Mental illness stigma and its effects on party support

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, mental disorders were already Europe’s heaviest health burden. This situation has only worsened during the pandemic. It is now well known that these conditions have wide-ranging implications for citizens’ lives well beyond their immediate mental health. This is why the pandemic has prompted calls for further multidisciplinary research to understand and address those implications. Our research proposal responds to this call for action by detecting mental illness stigma in the UK electorate in 2021, and investigating how it affects support for British political parties. The pandemic might have humanised mental illness but not necessarily alleviated stigma. This project addresses these issues through the use of survey experimental research and contributes to our understanding of political inequality and underrepresentation of people with mental health problems in politics.