Well with this news I'm almost certainly never going to get round to doing a proper version of the 'there's no relationship between change in crime and PCC voting' paper that's been on the back burner for nine years...

Currently in the early stages of a global 'please remove me from this mailing list' reply-all catastrophe 😱

I mention the Hall, Ariss and Todorov study of basketball betting (more information -> worse performance) in the slides for one of my pol psych lectures, and now the powerpoint designer wants to illustrate the slide with some basketballs, which certainly creates an interesting juxtaposition... 😂

I fell down a typographical rabbit hole last week and made my own R Markdown template. Quite pleased with how it looks, so take a look, and if you like it too, feel free to use it! Package here: github.com/drcaprosser/... Full explanation/example here: github.com/drcaprosser/...

Does it though...

Nothing says 'boost productivity' like policies designed to make people more tired and hungover. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

This is great - had always wondered if the telephone call thing was *actually* how they found out they'd won. In the unlikely event that I won a Nobel prize I'd probably see an unknown international number, assume it was scam, and block it.

Judging by the number of review request I've had lately, I see you all had a more productive summer than I did 😐

A conclusion reached by a well justified causal research design no doubt, and not just seeing there's a correlation and asserting the causality runs in one direction... 🤔

🚨Hiring a fully funded (3.5 years) PhD for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social to research social media and politics. Candidates should have quantitative/computational skills and/or be interested in content curation/moderation. UK home candidates only unfortunately. www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/hquftp...

Just spotted this excellently ironic typo in the acknowledgements of a paper I was reading 😂

I made a little R package to handle the faff of assigning party names to party colours when making plots about British elections in ggplot. I made it for myself, but if you're someone that also works on British politics and uses R, you might also find it useful! github.com/drcaprosser/...

Today in 'I'm sure this is a well identified causal effect and definitely not in any way a spurious correlation, can't think of any potential confounding variables at all' 🤔

The year is 3025. No one could remember what REF was, but the science minster and university leaders gathered for the annual ritual of deferring it. 'Maybe we'll actually do it next year', whispered a newly appointed vice chancellor to their neighbour. 'Don't be daft', replied the old hand.

🚨NEW DATA 🚨 The BES team are pleased to announce the release of the 2024 Random Probability Survey Release v1.0.0 You can download the data here: www.britishelectionstudy.com/data-object/... You can find our release note here: www.britishelectionstudy.com/uncategorize...

I'm taking over our PhD professional development seminar this year, which covers everything from 'so how do you actually do this PhD thing', to applying for jobs, via writing, ethics, inter alia. If anyone has run similar things elsewhere, I'd love to see what you cover - please drop me a line!

I feel like Shetland would be an excellent location for an institute of quantitative social science 🥵

It'd be great if there was a research fellowship scheme where instead of proposing a single project, you could just say 'look I've got about a dozen papers at various stages of completion and if I had some time I'd probably finally manage to submit some of them'.

'What do you mean there's no solution to the fundamental problem of causal inference?!? You're trying to tell me that all of this' [gestures frantically at the edifice of modern social science] 'rests on a series of untestable *assumptions*!?!' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

You'd think something like election results would be an commonly agreed fact, but whenever I use historical data I always end up going down some rabbit hole because different sources say (sometimes very) different things. Currently being driven mad by mid 20th century Australian elections... 🤯

Anyone know about rules governing how old you need to be to join a political party in the UK? Labour says 14 on their website but can't find anything for the other parties.

Anyone know of an accessible dataset of Australian Federal election results from 1946 onwards? Existing comparative sources seem to have some issues, e.g. v-party doesn't always have all the parties that make up the coalition, parlgov seems to have some rounding issues.

ANALYSIS: Presentations from our 2024 General Election in Review event are available on our website. Speakers included @profjanegreen.bsky.social @caprosser.com @drjennings.bsky.social @keiranpedley.bsky.social www.britishpollingcouncil.org/polling-less...

Cool that they’ve found another copy of the Magna Carta, but I would like some more detail about this aspect of it’s provenance 😂 www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

An underrated feature of preferential voting systems is that it is really satisfying putting the parties you really dislike last in your preference list. One vote systems are boring.

New publication by the @britishelectionstudy.com team! @jamesdgriffiths.bsky.social has summarised the main findings in this thread, but you can also find the paper here: academic.oup.com/pa/advance-a...

This is such a great paper! Even leaving aside its (entirely credible) argument that Brexit has helped lead to bloc voting, it's useful in all sorts of ways for students, teachers, and anyone else interested in British Politics - not least when it comes to its teaching-friendly diagrams. eg

🚨NEW PUBLICATION 🚨 Though people have moved on from Brexit, they still vote in line with their Brexit preferences - with age/education still separating voters. Voters now back party blocs, which matters greatly for Labour's current appeals to Reform voters. 🧵 academic.oup.com/pa/advance-a...

New paper from me and the rest of the BES team just published in Parliamentary Affairs, looking at the continuation of the Brexit alignment in voting preferences at the 2024 General Election amid record volatility and the absence of Brexit as an electoral issue. doi.org/10.1093/pa/g...

No, autocomplete, no.

Looking forward to speaking at this later today - do say hello if you're there too!

To some extent you have to admire the ONS's steadfast refusal to allow you to easily work out the demographic characteristics of the adult (i.e. over 18) population from most of their tables, but mostly it's really annoying...

Reading The Unaccountability Machine by @dsquareddigest.bsky.social at the moment, which I really recommend - one of those books that genuinely changes how you see the world. The last line of this section made me laugh out loud - not sure I’ve ever read a better description 😂

Mucking about making some animated plots of constituency vote shares over time and accidently made some lava lamps.

Teaching my students about gganimate in their final R lab tomorrow - pretty pleased with this demo of GB vote shares from 1832 to 2024, and never fail to be impressed by this package - from line chart to this in one line of code!

Not the most important point, but I would like to know more about the non-zero tax revenue from 0-9 year olds.

This is slightly terrifying as a potential source of survey error, but also hilarious. www.pewresearch.org/decoded/2025...

@sentimentbot.bsky.social hello!

The best thing about pre-ordering a book is I usually forget I’ve done it, so when it arrives it’s like getting a surprise present from someone who knows exactly what you wanted.

Free political advice: one power the government has is to name things, so you could rename NHS England the ‘Regulatory Executive Directorate for Treatment, Administration, and Performance Evaluation’. Then, rather than it sounding like you’re abolishing the NHS, you’d be getting rid of REDTAPE.

I've forgotten who I stole this example from, but thanks to whoever it was. It nicely illustrates the difficulty in accounting for confounding with observed variables and brings me joy whenever I come back to this lecture.

Nothing like coming back to your quarto lecture slides, which worked perfectly well last year, and discovering there's been a package update... This sort of thing doesn't happen in powerpoint 😒

My four-year-old, who is learning to read and write, has discovered that she can get to my iPad search screen without unlocking it, and if she types ‘cat’ will get lots of cat pictures to look at. For some reason they all have toothbrushes 😂

Feels like the predatory publishing spambots aren’t even trying anymore.

I think I'm right in saying that in only one of the 121 constituencies they won, did the Conservatives win over 50% of the vote. Which is extraordinary

A British election factoid I hadn't noticed until I was updating my lecture slides - in 2024 only 15% of constituencies were won by a majority of votes. That is less than half the previous low of 34% recorded in 2010.

Putting some Taagepera and Shugart style predictive models into my lecture on the UK's electoral systems - never fail to be impressed by these things - here's predicted and actual party system size for European Parliament elections in the UK across the switch from first-past-the-post to PR.

More academic disputes should have names like ‘the great porridge controversy’. (I confess to not having heard of the Norwegian sociologist Eilert Sundt before I read this, but he sounds great).

Very pleased to have become a trustee of the McDougall Trust, a small charity which exists to advance knowledge and understanding of electoral democracy. The trust was established by the will of Sir Robert McDougall, who died in 1938, in memory of his father Arthur McDougall.

There's no way "over half of Gen Z want a dictator" - our new study gets more like 6% This is vital to get right - we're sowing generational division, giving fake momentum to the sense that young people are rejecting democracy + missing the real message theconversation.com/only-6-of-ge...