Some lovely polling published by the Policy Inst at KCL today on partial quotations www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-insti...

Feel like we should bring back the old twitter follow friday to boost good people on here who maybe didn't get an initial boost from the starter packs. So follow @psurridge.bsky.social and @profjanegreen.bsky.social - two excellent and thoughtful political scientists.

These estimates of public support for violence (from www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/o...) are inflated - *much* higher than what we and others have found using question wording that reduces acquiescence bias: brightlinewatch.org/accelerated-... The vast majority of Americans reject political violence.

would have been good to see some push back from edsall on this. it's incredibly important to get these numbers right, and this unfortunately does not pass muster

Peter Mandelson Sacking Day seems to come around sooner every decade. My SKETCH of Today in "No! Not Peter! Not again?"

Ever struggle to explain why your research is relevant? Sometimes the data just does it for you! 👇 Has anyone seen a more dramatic poll discrepancy than this one from Spain nationwide polling? CIS has PSOE +9.0pp, while NCReport has PP +9.4pp *over the exact same fieldwork*! 🤯😅

An interesting analysis – which isn’t reflected in ‘would you consider voting for X’ data (which suggests Reform *is* reaching parts UKIP didn’t). There’s no contradiction: Reform is reaching more voters, but only because of Con/Lab collapse. Suggests ‘Reform Modernisation’ narrative is overdone.

Somewhat sensationalist headline here obscures some really interesting research - which tallies with other available tracking data - on shifting attitudes to climate in the UK. Below are a few quick thoughts on how to understand this, in my view 👇 t.co/gDqlQgQBHn

🚨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...

Sigh. "Might consider doing x" does not equal "set to do x".

In polling world, “synthetic sampling” (using LLMs to replace human respondents) has been getting a lot of attention recently. Last wk, Ipsos announced a synthetic panel! But does it actually work? Here’s a white paper I wrote: “Your Polls on ChatGPT” report.verasight.io/synthetic-sa...

Had it been presented with comment, that comment might have noted the good reasons not to take these answers at face value. In hotly politicised contexts, poll responses are often expressive rather than sincere: that is, people give what they know is the right answer to support their side. (1/3)

"And the award for the least truthful or effective use of polling in an election campaign in all time goes to....."

The headline here should say: "Number of private schools increases by 35 - showing fears of an exodus to be unfounded". (The increase is mentioned way down the article.) www.thetimes.com/article/19ef...

The shared conviction of everyone running election night coverage that no one staying up all night to watch the election could really actually be interested in the, y'know, election is one of the mysteries of senior TV management.

Welsh election law now requires local candidates to list their party memberships in the last year. That's good for transparency re. those listed as independents. It also gives us things like this... (Abermaw, Gwynedd by-election, polling this week)

I won't be posting any opinions how ever much you like this post.

Since people keep asking... We don't know with confidence how 16 and 17 year olds would vote. Polling evidence is quite scant because young people are some of the hardest to reach (and I would expect those you can reach will be disproportionately engaged and, therefore, not very representative). 🧵

Anthony's listed a litany of VI polls with hypothetical parties that massively inflated that party's support. I'd add to it that Panelbase found that 12% of voters would "definitely" vote for a hypothetical, Alex Salmond-led party. Alba won 1.66%.

There are some hypothetical VI polls with a new Corbyn party doing the rounds. Take them with a pinch of salt. It's a very natural thing to ask, but it's very difficult to do (and these things - voting intention polls asking about hypothetical new parties - have a *terrible* track record).

lol the clear implication of this briefing is that someone associated with a PR firm pretended to be an irate rich person on the phone to get a plug for a client who sells services aimed at irate rich people

I recognize this is a losing battle, but to keep blaring that trumpet: "Push poll" is a term of art, referring to a voter-persuasion technique masquerading as a poll. That is DIFFERENT from a real poll that asks people how their vote would change if they knew [X].

I'm reading the report behind these headlines about glyphosate and it may be the most scientifically illiterate thing I've come across (although it's a close thing with the recent MAHA report). 1/n

"if a piece of writing reports poll results out to the tenths place, stop reading it" is certainly not infallible, but I wouldn't call it a terrible rough heuristic for spotting writing that fundamentally misunderstands or doesn't care about how polling data works or what makes it useful

Note the BBC Projected National Share (PNS) also includes adjustments for multimember wards to count voters equally. PNS projects to places in Britain without elections last week, and estimates what the result would have been if all 5 parties (Con, Lab, LD, Green and Reform) had stood everywhere.

% vote from 2025 local elections, with adjustments for multimember wards so voters count equally. Reform 31 Con 23 LD 17 Lab 14 Green 9 All 1399 divisions Source: BBC For info on unrepresentative character of places with elections: electionsetc.com/2025/05/01/u...

Grrr. Lowest ever level *from More in Common* (it is good practice to compare like to like, but it does mean headlines like this are rather easy to come by for newer companies). Labour last down at this sort of level in 2019 before More in Common were polling.

Very good corrective to the frankly psychopathic right-wing war on Motability exploding across twitter and the hard-right media over the last couple of weeks www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

What a bizarre and terrible column this is by Simon Kelner, suggesting that Starmer raising the issue of the Ebbsfleet Spiders is like Trump's claims about transgender mice. When it isn't, because the spiders thing is *actually true*. inews.co.uk/opinion/keir...

Sometimes a co-author might be listed first due to alphabetical order, or the toss of a coin. And sometimes — as in this case — the first author was the undoubted star of the show and did far more than his fair share of the work. So I’m adding my grateful congrats here!

Anyway, if MailOnline are going to stick their story behind a paywall then I'm going to make mine available for free for 24 hours. So have a read, stick this in your WhatsApp group, and just help me spread the word about where to get the real thing. www.londoncentric.media/p/harry-pott...

One for those who like field experiments with validated behavioural outcomes and political identities doi.org/10.1086/730718

Politics Live just referring to this poll claiming alarming decline in support for democracy among the young. Except there isn’t. This has now been debunked several times (Mark Pack’s linked post is the most thorough) but the only thing remembered and cited in debate is the original headline.

I have a new article in @electoralstudies.bsky.social 🎉 It uses conjoint experiment in the UK to test how important the culture war (statues, LGBT+ representation in pop culture, DEI, transwomen athletes, curriculum diversity, and university free speech) is to voters Link👇 & results 🧵

This is very good and thorough on that Channel 4 poll claiming half of Gen Z think we’d be better off with a dictator.

Very useful piece on whether "Gen Z" has really given up on democracy. It brings out a key problem with the reporting of polls: that what we often get are very contestable analyses, spiced with numbers that give an impression of scientific precision. And it takes a lot of digging to challenge that

There's more from that shonky Zoopla poll. Deary me.

As Jim says, this poll looks like bullshit. A clearer point though is that it is very obviously, definitely NOT to do with VAT on schools. The poll was of parents who had applied for a school place in the last five years. The overwhelming majority of those applications were before VAT on schools.

This is extremely shoddy poll reporting.

If you are (or know) a student interested in politics, elections, public opinion & quant methods and are looking for a sandwich placement for 2025-2026, we're currently recruiting for our student placement in the YouGov political team boards.eu.greenhouse.io/yougov/jobs/...

Perhaps you’re considering a January detox: herbal teas, mud baths and the like. By all means knock the booze on the head for a bit. But the rest of it? Total bollocks. Because you already have a liver and kidneys. Here’s something I wrote a while back. www.theguardian.com/global/2017/...

We're recruiting for our student placement for Aug 2025 - Aug 2026. If you are a 2nd year student looking for a placement year and are interested in politics, polling & quant methods (or perhaps, given my followers, if you teach lots of them) do take a look. boards.eu.greenhouse.io/yougov/jobs/...

Okay fully behind it now.

This is a odd story. The number of seats remained the same, so the boundary changes made no net difference. Some MPs got more people, some got fewer. Some MPs do have more people living in their constituencies than others because of unregistered people. But that's not new from the boundary review

Ed Davey's charity single is all well and good but my plea to the Lib Dems is to give the people what they really want and release the Clegg/Carly Rae Jepson video.

A thread about being wrong: 5 years ago, we wrote a paper about how how newly enfranchised 16-year-olds vote in Austria. But we were wrong. This year, @elisabethgraf.bsky.social, @schnizzl.bsky.social, Sylvia Kritzinger and I are setting the record straight: authors.elsevier.com/c/1juT5xRaZk...

Just how wrong might the Labour Force Survey have been about employment, unemployment and inactivity rates? My new paper estimates these rates independently of the LFS and gives quite different results... www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications... 🧵

Just going to post #TomorrowsPapersToday here tonight as well as at the other place as a little test…

I had two great-great-great-uncles who were rival speed skating champions in the 1850s and 1860s (they were joint-champions in 1861, because one of them was "hampered by a scythe injury").

Far be it from me to suggest that the story on the right should probably be interpreted in the light of the story on the left...