@electoralstudies.bsky.social If you’re interested in academic studies of political polarisation we have loads of great papers at Electoral Studies. Check out this one by Joseph Phillips www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Looking at latest BES. On the allowing more or fewer immigrants 0-10 scale (higher is liberal), the mean score is 3.11 and <20% of voters are >5. Many have shown that anti-immigration stances are inefficient for Labour, but I'm unconvinced that the opposite position would lead to better polling!

I am honoured to be shortlisted for the Maddox Prize. The prize recognises researchers for standing up for science and showing courage and integrity in the face of challenges and hostility.

Notwithstanding some bad stuff, I've met some amazing people; the advantages definitely outweigh the disadvantages!

Constant, morale-sapping, self-doubting rejection throughout their careers is one thing that all but the luckiest/most talented academics, no matter how supposedly senior they are, share with each other! I rather liked this advice about staying positive regardless - I just wish I could follow it!

The standard in the Welsh league isn't *quite* as good as the Premiership... but we still love it 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿⚽️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Hehe, there have been rather a lot of these pieces!

Why bother with Chelsea v Liverpool when you can watch Colwyn Bay v Caernarfon?!? 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿⚽️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Rest in peace, Claus Offe! Great, critical, inspiring scholar. www.hertie-school.org/en/news/deta...

🚨🚨NEW🚨🚨 The 'progressive cat lady' is a staple of culture war discourse; J. D. Vance once dismissed Democrats as 'a bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives'. But I can’t find any evidence for them…

Modern Languages; Music; and History, Archaeology & Religion remain in scope. Compulsory redundancy is a red line. It is time to vote in the consultative ballot on industrial action NOW - the deadline is tomorrow.

Can someone ask Farage or Zia Yusuf why, if they're so concerned about incitement to violence, they had Lucy Connolly as a guest star at their conference?

super refreshing to see this taken seriously by political scientists who work quantitatively theloop.ecpr.eu/assessing-th...

Over the past week, I've enjoyed reading about the James Marriott 'post-literacy' thesis and there's definitely something to it. But are proponents overstating things? Literacy in modern society has profound stabilizing mechanisms, not least mass higher education!

Nathan Gill, Reform's leader in Wales at the last Welsh parliament election, has pled guilty to 8 bribery charges, taking Russian cash while he was one of Nigel Farage’s MEPs to speak in favour of Putin's Russia in that parliament www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

If/when Reform get serious numbers of representatives in the UK and devolved parliaments, I worry profoundly for the quality of our legislators. Time and time again, Reform's personnel have shown that they're not up to it.

Another indication of the quality of Reform's personnel - the problem seems even more acute in Wales nation.cymru/news/former-...

Repeat after me - partisan influences on inequality are secondary

Progressives ask the heterodox an important question about priorities; why fixate on problems with progressives in an age in which radical right populism is ascendant? But the same question can be asked of progressives; at the present moment, why fixate on figures like Ezra Klein and Nate Silver?

New essay. From triumphal 1990s ideas about an American century underpinned by Internet power, to the mid-2010s belief that social media was a “global conversation,” to mid-2020s anxieties about communication breakdowns and civil war. open.substack.com/pub/paroxysm...

This is very good. Alas, I'm sceptical of the potential for coordination on the left!

Can we have 8 min of your time please? @siljahausermann.bsky.social @bpalier.bsky.social & I wrote a very brief reflection on why social investment might be a misleading paradigm. Way forward: please distinguish different types of social investments! More here journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

First day of new term and always have a mild existential crisis - I've been in the sector for quite a few of these 😬😬😬

I'm not sure this should be a 'true question' for liberals at all! Irrespective of public opinion, the liberal defends minority rights.

Disney's indefinite suspension of Kimmel is a big moment in part b/c Disney has a pretty liberal groups of executives, including the two individuals who reportedly made the decision (Bob Iger and Dana Walden). Here's a plot, based on data from my forthcoming APSR paper.

Broadly, this is true, yet lack of clear popular support is not necessarily an impediment to hegemony; neoliberalism was hegemonic for decades, despite serious issues with public opinion 😬

What the Trump administration has been doing is terrible and unjustifiable. But I think that -left excesses caused both liberal criticism and a conservative backlash is a better model than -there were really no left excesses but misplaced liberal criticism of such excesses caused the backlash.

A reminder to members to vote in the indicative ballot by October 3rd

One can oppose both

Death, taxes and far-left splits...

This explanation gets little airtime, yet imo the primary reason for the unpopularity of the Starmer government is the very challenging politico-economic structural conditions in the UK. The last five PMs have struggled desperately, despite having very different ideologies and approaches.

Latest ITV BarnCymru 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 poll confirms trend seen over last 6 months - neck and neck race between Plaid Cymru and Reform UK for largest party, with Labour falling to even more distant third. Evidence growing of distinct realignment in Wales 🧵

In this paper, we show that the staggered broadcasting rollout of Dad's Army in 1960s Britain reduced voting for the radical right in the 2020s.

The economic and cultural values of party supporters, according to the recent wave of the British Election Study. Coming from rural West Wales, it always surprises me that Plaid supporters are so liberal. Here, only the Greens have more liberal supporters!

But I still say that the Conservative Party is one of the oldest parties in the world, embedded in one of the oldest systems. Its demise has been predicted many times before and, as an institutional theorist, I'm naturally sceptical of such arguments.

My assumption has been that at some point the dam will break and there will be a swarm of these - MPs in that sizeable overlap between the beliefs of the Tory party and Reform making the decision that the Tories are dead, and if they'd like to keep their job, they should have the other rosette on.

Surprised by Danny Kruger's defection to Reform! That's a pretty big coup for them, no?!?

Interesting discussion on the relationship between racism and economic factors; tldr, there's little evidence. In our work on progressive values, we also find limited evidence of economic influences. Pace Marx, economic explanations seem to have a poor record across the social sciences!

‘I’m not far right but I went to a rally organised by Tommy Robinson’ is a pretty unconvincing position.

Mixed feelings about this. Yes, parts of Xwitter are revolting and the ownership issue is extremely worrying. Yet given the state of Bluesky in the last week, such criticisms feel hollower than normal.

This is a longstanding feature of centristdadism...

Watched Netflix's High School Catfish last night and 🤯🤯🤯

Historically, lists of political enemies have a very illiberal record. This new website, which lists people who celebrated Kirk's murder, doesn't seem to be an exception.

Yes thousands turned out - which is far more than I’d like - but that is dwarfed by the millions that understand real patriotism means loving your country as it actually is, not hating its diversity or trying to exploit its challenges. That’s what our flags actually represent

And in the next few months, there are going to be scores of Reform candidates announced for the 2026 Senedd elections. Given the size of Wales, Reform's recent emergence and the party's, ahem, historic problems with personnel, I foresee some embarrassing stories...

Llŷr Powell is Reform's candidate for the Senedd by-election in Caerphilly. He may be favourite - Reform did comparatively well in Caerphilly in GE2024.

Over the past 24 hours, parts of Bluesky have been sewers of extremism and whataboutery. And given the tendency of this site to present itself as better than alternatives, it's extremely difficult to stomach.

When people die, particularly in brutal conditions, it's customary to be charitable about their life's work and aims; I rather like this tradition.

New preregistered report @jepsjournal.bsky.social "Thin" populism treatments manipulate perceptions of people-centrism + anti-elitism But: some treatments (e.g., "American people") affect perceptions of host ideology, complicating causal analyses of impact of populist rhetoric cup.org/4n3DvZm

Ever struggle to explain why your research is relevant? Sometimes the data just does it for you! 👇 Has anyone seen a more dramatic poll discrepancy than this one from Spain nationwide polling? CIS has PSOE +9.0pp, while NCReport has PP +9.4pp *over the exact same fieldwork*! 🤯😅