Intervention (Hidden)
The intervention consists of a dedicated survey experiment, administered as a part of the YouGov's political omnibus. It is fielded as a part of the YouGov UniOM scheme – a programme through which YouGov partners with British universities to allow graduate and undergraduate students to collect primary data for their research work. The following research proposal was submitted in January 2025 for consideration by the relevant panel at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Following the proposal’s approval, the author has been working with the YouGov team to tailor the questionnaire, which is to be fielded in early March 2025.
The survey will target c.1600 adult respondents living in the United Kingdom. The data will be sampled and weighted to ensure it’s nationally representative based on gender, age, education level, social class, region, voting history, and political interest.
The experiment itself will consist of 7 survey blocks. The first block will be shown to the respondents in a randomised manner. Depending on their condition, a respondent will either read one of the two framings of the British slave trading history or will see no text prior to answering the questions, as outlined below:
Treatment #1 (negative priming): Britain has a history of slave-trading. It was one of the dominant slave-trading countries from the 1640s to 1807. It is estimated that Britain transported 3.1 million Africans (of whom 2.7 million arrived) to the British colonies in the Caribbean, North and South America and to other countries
Treatment #2 (positive priming): Britain has a history of slave-trading. It was one of the dominant slave-trading countries from the 1640s to 1807. In that year Britain became one of the first nations to abolish slave trade by passing the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act.
Control: [no prompt, straight to the questions below]
The following six blocks with contain between 1-3 survey items pertaining to: i) shame vs pride in the British role in the slave trade ii) support for restitutions; iii) national pride; iv) racial relations; v) racial attitudes; vi) opinion on race-related policy measures in modern Britain. The exact phrasing is described in the attached questionnaire. Where possible, the wording of the question follows past surveys to allow for (qualitative) comparisons of the results.
The expectation is that negative priming will make respondents in this treatment arm: i) more ashamed of the British role in the slave trade; ii) more supportive of restitutions; iii) less proud of being British; iv) more likely to notice greater discrimination against people from ethnic minority backgrounds; v) more open to having a Black person as a neighbour; vi) more supporting of policies promoting affirmative action and public admission of historical wrongs.
The positive priming treatment group is expected to shift its answers in the opposite direction.
The respondents will be evaluated relative to the control group using both weighted OLS and ordered logistic regression models, controlling for the socio-demographic variables listed below.
Socio-demographic controls included: age, gender, region, social class, education level, household income, ethnicity, religion, marital status, work status, political interest, and a dummy for voting in the Brexit referendum and national parliamentary elections in 2019 and 2024. The significance levels will be corrected for multiple hypothesis testing using the Bonferroni correction.