Jesse joined the Department of European & International Studies as a PhD candidate in September 2023, interested in the intersection of homosexuality and nativism and how both public opinion and party appeals combine nativist attitudes with sexual-liberal positions, as well as how these ideological configurations compare across European nations.

He is a recipient of the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS-DTP) studentship in Politics, Public Policy & Governance, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He holds a BA in Political Studies from Queen Mary, University of London (2019 – 2022) and an MA in Human Rights Research (Law and Political Science) from the University of Manchester (2022-2023).

Entering education later in life, Jesse spent most of his early years working in business management for large international companies before developing an interest in politics and deciding to enter education. Whilst completing his studies, Jesse has held several positions, such as parliamentary researcher for the UK Parliament, data analyst for the Icelandic Constitutional Archives, and contributing content to academic textbooks such as Politics UK, as well as working on EU Horizon Project’s coding and analysing data relating to gender attitudes across political parties.

Research interests

• Comparative politics
• Mixed-methods
• Nationalism and nativism
• Sexuality politics
• British and European politics
• Masculinity studies

Teaching

• 4AAOB101: British Politics

• 5AAOB201: The Integration of the European Union

Office hours

Thursday: 15.00 - 16.00

PhD research

The growing electoral success of populist radical right (PRR) parties across Europe has ushered in a new era of not just political volatility, but ideological blurring – with the traditional boundaries of party ideology and voting behavior being re-written throughout the course of the last few decades. My thesis takes a quantitative-led mixed-methods approach in analysing the interplay of homosexuality and nativism across both political parties and public opinion across Europe.

Separating many of these PRR parties from traditional far-right groups is their strategy of adopting certain socially progressive positions into their otherwise largely nativist platforms. My thesis aims to comprehensively analyse this phenomenon through the PRR’s adoption of seemingly progressive positions on homosexuality through including homosexual natives into what they deem the ‘acceptable’ population of the nation. Conceptualising the phenomenon as homosexuality-inclusive nativism – homonativism – my theorises its adoption due to both presenting an opportunity to exploit the sexual-liberal values of society to defend against the alleged threat of non-native peoples, as well as providing an electoral strategy to appeal to the wider electorate by distancing themselves from traditionally homophobic far-right groups. The analysis then extends to the centre-to-moderate right-wing to explore how theories of party competition and ideological shift may lead to relatively centrist parties adopting similar positions to the PRR.

Parties do not operate in a vacuum, and the ideological platform presented by parties at least partially depend on their success in appealing to the electorate. Therefore, the second phase of this thesis analyses the extent to which both nativist and sexual-liberal attitudes have manifested themselves in European populations, how large the proportion of this electorate may be, and identify any similarities and/or differences in the characteristics of the potentially homonativist voter cross-context.

Through both manual database construction of party manifestos and making use of the European Social Survey for public opinion date, a range of quantitative methods will aim to identify homonativism at both the party and public levels, map their development across time and place, and predict further who (or where) is more likely to develop homonativist positions. The findings are then supplemented qualitatively with comparative case study analyses to provide the contextual underpinnings of the phenomenon’s emergence and development across time and explain its similarities and differences cross-context.

PhD supervisors

Dr Isabelle Hertner and Dr Russell Foster

Latest publications

Grainger, J. (2024) Why Israeli-palestinian tensions in the UK matter for ReformUK, Europinion. Available at: https://www.europinion.uk/post/why-israeli-palestinian-tensions-in-the-uk-matter-for-reformuk

Grainger, J. (2024) An emerging homo-nativist electorate?, British Politics and Policy at LSE. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/an-emerging-homo-nativist-electorate/

Grainger, J. (2024) ‘Coming In: Sexual Politics and EU Accession in Serbia - Koen Slootmaeckers’, Europe-Asia Studies, 76(5), pp. 813–814. doi:10.1080/09668136.2024.2339737