This case study reviews a social movement course that centered on a 10-week simulation of a contemporary contentious event in Washington, DC, involving six movement organizations and four police agencies. To our knowledge, it is the first classroom simulation of a Trump-era police–protester contentious episode or of any political science simulation that places an episode of insurrection in the contemporary United States. Three goals animated this project: (1) promote learning concerning extra-institutional political conflict in the American case; (2) combine scholarship and role playing to explore the dynamic interaction of movement, countermovement, and enforcement organizations; and (3) teach the complex relationship between social science theory and political practice in an engaging way. Students used theoretical frameworks drawn from the literature to assess and develop protest capacity and repertoires for their assigned organization and chose strategic goals and tactical means to attempt to generate political leverage. Student organizations made concurrent “moves” and instructors iteratively developed the contentious episode. This article discusses the results of students’ evaluations of the simulation. In addition to extensive online appendices, it provides a detailed explanation and design for instructors who are considering a similar approach.

Although ethnographic methods have yielded important insights into the inner workings of many political institutions, their use in the study of institutions engaged in national security policy making and practice has been more limited. Common features of security institutions raise methodological and ethical concerns for participant observers: they are hard to access, handle classified information, and their proximity to the use of violence creates challenges for researchers who adopt critical perspectives toward the framing and practice of national security. This article reflects on how critical ethnographers might respond to these challenges, drawing on experiences from a 14-month ethnographically influenced study of UK government departments involved in national security policy making. I argue that even though questions of informed consent and avoiding harm are complicated by the core functions of security institutions and their cultures of busyness and secrecy, navigating these tensions can itself generate useful ethnographic insights into institutional cultures.

The decision by a narrow majority of British voters to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016 was a political earthquake that few had seen coming. It produced new political divisions, not only between the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe but also within the United Kingdom. In particular, the referendum campaign and the outcome generated two new political identities: “Leavers” and “Remainers.” These Brexit identities crosscut partisan identities and voters formed deep emotional attachments to them (Curtice 2018; Evans and Schaffner 2019). Moreover, this Brexit divide led to affective polarization in the form of out-group animosity and discrimination (Hobolt, Leeper, and Tilley 2021). It also shaped perceptions of the economy (Sorace and Hobolt 2021), attitudes toward immigration (Pickup et al. 2021), vote choices (Hobolt and Rodon 2020), and losers’ consent (Schaffner 2021; Tilley and Hobolt 2023a). Brexit identities have been shown to be salient and politically consequential. Yet, we know much less about whether these new identities are rooted in policy norms that go beyond preferences about the desirability of leaving the EU. In this article, we thus explore the nature of Brexit identities and how they relate to policy norms.

In post-Brexit and post-devolution Britain, relationships among the four nations appear fragile. This article aims to discover where British citizens draw the symbolic boundaries that define in-group and out-group members between nations—in particular, England, Scotland, and Wales—and within England. Within England, we also examine class divides and the North–South divide. We operationalize symbolic boundaries through a set of new innovative measures administered in an online survey in 2019. Questions ascertain agreement that the various groups “share my values,” are “people I could get on with,” and are “straightforward and honest.” Results of our descriptive analysis suggest that boundaries are blurred between the British and the Welsh but sharper for the Scottish. We also find sharp but asymmetrical boundaries within England, between the working class and the middle class, and between Northerners and Southerners. Regional differences in perceptions of Southerners map closely onto those of how well Westminster looks after regional interests, which suggests that power imbalances reduce social cohesion.

How can scholars conduct field research when there is limited access to the field? This article first identifies how limited and uncertain field access can affect field research and then provides recommendations to address these challenges. We focus on conducting field research in Japan because of our substantive expertise, but we believe that the problems and solutions outlined in this article are applicable to a broad range of countries. Our hope is that this article contributes to the developing literature on conducting research during times of emergency and to the larger literature on best practices for field research.

Rhetoric surrounding the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on continued European Union (EU) membership frequently has invoked the “will of the people.” Addressing the House of Commons in March 2019, then–Prime Minster Theresa May stated that “my sense of responsibility and duty has meant that I have kept working to ensure that we deliver on the result and the will of the people” (March 27, 2019).1 May’s successor, Boris Johnson, appealed to the same notion when suggesting in the Daily Telegraph (September 15, 2019) that opposition parties were “united in wanting to cancel the referendum result…and overturn the will of the people.” On the other side of the debate, Caroline Lucas (currently the sole Member of Parliament for the UK’s Green Party) stated that “[e]very recent opinion poll shows that the will of the people has changed since [the referendum]” (December 4, 2018).

The 2016 referendum on UK membership in the European Union (EU) led to a realignment of voters along their referendum position (Fieldhouse et al. 2021; Sobolewska and Ford 2020). By December 2019, both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party received approximately 80% of their support from voters who had been on “their” side during the referendum (Fieldhouse et al. 2021). Brexit identities were akin to partisanship, with affective polarization and perceptual screening (Sobolewska and Ford 2020; Sorace and Hobolt 2021). Research also traces the Brexit vote to a growing values divide (Evans and Menon 2017), with ethnocentric attitudes found on opposing sides of the referendum (Sobolewska and Ford 2020). The views of ethnic minority voters, as traditional victims of white ethnocentrism, have been seen largely in this debate as the same as the identity of liberal Remainers. However, despite the assumption that minorities naturally would fall on the side opposing white ethnocentrism, the referendum marked the biggest departure from the traditional ethnic minorities bloc vote since 2005, when a substantial minority of Muslim voters deserted Labour over the Iraq War (Curtice, Fisher, and Steed 2005). The Leave side in the 2016 referendum received approximately one third of the votes of ethnic minorities (Martin, Sobolewska, and Begum 2020), despite Leave also drawing a majority of its support from “UKIP-curious” voters (Evans and Mellon 2019) who had voted for or considered supporting the anti-immigrant radical-right United Kingdom Independence Party.

A pessimistic view of the potential of deliberative mini-publics to effectively contribute to democratic decision making on highly contested issues in deeply divided places asserts that (1) deliberative quality would be low due to the bitterness prompted by discussion of divisive issues, and (2) levels of opinion change would be low given the stubbornly enduring nature of political attitudes in divided places. We empirically examined this pessimistic view using a quasi-experiment involving mini-publics on two separate issues in Northern Ireland: (1) the contentious ethno-national question of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status, and (2) the much less contested and non-ethno-national issue of social care. Contrary to the pessimistic view, we find evidence that from the perspective of the participants themselves, deliberative quality was higher in the mini-public on an ethno-national issue. However, in line with the pessimistic view, levels of self-reported opinion change were significantly lower in the ethno-national mini-public. Overall, the findings highlight the potential for carefully designed deliberative mini-publics to address divisive ethno-national issues: they provide a space for participants to engage with such issues in open and respectful discussion—even if the prospects for attitudinal change are more limited.

This article introduces a “methods lab” approach to teaching undergraduates about different types of research in political science. In this approach, students are given explicit instruction on what a specific research method entails and the opportunity to practice it before conducting their own research. Methods labs can help students craft more creative research designs as well as understand the strengths and potential pitfalls associated with each method, making the subsequent process of writing a research paper or thesis easier. We provide two sample methods labs focused on conducting archival research and developing survey and interview questions. We discuss our experiences in implementing the labs in a thesis course, describe how the modular lab approach could fit into multiple types of courses, and offer suggestions for those interested in developing labs for other types of research methods.

Do people’s political beliefs alter the emphasis they place on different symbols when constructing their “personal” national identity (Cohen 1996)? Does the content of their national identity affect how they vote? These are the central questions we address in this article, focusing on England but using the United States as a comparative case to demonstrate common dynamics.