BLOG POST: why I think the measurement of disproportionality in mixed member systems is wrong, and what to do about it www.chrishanretty.co.uk/posts/mixed_...

Basically, Burnham has become - regardless of its accuracy - the image of "what you think Labour should be". Put into practice, that can obviously go quite wrong, but prior to that, it makes him uniquely attractive to people who should like Labour, but currently feel alienated from it.

This is Manchester we’re talking about!?

Farage's resilience in the face of negative news draws on the fact that almost everyone has made up their mind about him His weakness in broadening Reform's appeal is that almost everyone has made up their mind about him

NEW: What exactly happened in the local and devolved elections in England, Scotland and Wales last week? @persuasionuk.bsky.social has some new polling out today which offers a first glimpse. Thread here on top line findings from each nation. 🧵

People cannot be asked to keep an issue hot, especially not one as complex and at the core technical like climate change, if the top information ecosystem is actively telling them *not* to mobilize. Climate policy is objectively hard, but the climate "backlash" is mostly an elite-driven phenomenon.

Excited to kick off another year of #AAPOR! Sharing some of my slides on a fun little survey experiment for anyone who was at a different panel (or, unfathomably, not attending a polling conference.)

Is impatience killing the government? Some data and some thoughts. @karlpike.bsky.social @philipjcowley.bsky.social and I found a year ago that people expected noticeable improvements in the NHS, schools, housing well within Labour's first parliament. www.politicshome.com/news/article... 1/7

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 New Blog 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 A short piece on how the new Senedd voting system worked! How many votes did it take to win a seat? Was it proportional? Who benefitted? Where did parties win support? And what would it take to win one more seat? If you're interested: blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/thinking-wal... 🧵👇

Llongyfarchiadau mawr i griw @yougov.co.uk ac i griw @itvcymruwales.bsky.social a @walesgovernance.bsky.social sy'n gweithio hefo nhw. Big up the whole YouGov team and the associated ITV/Wales Governance Centre teams! yougov.com/en-gb/articl...

Could Curaçao even do this?

And we have advisors who tell people not to eat bacon sandwiches in case there's a potential embarrassment.

Superb talk, thoroughly enjoyed by everyone (except those who still think that national identity is an ‘unmoved mover’, despite the massing evidence that it’s been heavily politicised across the UK by recent referendum campaigns and results).

We are here at LSE for their 2026 Elections event organised in collaboration with POAL! 🗳️ Throughout the afternoon, top academics on elections and public opinion in the UK will be giving their analysis of what happened on 7 May, what this means for the country, and what happens next.

The Nick Clegg Theory of Everything: since 1970, the delicate stable state of British politics has hinged on the Lib Dems or their previous iterations being the repository of protest votes and doing absolutely nothing with them; once they entered government, all the wheels came off.

At some point on my lifetime we might get a government which recognises that having an entire tier of elected institutions which are just powerless complaints departments for a failing social care system is not a healthy or sensible state of affairs.

National identity reconfigures brain responses from “them” to “us” Briefly priming national versus ethnic identity increases ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation for ethnic out-group faces, a pattern typically reserved for self and in-group processing. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I spent way too long this weekend correlating 81 census variables with local election results, so you don't have to. Enjoy! datawrapper.dwcdn.net/QQQ3D/7/

In Scotland's system - MMP with a large SMD tier and small-magnitude PR tiers - the SNP has 44% of seats with 38.2 (27.2%) of constituency (list) votes; and the Indy-bloc has 57% of seats with 39% (41%) of constituency (list) votes.

Labour down 30 points in two constituencies declared so far @itvcymruwales.bsky.social @yougov.co.uk MRP looking pretty good at the moment across board on vote shares

Really fascinating and detailed maps on how the population of different bits of Europe has changed over the past 60 years: rural depopulation and the move from east to west being the big stories. correctiv.org/en/europe/20...

When you look at the opinions of Leave voters who have drifted away from Labour in fits and starts over the last couple of decades, two things stand out: i) They now dislike the party pretty intently; ii) They don't *believe* its attempts to move in their ideological direction. Implications?

British politics is resembling the rest of Europe: • Multi-party competition has replaced two-party dominance • Challengers are on the rise, esp. the populist right • Political realignment centres on identity politics (incl Brexit) But FPTP is poorly suited to this fragmentation

Now updated with lots more on AI and surveys: ✅ how chatbots and other uses of LLMs can probe for more accurate answers, guide new question design, and quickly bring order from open-ended chaos ❌ oh, and how to check that the bad type of bots aren’t infecting your data and ruining everything

Excited to share the BBS results page for the 2026 Scottish Parliament election. True to form, there's going to be more data on here than you can shake a stick at, giving you the most in-depth rundown available anywhere! This will all update automatically throughout the day, so refresh often!

🚨 SES Annual Lecture 2026 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @richardwynjones.bsky.social 🥀 The Decline and Fall of Welsh Labour 🕗 6PM, 23rd of May 📍 Usha Kasera Lecture Theatre, University of Edinburgh Sign up edin.ac/4mHfPKZ

And, standing out to the older among us, Dave Nellist!

A great thread here on how the muzzling effect of early assumptions has turned national identity into one of those dogs that haven’t done much barking in British electoral research.

The post was about Polanski but I was struck on the graph by how smoothly, once his quick honeymoon was over, Starmer's graph just took over from Sunak's. Talk about cost of ruling.

I was re-reading this piece on going undercover in the BNP in the mid-2000s www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/dec/... and it struck me how insane this paragraph is compared to the content of the average 'for you' feed on X.

Referendums meant to resolve constitutional questions can erode the very identities that hold a state together — Brexit may be doing exactly that, while creating new polarised ones in their place (see @sarahobolt.bsky.social & Tilley)

🚨 New Research Recently accepted at the @bjpols.bsky.social, our paper shows that Brexit led to weaker British 🇬🇧 identities among Remainers! You can read the paper by @jaclarner.bsky.social, me, and @danielwincott.bsky.social here: tinyurl.com/mrj96ywu

New from me: We need to update our priors and start thinking about the problem of online political violence as it is, not as it once was. So I am nailing this to the wall: 14 Theses Concerning Online Political Violence medium.com/the-berger-d...

New Scottish Parliament poll, Norstat 27-28 Apr (vs 30 Mar - 1 Apr): List: SNP ~ 28% (-2) Lab ~ 17% (nc) RUK ~ 17% (+2) Con ~ 14% (+4) Grn ~ 12% (nc) LD ~ 10% (nc) Constituency: SNP ~ 36% (+2) Lab ~ 20% (+1) RUK ~ 16% (+1) Con ~ 14% (+3) LD ~ 11% (+1) Grn ~ 1% (-7)

Garbage in, garb.... well, let's just say treat the seat predictions with extreme caution.

In this week's blog, @cjcarman.bsky.social discusses our data on Scottish voter awareness and concern surrounding the digital information environment 📱🗞️ Are Scots worried about fake news? Find out below on our well-trusted blog ⤵️ scottishelections.ac.uk/2026/04/30/f...

Lots of misunderstanding about Wales’s new electoral system — how it works, what it takes to get elected, and especially around tactical voting. Partly to sort my own thinking, I put together something that tries to make sense of it. Proper write-up coming soon. jaclarner.github.io/jaclarner/bl...

In just 2,000 words, @richardhywelking.bsky.social has produced a masterful guide through the last 27 years of Labour in Wales. Essential reading before next Thursday when the Labour century may come to an end www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"how was your first day at work?" [longest cigarette draw in history] "pas bien"

Trying to remember the last time I saw the term ‘gold standard’ in this context without those inverted commas.

Thanks to @profjanegreen.bsky.social, John Curtice, @stephenkb.bsky.social and @benlake.bsky.social for their excellent insights into politics and public opinion before the elections next week. Recording of an event @trinityoxford.bsky.social on 28 April 2026: youtu.be/fxbPYKJCW8U?...

The word ‘leaning’ would soon come under severe strain. The Mirror and Mail ‘lean’ politically in roughly the same sense as the Warsaw Radio Mast now leans.

Pollution levels in Paris after 10 years of advancing sustainable transport.

The FT @financialtimes.com is hiring a new data journalist to join our US data and visuals team in New York. Great job, great team, great place to work. Apply here 👉 job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/financialtim...

🚨❗ C-🐻 🏖️ 🏫 on 🧪 in 🍻 🥼 ♎ 🆙 🕟 www.ncrm.ac.uk/training/sho...

Next Thursday at noon I'll be joining @uofgpolicy.bsky.social's @profnicolamcewen.bsky.social and @kezdugdale.bsky.social, and @ipsosinscotland.bsky.social's @rachelormston.bsky.social to debut the results of an exciting (in a nerdy way) piece of work on the drivers of Scottish voting behaviour:

I will continue to post this every #WorldBookDay.

Britain's big cities are not very dense. But why? And where should they be looking to build upwards? The answer lies in the postwar housing (blue) built in "collars" around the big city centres. This is very low density + should be the priority for densification. Quick thread:

Those golden rules for polling again: 1. Avoid double-barrelled questions 2. Keep wording neutral 3. Have faintest idea about election you’re polling about