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Defence date: 28 May 2018 Examining Board: Professor Pepper Culpepper, formerly EUI / University of Oxford (Supervisor) ; Professor Philipp Genschel, European University Institute ; Professor Mark Mizruchi, University of Michigan ; Dr. Stefano Pagliari, City University of London This is a theses on political preference formation, which refers to the ways in which actors learn to prefer one political option over another. In political science, these actors are usually private citizens, in their role as voters, and it is easy to see that voting behavior will continue to dominate the research on political preferences. After the referendum that saw a majority of Britons in favor of leaving the EU and the American election of 2016, which brought Donald J. Trump to the White House, people now call for political scientists to spend the next few years trying to figure out how this could have possibly happened.1 It is a safe bet that political science journals will be filled to the brim with articles on the topic and that many, many hours in university classrooms will be devoted to discussions of Trumpism, authoritarianism, anti-immigrant sentiments, white backlash, et cetera. As important as this is, the road that this study travels takes a different turn. It heads away from elections and referendums – “electoral spectacles”, as Hacker and Pierson (2011, p. 86) call them – and instead takes aim at preference formation among large firms, the type of actor that, according to the same authors, truly shapes politics in the long run. |
