Can’t wait for a second EU referendum to bring back my Mad Remainer Persona.

a drive-by shooting by findmypolitics dot com this morning

Meanwhile in Vienna

Andy Burnham would be the first avowed, on-the-record pro-PR prime minister. Even if you don’t buy the hype about him - and I don’t - it’s a way out.

When I moved to London 5 years ago, I did not think that I would ever wonder if it was safe to move through the city just because of the color of my skin. Today, this is the case. Yet again. Far-right agitators and thugs are roaming the streets. Empowered and emboldened by the rhetoric and politics

🎯 New paper alert! It includes the main theoretical & empirical contribution of my dissertation: disentangling targeting and tailoring in political social media advertising. Really happy @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social and I found such a great home for it 🏠 Open Access 👉 doi.org/10.1080/1369... 1/4

The government has delivered on pledges on immigration, NHS, policing and workers’ rights. It clearly isn’t helping. Were they the wrong pledges all along? Were they the wrong things to prioritise? Or has Britain become “ungovernable”, as some claim? (I think there’s a decent argument for each.)

Excited to present this project on immigration and group identities *tomorrow* (May 14) at the QPE Early Career Workshop at @kingsqpe.bsky.social Program 👉🏻 sites.google.com/view/kingsqp... For the great London weather 👇🏻

My first paper is out! Co-authored with @falkscheidig.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/pa/g...

And what was the major policy decision that came out of it? Was it good? God I hope it was good

Step 1: Run regression of [scary Y] on [trendy X] using observational data Step 2: Magically "adjust" for the 20 bajillion imperfectly-measured confounders Step 3: Wait for a credulous journalist to write it up as causal www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Exactly this. The best time for radical institutional reform was yesterday. The second best time is now. There might not be a third for a long time.

I know this is a conclusion with a kernel of truth, but it sends all my polisci red alert flashing: - 2026 Reform vote at >50% of previous non-voters has no face validity, especially if inferred uniquely from aggregate data - how is the reference point 2024, when these places last voted in 2021-2

What drives legislators' emotional engagement with climate issues? I explore the role of their age and party affiliation and over-time developments in a new research note in European Journal of Political Research. (a thread)

Interesting paper on elite capture. You can taste the joy these economists had by just doing sociology www.nber.org/papers/w35180

Can attitudes change our identities? 🪪 Group-based anti‑immigration appeals nudged participants to newly claim “working‑class” or “Christian” even without strong objective ties or changes to policy views - showing instrumental belief justification. #Identity #Immigration Read the study recap:

The AfD could win an overall majority of seats in the September state election in Sachsen-Anhalt. Die Zeit puts their chances at 37%, with current polling. www.zeit.de/politik/2026...

On 7 May 2026, Britain ran a PR experiment: Scottish Parliament: a Mixed-Member Proportional system Welsh Senedd: a (new) Low-Magnitude Party List system Same day, same political context, different outcomes. Which version of PR would be better for Westminster? 🧵

The Nick Clegg Theory of Everything: since 1970, the delicate stable state of British politics has hinged on the Lib Dems or their previous iterations being the repository of protest votes and doing absolutely nothing with them; once they entered government, all the wheels came off.

If the problem for the UK ‘left bloc’ is that they're split 3 ways while the ‘right bloc’ is split 2 ways, selecting the *right* electoral reform is as important as switching away from FPTP: MMP and low-district magnitude PR can still yield high returns to cohesion.

Manchester's map looks a bit like Berlin's and Vienna's - green core with social democratic red ring around it, radical right in the poor suburbs, traditional right in the rich ones..

Random thought but traditional left-of-centre parties are holding up best today in countries (Australia, New Zealand, Canada) where manufacturing workers historically made up a smaller share of the electorate.

Besides FPTP, an under-discussed issue of how British institutions can process the emerging multi-party system is the House of Lords. The two largest parties in the local elections, the largest party in Wales, the largest party in Scotland, and the largest party in NI have 4/752 seats in the Lords.

My takeaway from the elections is that it's time to fork out big cash for experts on electoral system effects and electoral reform.

I know it’s been 20 years but I’m still pretty upset I can’t be Professor of Symbology.

It was the best of times (+30.0), it was the worst of times (-29.3)

Yup. Cultural conflicts eat up the categories of "old" politics and spit them out as something completely different. @fraraffaelli.bsky.social and I have a paper about this 👇

This would represent a certain historical continuity. Sachsen-Anhalt was the first German state in which an extreme-right party entered parliament after reunification (DVU in 1998). Interestingly, the DVU was overwhelmingly voted for by young men in Sachsen-Anhalt in 1998:

One of the surest ways to tell a lousy politician is when there’s a contrarian take about them that goes like “don’t underestimate him; the fact that everyone underestimates him is low-key his strength.” It almost always turns out to be wrong (Starmer, Bush Jr, Bill Shorten, IDS, Scott Walker).

Farage has assessed - perhaps correctly - that nativism and NIMBYism are the ideological core of the British right. The strategy that logically follows - "concentration camps, but not where you live" - would be comical if it didn't entail concentration camps.

Nutrition and health scare fads (MSG, palm oil, seed oil, glyphosate, nitrates, gluten being bad for everyone, food dyes, microplastics) exist on a continuum going from conspiracy theory to "ok maybe there's a point" and basically no lay person has the time to research properly which is which.

Manifesting The Crown Season 7 finale shown from the perspective of Liz Truss

Back to one of my regular moans about democracy measurement - present bias. According to VDEM the UK's 'level of liberal democracy' is now lower than any time since 1945 - a period of time in which business owners and graduates had multiple votes and during which the Troubles occurred. WRONG.

One of the issues of integrating AI in teaching is that there’s a steep price-usefulness curve to AI plans. A basic ChatGPT plan is useless (counterproductive?); Claude Code or Codex would add value but useful plans are expensive. Allowing unfettered AI use gives students with more means a big edge.

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

Very happy to share that I am going to be the new Director of the Democracy unit at the @wzb.bsky.social Berlin Social Science Center. I am excited to form a new research unit on democratic politics and to engage with people in Berlin and elsewhere to make liberal democracy more resilient.

Hello darkness my old friend

we're \begin{figure}[H] we're queer get used to it

Wonderful to see this book now published! 🎉 I am happy that we were able to contribute a chapter and huge thanks to the editors for putting this together! #PoliSky #EUDemocracy

Brooding millennial vibes slap open.spotify.com/playlist/13G...

Ahead of the local elections, here's an easy guide of how best to assess the results as they come in, including the best metrics to use and some historical benchmarks. It's on the longer side, but is split into sections and filled with lots of (hopefully) useful data, and completely free-to-read.

It’s inaccurate to say Mario is brave and Luigi is cowardly Luigi is afraid of death, so he runs away from danger. Mario is afraid of living, so he runs towards death. Both brothers are cowards in their own way

Making a playlist for a very specific mood

“The anti-foreign impulse and the anti-commercial impulse are related. Left and right end up hating the same thing, liberalism, because both movements have at their core a desire to control. To those who think systematically, the city must be offensive.” Super stuff www.ft.com/content/ba3b... l

Imagine the sort of conversations behind the decision to have a footnote like “we know pterodactyls and plesiosaurus aren’t dinosaurs”.

🚨New Paper in PNAS: "Refugee Labor Market Integration at Scale: Evidence from Germany’s Fast-Track Employment Program" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Ungated preprint osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/px9ew_v3 w/ J Hainmueller, D Hangartner, @niklas-harder.bsky.social & E Vallizadeh #econtwitter #econsky

I'm going with "yesterday, a great evil was defeated".

Tisza at 137 seats, 4 clear of a supermajority, with 2/3 of the constituency votes counted.

Tonight I'm thinking of the many Hungarians I've met over the years - many of them abroad against their wishes, many of them queer - who haven't stopped fighting, for sixteen years. For most of us, Orbán was an on-and-off nuisance on TV - at best. For them, he was a constant nightmare.