Today's absolute must-read for anyone studying/interested in British electoral and party politics over the long term. (Oh, and I'm pretty sure this is indeed a British street despite the classic Citroen in the foreground)!

Why did class voting in Britain rise, then decline? @olliheath.bsky.social, Humphrey Southall, Paula Aucott & @caprosser.com examine elections from 1885-2024, arguing political agency explains class dealignment better than social change. OPEN ACCESS: buff.ly/klGDUJz @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social

New paper from me, Olli Heath, Humphrey Southall and Paula Aucott, just out in @polstudies.bsky.social: The rise and fall of class voting in Britain, 1885–2024 We link ~140 years of census and election data to map the relationship between class and vote in Britain doi.org/10.1177/0032...

New paper from me, Olli Heath, Humphrey Southall and Paula Aucott, just out in @polstudies.bsky.social: The rise and fall of class voting in Britain, 1885–2024 We link ~140 years of census and election data to map the relationship between class and vote in Britain doi.org/10.1177/0032...

Sometimes its hard to escape the feeling that someone in government has built a model of how policies might affect economic growth but accidently flipped the sign on the output.

Really delighted to be joining the editorial board of West European Politics - an excellent journal and home to one of my first publications as a grad student and my series of articles on the 2015-24 UK general elections - in excellent company too!

Miliband was neither especially popular nor unpopular - average feelings towards him during the 2017 election campaign were pretty similar to mid-2017-campaign Corbyn, 2024 Starmer, and 2019 Johnson.

We need a democratic big bang, just like the economic one in the 80s: real local politics with autonomy, discretion, and tax-raising powers; proportional representation across the board; an elected upper chamber. All of our other problems are downstream of that. Just grab the bloody nettle.

The charity I'm a trustee for is looking for new trustees to join our board. The McDougall Trust is the independent charity that promotes public understanding of electoral democracy. See the link for more details and how to apply. www.mcdougall.org.uk/news/39/38/M...

Now, I'm no foreign policy genius, but surely the EU suggesting EU students should pay the same fees as home students should not have come as a complete surprise given it was the status quo until six years ago...? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

All of my work will be published in top journals. The only thing prohibiting publication in those journals right now is the reviewers shooting it down. It will be published in those journals should reviewers not do that.

In the year of our lord, 2026, an academic journal has gone from accepting .tex file submissions, to only accepting word documents... (Between an original and R&R submission 🤬).

This is an interesting provocation, and I think David is right that electoral reformers shouldn't just assume that the only (or best) electoral reform is PR. There are two parts to the argument: 1. Majoritarianism > PR 2. If Majoritarianism, then two round elections I disagree with both bits.

UK Poll of Polls, 14 February 2026 Reform: 29% (27-31%) Labour: 20% (18-22%) Conservative: 19% (17-20%) Greens: 14% (13-16%) Lib Dem: 12% (11-14%) Other: 3% (3-4%) SNP: 3% (2-3%)

Brushing up on some reading for a research ethics workshop I'm running in a couple of weeks and perhaps getting a little carried away...

Sounds like excellent research and I will not be asking any probing questions about causal identification at this time.

This is fun, even if the British Media, Politics, and Policy cluster is hanging out on the edge of the galaxy.

An 'archaic' procedure such as one of the central planks of the British constitution, which establishes the supremacy of the Commons over the Lords...

I bet the author is a British person living in Australia, because my petty gripe is that in Australia you can get a flat white in many sizes (and could 20 years ago when I started drinking coffee there) whereas in Britain people insist it can only be one size. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

'Immediate reject' is a new peer review option to me... does it mean 'wow this is bad, don't even read my report just hit the reject button'?!?

Procrastinating from writing something by analysing the number of peer reviews I do. Not sure if my new website made me more visible, or getting something into APSR made me look like a serious person, but 2025 was apparently the year journal editors remembered who I was again.

The main thing I'm taking away from this is that more of you should listen to Olivia Chaney, so if you like indie folk, give her a listen!

Lately, I have been reading lots of early 20th century literature; now I want to use semi-colons in everything I write; I feel sad they have fallen into disuse.

Adversarial Poetry sounds like a great research genre. Would definitely read studies of the effect of adversarial poetry on political persuasion, adversarial poetry and affective polarisation, adversarial poetry and misinformation. So many possibilities 😆

Never mind twitter and chat gpt, the cloudflare outage seems to have taken down doi.org!

Not at all relevant to the actual discussion about this, but I remember being really impressed by the Boix paper when I read it as a grad student, whereas now every time I see it I can't get past the fact that in the 1990s you could get an N=22 OLS into the APSR.

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...