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...

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...