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...

Widespread media coverage about a recent study suggested over half of Gen Z want the UK to be run by a dictator. But our research suggests it's more like only 6% who hold this view in reality. @bobbyduffy.bsky.social & @pmorini.bsky.social explain why this matters for @uk.theconversation.com ⬇️ 🧵

And over half of those who agree with the original statements go on to say, no, they don’t want a leader who faces no checks or control of their actions by MPs in parliament

Respondents were asked 3 versions of the question: 1) Identical wording to a recent survey for Channel 4 2) Same w/ 2nd half of the question in bold caps 3) Same w/ "dictator" used in lieu of "strong leader" The variations result in far lower levels of agreement

This is a really excellent investigation into the claim that around half of Gen Z want a dictator. It makes a compelling case that the combination of inattentive respondents and question wording inflates apparent support for non-democracy considerably - small tweaks lead to much smaller numbers.

If I were a billionaire I’d probably indulge a few whims too, but they’d be less ‘overthrow democracy’ and more ‘run a high powered randomised control trial to see if giving people an apple a day keeps the doctor away’.

It’s an old idea, but given the apparent paucity of idea in government at the moment, could be worth giving it a go…

We've just published a collection on the 2024 General Election, bringing together a diverse set of political scientists, historians, and policy specialists to analyse the campaign and the result. @pjsloman.bsky.social summarises the articles. Read now: politicalquarterly.org.uk/blog/reflect...

Slightly random question thread for people who know more about spatial statistics than I do. Say you have a bounded geographic area, in this simplified example a square 10x10 square filled with 1x1 tiles, and you randomly sample points with equal probability across the grid.

Here's me and Ed Fieldhouse for @conunitucl.bsky.social, summarising our recent paper on voter ID in Britain: with more detail on who is lacking ID and the impact on turnout.

NEW BLOG: How have voter ID requirements affected elections? @ralphscott.bsky.social & Edward Fieldhouse examine recent data to show what voter groups are without an accepted form of voter ID and how the new rules affected turnout at recent elections.