Tracking our *negative* voting intention (who would Britons vote AGAINST): ➡️ Ref 38% (+9) 🌹Lab 34% (-4) 🌳 Con 7% (-1) 🌏 Green 7% (+4) 🐦‍ LD 3% (-) changes w/ Nov 2025 As Reform has plateaued in the polls, the number of people saying they would also vote *against* Reform has grown

Thoughts with @ianleslie.bsky.social at this difficult time.

🚨 Please share widely! 🚨 I'm hiring a postdoc (from Aug 1) to help build a new research program on politically sustainable immigration policies at Notre Dame. Looking for a social scientist with strong quant skills, familiarity with new computational tools, and interest in public-facing research.

Interested in the Gorton and Denton result from the methodological point of view ... but I can't help but feel that it doesn't matter (unless polls are hella out).

Goodhart's Law strikes again. I touched on this (way, waaay less thoroughly) in the connection between subjective identification as working class and immigration attitudes/authoritarianism (recently picked up on by @gcarty80.bsky.social-now you have an *actual* source!). Also for christian self-id.

Has anyone written the stories of what would happen if Paris chose Athena or Hera?

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fuentes, yesterday: “Our #1 political enemy is women because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man, everything. They have to be imprisoned. They are the ones that are hurting the fertility rate. They're the ones making us sympathetic to poor people, which are also brown people.”

Interesting and impressive amory-gethin.fr/files/pdf/Ge...

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Trove Of Emails About Pedophilia Reignites Nation’s Love Of Reading https://theonion.com/trove-of-emails-about-pedophilia-reignites-nations-love-of-reading/

This me (bar the Marxist part ... just 'sophisticated'). I think there's also an aspect where we're all living with the same crude tropes about what the rich would get away with *but that they don't just appeal to the poor and cynical but also the rich and cynical*.

Theoretically testable hypothesis (e.g. did the Rivers of Blood Speech *drive* public sentiment** more than it *reacted* to it?) ** Specifically through the mechanism of driving down trust among Conservative-voting authoritarians in (other) Con MPs/party.

Whenever people declare that Trump is a genius because "he stops people focusing on his actions by flooding the zone with shit" ... ... I can't but feel that this is maybe just cope to avoid considering that there's very little practical constraint, even when people have just one thing to focus on.

I wonder about the direction of (any/hypothetical) causality here.

I just thought everyone should see this

Redid the Yougov breakdown with BES (May 2025) data and split by <64/65+. I think probably dropping DKs/WNVs is a bigger issue than not separating retirees. Prob also important to flag how much of the current workforce is in each category (the distribution has changed a lot since cats were made!).

Lab to DK is a group twice as large as Lab to Ref (and losses to DK are often easiest to win back) Lab to Grn/LD is a group three times as large as Lab to Ref (and on multiple metrics this group looks more open to returning to Labour)

It's so exhausting to to be constantly told by American leaders that the defining policy of the 80 odd years during which the US became the most wealthy and powerful country in the history of the world was a grossly unfair failure for them.

Most generous take here is that (i) the US is not alone - this is a trend across most democracies taking us back to ~pre-WWII conditions (ii) the Centre-Right swallowed the Radical Right and imprisoned it inside its belly* - we shouldn't be surprised that it's the first victim when it bursts forth

One of the Continuously Radicalising things about UK Student Loan discourse is that wherever I start I always seem to end up faced with "Sir, I'm a *progressive*, I need you to understand that I don't care how many WC kids get to attend university because high marginal tax rates == slavery".

Unruly children update

There's a bit of a tendency for people who overdose on politics/nuance to overlook the fact that Authoritarian politics dominated across the West in the 1930s ... and then became *so unpopular the party family basically died out for the next half century*, so unpopular it became a curse word.

Just about to try to importing my historical twitter-tweets to bsky - apologies in advance if this triggers a horrible number of notifications for other people (I *think* it won't).

Looks good - and maybe relevant for discussions about whether Reform will be hurt by <any given scandal>. Makes me wonder about how fast a turnaround you can get from (i) deliberately driving down trust in political institutions (ii) then popping up to reap that by running on clientilism

Strong agree. I think the reason journ./commentators/politicians/political hobbyists think this is a problem is a general issue where they follow politics in a way normal people do not - they listen really closely to what they say.

A point with much broader application than the context of the thread. A lot of 'discourse infrastructure' (around the world but particularly in anglo states) is struggling with the sudden tension between (i) obvious naked-eye visible facts (ii) how ridiculous stating them makes you feel

Looking back over the period 2014-2024 I'm struck by *naively* the commentariat were in talking about Douglas Carswell's politics almost entirely (i) on the basis of his rapid disagreements with Farage (after defecting to UKIP in 2014) (ii) from dictation

Looking back on this Labour administration - 2020 through to 2025 - the fundamental problem seems to be that their thinking and personnel prioritised deCorbynising *as if they'd have the freedom to focus on nothing else* and then founding themselves heading into government.

"The Dialogue Of The Wise bOiLeD Frog" 'You young frogs simply don't understand, when I was a tadpole the water went from 30 degrees to 40 degrees so really this is just more of the same.'

Useful corrective for the facile "well, #bothsides of populism are divisive, polarisation is *real enemy*". Greens/Labour/LD/Conservatives are indistinguishable on this, Reform ... quite a lot of standard deviations away from the rest of the public (would be curious to know where non-voters are).

Trump says a lot of delusional stuff, but this takes the biscuit.

I had never even heard a hint that generational upward mobility had been higher in the UK than in the US for decades, until seeing that second chart.

It's a rough time for comic writers - I enjoyed Mythic Quest and it's goofy, parodic nutty CEO bro. But the made-up character had to be someone you could empathise with and bear to watch for multiple minutes - i.e. more credibly human than Alex Karp.

Very depressing is a Gallup poll June 1946: Jun 1946: “Do you approve or disapprove of the government’s decision to allow Polish troops who do not wish to return to Poland to remain in this country?” Approve 30%, Disapprove 56%, No opinion 14% Source:

Five years ago, JK Rowling set out her position on the transgender issue with a liberal and reasonable essay. But increasingly, Rowling’s positions have moved away from liberalism. What happened? www.thepathnottaken.net/p/what-happe...

I think UK Green position on NATO is contemptible - in the strong sense of not even logically aligned with their values, just confused inherited garbage - but it's important to remember that they are not *the* anti-NATO party/party family.

“If you believe the MAGA postliberal project is real, then liberalism must understand MAGA is not a reaction to economic consequences or “elite failures,” but an affirmative preference for illiberalism. Liberalism must stop apologizing. Stop excusing. And fight.” www.thebulwark.com/p/maga-and-l...

This shouldn't be a novel point - the Labour Party didn't disappear or even notably suffer when the Conservative Party embraced the NHS, the Conservatives didn't disappear when New Labour embraced the Third Way and the Green Party has only put on support while major parties back action no climate.

Good news for election nerds and relatives of election nerds - our publishers have confirmed "The British General Election of 2024" will be published on 3rd December. To celebrate its imminent arrival, I am starting a "BGE 2024 advent calendar" thread - first door opens in next post

A hidden gem for PolSci in an Econ journal: mainstream right-wing parties seem to capture only a fraction (!) of the far-right vote when the latter don't run in an election. Crucially, left parties seem to gain votes! A key finding for understanding potential coalitions doi.org/10.1016/j.jp...

Watching a delightfully ponderous and unanimated youtube video on the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire (and the Wrongness of Musk in pinning it on population decline/too much population).

This hex-map breaks down the share of 15-24 year-olds in Germany and the regional contrast is hard to miss. Eastern Germany shows much lower shares except for larger cities, while many western and southern areas have noticeably more young people. #30DayMapChallenge Day 25: Hexagons #ggplot2

After more than 10 years of “the Danish Model”, nativism is hegemonic in the country, the far right polls near level highs again, and the Social Democrats lost Copenhagen and poll at historic low. European Social Democrats should look at the facts, not the myths! Me in @theguardian.com

If, like me, you are an enjoyer of Ben's patented bubble plots, you'll have likely noticed that voters cluster by ideology and not demographics. My new preprint is on exactly that: osf.io/preprints/so...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg29... I am a victim of 2015 era Internet Nostalgia but every day I feel like another adultswim informercial has somehow turned into reality.

We then ran a pairwise experiment. They avoid this some of the issues around salience by forcing respondents to choose between two issues at a time, producing a clearer hierarchy. When we use this method, Cost of Living concerns dominate, with immigration and asylum much lower.

I find it hard to explain centre-left/right party behaviour - inside and outside the UK - other than that mere fact of Radical Right parties converging on *the % you'd expect them to get when not actively proscribed/associated with the losing side of WW2* drives them mad.

A chart from "The British General Election of 2024" (out soon!) which is relevant to this debate - here's what voters wanted (black line) and what they though Labour (red) and Cons (blue) would do on tax and spend during the campaign. Higher figures = "put them up". Some important lessons here 1/?