What Is the Problem? Policy and Violence (Abuse and Harassment) towards UK MPs

• In Event: Graduate Student Research Lightning Round: Identity, Public Opinion

Abstract

This ‘Research in 5’ will present my doctoral research on policy frameworks that address violence (including abuse and harassment) towards UK MPs.

In recent years, there has been increased global attention to violence experienced by politicians in ‘stable’ contexts – from the attempted insurrections in the US and Germany to the murders of UK MPs Jo Cox and David Amess.

Beyond these still largely extreme incidents, there has been growing attention to the spectrum of violence, including abuse, harassment and intimidation, regularly experienced by politicians. Feminist scholars have expanded our understanding of violence to include sexual harassment and online abuse as harmful forms of violence which threaten democracy (e.g. Bardal; 2011; IPU 2016; NDI 2017), and that gender is an important factor when researching political violence (e.g. Bjarnegård 2018; Bardall et al 2020). A specific theory which has grown its evidence-base in recent years is that there is a specific phenomenon of Violence Against Women in Politics (VAWP) in which women are targeted for being women in the political space (e.g. Krook and Restrepo Sanín, 2016; Krook, 2020). A growing body of research demonstrates that politically active women, and particularly those of marginalised intersecting identities, experience particularly aggressive forms of violence (e.g. Herrick and Thomas 2019; Håkansson, 2020, Collignon et al, 2022). It is now established that politicians across context experience a spectrum of violence for carrying out their democratic roles and that the violence is differentiated along intersectional gendered lines.

Yet, there has been less academic attention to how the phenomenon is and can be addressed by policy. Krook (2020) includes policy, including on the part of governments and political parties, as part of the multi-faceted solutions to address violence against women in politics (VAWP). Restrepo Sanín (2021, 2022) examines legal frameworks in Latin America. Others (Collier and Raney, 2018; Raney and Collier, 2021; Julios, 2022) focus on specific policy mechanisms, such as parliamentary code of conducts.

My multi-method qualitative doctoral research aims to fill this gap with driving research questions ‘How and why has violence against MPs become a policy problem in the UK?’ and ‘How and why has gender formed part of the policy problem framing?’ The first paper uses feminist frame analysis to explore how violence towards politicians been represented as a policy problem in parliamentary debates, especially examining how gender been considered in the framing over time. The second paper examines how the specific policy framework to address violence towards politicians in the UK has developed over time, primarily undertaking a content analysis of policy documents. The third paper explores the effects of the recently developed policy framework to address violence on MPs’ experiences, using original Interviews with MPs. The final, fourth paper uses the data of the debates, policy documents and interviews to ask Why has the policy problem representation shifted over time? It uses process tracing to test if the causal mechanism of Jo Cox MP’s murder in 2016 fully explains the politicisation of the problem.

This research will be a novel contribution to the field, and I would hugely appreciate the opportunity to present in the graduate research lightning round or similar format.

Author

• Hannah Phillips, University of Oxford