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/?

I've written a blog post about using metric unfolding to extract latent dimensions from data, using the ANES feeling thermometers & BES 'like' scales as examples. It's a high-level intro to unfolding and using the smacof R package. These plots are the results. philswatton.github.io/2025/11/05/e...

Der Beitrag basiert auf einem Artikel in der @pvs-journal.bsky.social, der gerade #onlinefirst und natürlich #OA erschienen ist: 👉 www.link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11615-025-00637-3

So I mostly think this is just a side effect of (i) polling where you give people lots of options other than broad income tax bump (ii) political cueing (public support for tax rises for was at/near an all-time high until 2023*) * curious what drives that 2023+ jump in 'reduce taxes' ...

Very cool - I'm particularly interested in the algorithms to infer 'community structure' (LIB/RWA/ALT 'factors' connected to the various items). Would be interesting to see the results on a dataset with more economic values (at first glance this looks like 17 auth-correlated items and Lower Taxes).

British Election Study 1997 asks more or less the same question to the same respondents - do you like the Conservative Party? - on a 5pt scale and an 11pt scale ... ... and the correlation of the results is only .77. 9 point "Strongly Against" them ... who *also rated them 10/10 for liking them!*.

A majority of voters, and a plurality of white voters, think that Reform is a racist party with racist policies.

Good to see that Silicon Valley is following Neon Genesis Evangelion both in content and logical coherence.

I've come up with - yet another - plot. This time combining mini pie charts and the political compass plot. Each pie chart reflects how voters have shifted preference from their 2024GE Labour vote to their vote intention in May 2025 for the value subgroup.

I love("") that you can just read the timeline and watch the guy 'politically age' like it's a sped up nature scene. Like watching someone segue smoothly "Haha, it almost seems like my belt is shrinking!" to "My belt really is shrinking each year": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_S...

I may have buried the lede - here's a toy model where you can manually change party position *and see how moving towards another party can(!) reduce rather than increase* your voteshare. There's nothing clever happening under the hood (no salience/legitimacy mechanics) just a dumb spatial model.

Here is the - distinctly alpha version - Interactive Political Compass Dominance Map: py.cafe/app/MariosRi... Ever wanted to know what would happen if a party shifted position/changed perceived competence? Now you can!

A policy *supported by a smaller % of the population* than it would seek to deport!

What are we supposed to do, Grandad ... "Build" "Houses" in any of the parts of the undeveloped parts of the UK? No - we must conserve what is essential to Hungary.

Great post, but it doesn't go too far enough. I mean, isn't this the perfect time to really make a pitch for the HANG THE PAEDOS, SAVE THE NHS vote?

When we analyzed news coverage, we found the main driver to be intra-party divisions within the center-right CDU, where candidates were vying for party leadership. While the UN compact & far-right agitation against it certainly warranted coverage, the issue became disproportionately amplified.

Your regular reminder that scrapping ILR for people who have come here and played by the rules, which is what Lam proposes here, is a position supported by 3% of the public

@dylandifford.bsky.social @ewanhoyle.bsky.social I've had a look at the (mean) respondent-level gaps between party Like and PTV evaluations over time ~3 clusters (1) Parties of Govt (Lab/Con/SNP) … & Reform in 2025 (2) 3rd Parties (LD/PC/UKIP/Reform until 2025) (3) Green Party

One of the reasons I'm skeptical about the "Lump Of Taboo" concept - that you can only invoke a taboo a finite amount so many times before it 'runs out' - is that it doesn't seem to apply to any taboos in history.

1. Ecological Fallacy: just because a constituency goes from one party to another doesn't mean many individual voters made same journey 2. Availability Bias: just because you can easily picture the stereotype of a particular voter doesn't mean that they are numerous in electorate

Just started The Alters ... and, as all the reviews have said, it's really good. (You crash land on alien planet, rest of the crew is dead and the only way you can survive is to crew your base with ... alternate versions of you) store.steampowered.com/app/1601570/...

Finally made it through to the end of Foundation Season 3. It's almost precision-engineered to be the least Asimov thing possible (continuous meaningless action rather vs pre-adapted-for-radio-play / baroquely overwritten characters vs thin plot-aqueduct achetypes, sf concept overload vs clarity).

"The wealth tax debate shouldn’t be separate from the one about how we tax property and pensions – that’s where most of the country’s wealth sits."  c/o @resfoundation.bsky.social Bet it will continue to be, though. 🙄

This is just generally very good (new data, new analysis!). Lots of fun stuff - but the thing that jumped out to me is that Labour's rhetoric on AI *actually reflects their real electorate's positivity on automation* - in contrast to Labour's imaginary electorate (skilled manual workers).

I'm working on a new model/visualisation - ideally eventually interactive - where you can look at the political compass in terms of where voters 'perceive' parties to be in value space (arrows)/how 'competent' they perceive them to be and how that turns into voting intention/behaviour.

One of those sentences you read and think "Well, obviously this must be an aggressive paraprh-" before your eye tracks down to the actual quote from the Israeli minister and realise it is, in anything, an understatement.

Not just Conservatives - this is an issue with centre-left and centre-right parties 'dealing' with Radical Right parties all over the world over the last decade. They keep making choices which all the available evidence says are the absolute worst moves possible.

I don't have a problem finger-wagging at random bluesky posters saying dumb stuff because they're frustrated about gaza. But scolding/expectations should be proportionate to official responsibility/resources.

Great chart! The point isn't novel - but this chart does have the merit that you can see with your eyes that people are not moving to Reform because "frustration"/"economic angst"/"austerity"/"the economy isn't working".

Piece is here: benansell.substack.com/p/british-po...

This is the weak point of the argument. If you're merely *telling a story* about *how you personally approach politics* -then, sure, 'because I have a hunch/feel like it' is fine. But if you're telling other people they are *doing it wrong* then I think you need to at least try to substantiate it.