Keir Starmer uses the answer to the ‘engagements’ (first) question at PMQs as an opening statement. On average, they are around 153 words, but some have been longer (e.g. about 586 words on the China spying case), leading to criticism that he’s using them as a substitute for a full statement.

Missing here is another way unis are managing costs: a de facto hiring freeze across much of the sector (judging by how few jobs are being advertised)

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN 🎉 The PSA Parliaments Annual Conference 2025 will be hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York in conjunction with The White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership on the 27th-28th November!

📣 We are very excited for this year’s @psa-parliaments.bsky.social annual conference taking place at the University of York! 📝 More details and registration: psaparliaments.org/annual-confe...

It is briefings day! We are releasing newly updated versions of our briefings, plus three new ones! The series covers topics from the constitutional principles that underpin democracy to the role of citizens' assemblies. Use this mega-thread to browse them. And find out more 👇

ON THE BLOG: Prime Minister's Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons: Lessons in parliamentary reform @ruxandrasrbn.bsky.social explains how Canada's experiment with a Prime Minister's Question Period procedure between 2017 and 2025 worked and how it differed from the traditional model.

New Working Paper 🚨 I am introducing the new dataset on Parliamentary Elites in Authoritarian Regimes (PEAR). It includes information on the composition of parliaments in 819 legislative terms in 130 autocracies from 1945 - based on over 200k individual-level observations. tinyurl.com/48h68hmh

1/ Whatever you think of digital ID, the process matters. And in 2025, this is still how we make big public policy. 👇

It was great to talk about all things PMQs with @ruthfox.bsky.social and @darcyxtip.bsky.social on @hansardsociety.bsky.social Parliament Matters! We discuss why France and Canada have experimented with PMQs, and why it may be time to retire the ‘engagements’ question. youtu.be/OtpApR3fNQE?...

Want a good starting point for learning good principles of Dataviz? I'd highly recommend @andrew.heiss.phd course--Data Visualization with R. Reading materials, slides, lecture videos, examples, code, etc. are all posted for free on his website.

Couldn't even finish this cos I thought I would turn myself inside out like a pretzel with cringe. The stupid, it burns! www.theguardian.com/education/20...

#NZPol www.rnz.co.nz/news/thehous...

🎉 PSA Parliaments Annual Conference on 28 Nov @york.ac.uk 🎉 📣 Call for Papers is now live! Submit your abstract here: bit.ly/4o879gP ✏️Our ECR methods workshop will also take place on 27 Nov! Apply here: bit.ly/3J4uQXk 💻 Check out our website for more details: psaparliaments.org/annual-confe...

This is the kind of article APSR used to be famous for. The ones that make your brain explode, that challenge you, confuse you, test your patience, and make you smarter by making you realize your limitations. Well done Erica Simmons and @nickrushsmith.bsky.social‬ 👏

We live in an era of democratic backsliding. But the terminology of "backsliding" isn't up to the task of making sense of the deep crisis of liberal democracy around the world. I've just finished a working paper that lays out what I think is going on. tl;dr it's about the state and society 🧵

Changing adversarial behaviour at PMQs is a collective action problem. MPs and parties criticise it, but continue to engage in it because confrontation draws attention to PMQs and is the way it has worked for a long time. Meaningful change would require all parties agreeing to stop engaging in this.

I’m really pleased that the @psa-parliaments.bsky.social conference will be at @uoypolitics.bsky.social this November! If you work in the field of parliaments or legislative studies please consider applying More details on the website: psaparliaments.org/annual-confe...

I've been working on something on this and here's a sneak peek of recent trends in Politics job adverts on jobs.ac.uk Here's a scatterplot and (GAM) trendline showing that the number of advertised politics jobs has pretty much halved since 2021.

After debate this amendment was not pushed to a division, the Bill will return (after 3rd Reading) with 3 principal amendments: 1) phasing hereditaries out by abolishing by-elections 2) essentially banning unsalaried lords ministers 3) allowing creation of life peers without a seat in parliament

Today the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill is set to have its second day of report stage in the Lords. We will mainly be looking out for amendment 23, from Crossbencher Lord (Terry) Burns. This would cap the chamber's size at 650 and limit prime ministerial appointments. A thread 👇

Me, on a podcast, talking about backbench rebellions. What else do you want? pod.link/oppositionca...

Brilliant scoop from the always excellent @sophiealichurch.bsky.social at @politicshome.bsky.social: The QEII Centre *finally* agreed as the decant location for the Lords during Restoration and Renewal www.politicshome.com/news/article... #WestminsterRR

If anyone has something like this for the UK I'd be very intrigued...

If true, this feels like a very unfortunate continuation of the “AI will make qualitative research scalable” trend, which misunderstands the core premises and aims of qualitative research.

What is a parliament? This workshop aims to start a fresh conversation on this classic question in legislative studies. ⏰ You have two more days (deadline Friday 4 July) to submit a brief paper proposal. Sign up details below ⬇️

We have new opinion polling on House of Lords reform! There is overwhelming public support to go beyond the government's current plans to remove hereditary peers (due to be debated in the Lords on Wednesday), including to limit prime ministerial appointments and cap the chamber's size. A thread 👇

📢📢📢 CfP: What is a Parliament? ***Hurry! Deadline is this Friday!*** Interdisciplinary workshop on 19th September 2025 in London. Full details below. Kindly sponsored by Birkbeck, the University of Birmingham and @psa-parliaments.bsky.social Please apply and/or spread the word!

Budapest Pride! Sent from a friend on site. ❤️

NEW BLOG: The urgent need to update the Cabinet Manual The Cabinet Manual, a road map for the UK’s uncodified constitution, has not been updated since 2011, despite some significant constitutional changes taking place. @lisajames.bsky.social argues that updating the Manual should be a priority.

Want to easily scrape data from news media sites? There's an R package for that! paperboy "paperboy offers writers of web scrap[ers] a clear path to publish their code & earn co-authorship on the package, while deliver[ing] news media data from many websites in a consistent format."

After last week's vote in the Commons, could the assisted dying bill be blocked in the Lords? New piece by me for @uk.theconversation.com. 'Assisted dying: what happens now the House of Lords has the bill?' theconversation.com/assisted-dyi... #AssistedDyingBill

Most literature reviews miss the point.
 Not because they’re sloppy. 
But because they treat the literature like a box to tick. In my latest Respect the Marble Post, I carve out a 6-step process to writing a meaningful lit review: catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/most-liter... 🧵

Thinking ahead to ECPR in August 🥲

Leaders are getting older in presidential democracies and all types of dictatorship. Yet, they are actually getting younger in parliamentary and semi-parliamentary systems!

In 2017, PM Trudeau started answering all questions on Wednesdays, in effect introducing a Prime Minister’s Question Period. PM Carney returns to the traditional Question Period model - answering a few questions at the start of each daily QP (usually except Fridays). www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

The second edition of The Effect has been delayed a bit... because there were so many orders they had to switch to a bigger print run! Thank you everyone for your support, and check out the second edition here: www.routledge.com/The-Effect-A...

I am incredibly proud that my book, co-authored with Andrea Aldrich, is published. Using an original party leadership dataset from 11 parliamentary democracies, Andrea and I show that women candidates face a glass ceiling for leadership and quickly sink once elected (the quicksand theory).

side effect of AI-in-higher-ed: having to spend my ONE WILD AND PRECIOUS LIFE googling footnotes for articles that I can't believe I missed off my reading lists only to discover that they aren't, in fact, real articles

🚨New publication! By now, we know 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 democratic institutions autocratizers undermine, yet we (w/ Gorazd Ordanoski) ask: 𝑯𝒐𝒘 do they attack them? We present three sequential repressive steps: 1️⃣ legitimization rhetoric 2️⃣ legal engineering 3️⃣ coercive control 🔓🧵 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

my totally unsolicited end-of-the-semester advice to junior scholars is to keep the nice notes that students write to you in a safe place so you can reference them when things get tough in the future.

Join us on 18 and 19 June for our free, online conference exploring Labour's constitutional agenda in office. We have now finalised our line-up, which features the Minister for the Constitution and eight other cross-party MPs! Find out more and sign up 👉 www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution....

The elections in Poland will raise doubts about semi-presidentialism, rightly so. But it is important to get the critique right. There is unfortunately a widespread belief in political science & comparative constitutional law that constitutional design does not matter for democratic backsliding. 1/

Very excited to see the new edition of Exploring Parliament and our chapter in print 💙 Thank you @ameakin.bsky.social @estrangeirada.bsky.social @louisevthompson.bsky.social for all your fantastic work! 1/

🚨 “Good Description” with @annagbusse.bsky.social 🚨 What sets 'good' description apart from 'mere' description? We develop a framework for evaluating descriptive research, whether we are doing it as scholars or assessing it as readers. Two main contributions... 🔗📄 tinyurl.com/gooddesc

UK has a comparatively difficult registration process. Our comparative analysis of registration difficulty in 62 countries is timely as Labour consider introducing automatic voter registration. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

ON THE BLOG: Exploring Parliament: working together to make sense of Westminster A collaboration of academics & parliamentary practitioners has led to a new book, the 2nd edition of Exploring Parliament. In this post its editors explain why it is necessary and what they hope it will achieve

🚨 We're hiring! Join us at @LMU_Muenchen for the DFG-funded project "Democratic Persuasion: How to Make the Case for Democracy." Interested in making scholarly & societal impact? We’re looking for: 🔹 1 Postdoc (100%) 🔹 1 PhD researcher (70%) Starting: Oct 2025 | Apply by: July 8 More info ⬇️ (1/7)

The Constitution Unit's annual conference is taking place on 18 and 19 June! Cross-party politicians and experts will explore constitutional paths taken and not (yet) taken after one year of a Labour government. And we are very excited to have the Minister for the Constitution speak! Sign up 👇

Interested in debates about how to measure democracy and/or the use of observable and judgmental indicators? Then check out this piece.