being particularly prominent amongst women. In the conclusion, this paper argues for a conceptual revision and re-gendering of the national heroification discourse as a step towards both empirically grounded, and age- and gender-sensitive politics of heroes and heroines.
The substantive representation of minority groups in national legislatures is a topic of significant normative, theoretical and empirical importance. Addressing this question, this article focuses on what drives Members of the UK House of Commons to raise issues on concern for Jewish and Muslim minority groups in relatively low-cost parliamentary activity, i.e. Parliamentary Questions for written answers (WPQs). Drawing on the suggested positive relationship between descriptive and substantive minority representation (e.g. Hansard (2009), Speaker's Conference (on Parliamentary Representation): Final Report, London, The Stationery Office Limited), it uses content and statistical analysis to examine if having a Jewish or Muslim background impacts on the frequency and the probability of MPs’ engagement with minority issues, and how this effect compares to that from institutional predictors, namely the party parliamentary status and the minority presence in a constituency. The findings demonstrate that a religious minority background has a limited impact on MPs’ engagement with minority issues in WPQs, being inferior to that of institutional predictors. Being in Opposition, in particular, has a consistent, positive influence on the content of WPQs, whereby Opposition MPs table more WPQs on the issues of minority concern than Members from the party of Government.
The article addresses one facet of the representation puzzle, namely substantive minority representation in the UK House of Commons. It examines whether a religious Jewish and Muslim minority background stimulates politicians from these backgrounds to address issues of concern for Jewish and Muslim minority groups in Early Day Motions (EDMs), and compares the effects from identity-based and institutional predictors. The study draws upon previous studies that used low-cost parliamentary activities to assess the impact of gender and ethnic minority identities on the representation of women and ethnic minorities, employing quantitative content analysis and time-series cross-sectional data analysis to examine the content of EDMs sponsored by members of parliament from Jewish and Muslim background (plus a control group) between 1997 and 2012. The analyses test for the effects of religious background and institutional predictors on the likelihood of referring to minority issues. They show that identity-based predictors such as a religious background are vastly inferior to institutional factors, including a legislative role, representing a constituency with a significant proportion of minority population, and the length of parliamentary service, in determining such references.
Books Written:
Religion has a significant effect on how Europeans feel about the European Union (EU) and has had an important impact on how people voted in the UK’s ‘Brexit referendum’. This book provides a clear and accessible quantitative study of how religion affects Euroscepticism and political behaviour. It examines how religion has affected support for EU membership since the UK joined the European Economic Community, through to the announcement of the Brexit referendum in 2013, to the referendum itself in 2016. It also explores how religion continues to affect attitudes towards the EU post-Brexit. The volume provides valuable insights into why the UK voted to leave the EU. Furthermore, it highlights how religion affects the way that citizens throughout Europe assess the benefits, costs and values associated with EU membership, and how this may influence public opinion regarding European integration in the future. This timely book will be of interest to academics and students focusing on religion and public attitudes, contemporary European and British politics as well as think tanks, interest groups and those with an interest in understanding Brexit.
Book Chapters:
Thirty years ago research trying to establish relationships between media exposure, political attitudes and behavior was described as, “one of the most notable embarrassments of modern social science” (1993, 267). Much has changed since then, both in terms of the media landscape and the way in which individuals engage with news. While these changes, including the rise of 24-hour news channels, web 2.0 and social media, have complicated “media exposure”, they also offer opportunities to gauge exposure in different, and potentially less error-prone, ways. In this chapter, we consider the promise of web-tracking (or clickstream) methods, in which the websites that participants visit are unobtrusively monitored using software. We outline what these methods entail and, using examples from our own research during the 2016 EU referendum and 2017 general election in the United Kingdom, consider their strengths and weaknesses for media effects research, including the new ethical challenges they present.
The chapter discusses the performance of Members of Parliament with a Muslim background in the UK House of Commons in 1997-2012.
Media Appearances:
Radio Appearances:
Role of religion in the Conservative leadership contest
By-Election Special with Hamish Marshall
Dimensions of religion, religious and social capital in Britain: Intergenerational analysis
BBC Radio 4 and BBC Devon Any Question Special with Sarah Gosling and Chris Mason
Did religion influence the way people voted in the EU Referendum in 2016?
The 2019 UK General Election live coverage as the results unfold on 12-13 December 2019.
A piece of research on the effect of religion on the Brexit vote by Dr Katerina Kolpinskaya and Dr Stuart Fox featured on BBC Radio 4's PM programme, 22/02/2018.
Blog Posts:
Greater religious engagement among Millennials may protect against intergenerational inequality and conflict
Brexit may have been made in England, but Scotland and Wales are not that different
Britain’s changing religious vote: why Catholics are leaving Labour and Conservatives are hoovering up Christian support
How Religion Contributed to Brexit?
To Brussels via Rome: how Eurosceptical are British Christians?
Religion is irrelevant to how likely MPs are to represent minority groups’ interests