Two of the most counterproductive political system choices you can make, which increase corruption but sound good, are: 1) low salaries for elected office holders and bureaucrats 2) term limits for legislators

Q: How important is a representative sample? A:

If you’re a methods teacher who tells students that they can’t say anything about a result with a p-value of >.05, then you’re part of the problem so there’s no point looking all scandalised at this.

ANES Data Release! electionstudies.org/data-center/... The 3-wave ANES panel is now available. It merges data from 3 election studies (2016-2020-2024), the first time the ANES has collected interviews of the same respondents across 3 presidential elections.

The job of a good message isn't to say what is popular. The job of a good message is to make popular what we need said. MAGA and Madison Avenue have known and exploited this. But it also very much applies to campaigns for good. www.weekendreading.net/p/bringing-a...

I suppose one option for those beleaguered city executives might be to pay their graduate entrants a bit more.

Nano-targeting is not a persuasive weapon: it is a dissuasion and polarization weapon. New paper out osf.io/preprints/so... with the brilliant Thomas Robinson, @simonhix.bsky.social and @fresejoris.bsky.social – the first to quantify the perverse incentives/inherent democratic dangers of this tech.

team of postdocs in the lab meeting proposing the 15th joint paper when I ask them when we will find time to write it

I asked ChatGPT to write a brief history of Winston Churchill in the style of Boris Johnson and I think it's fair to say this sort of op-ed is easy to mimic...

Big questions. Brilliant speakers. This term at @EssexGov: 📊 Demographic change 🌐 Great power politics & the UN (with ModelUN) 🌍 Africa in multilateral organisations Join us! Link in bio. #PoliticalScience #EssexGov

🚀 And this marks our launch of the CampAIgn Tracker 🇳🇱! @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social and I are glad to finally publish our dashboard where we monitor the use of AI imagery in campaign messages, by parties, politicians & other actors during the election #tk2025 See here www.campaigntracker.nl/en/

A perceptive and wide-ranging analysis of this award that (perhaps not coincidentally) doesn’t even mention Donald Trump. theconversation.com/nobel-peace-...

A Brief History of Men are Becoming Less Manly 🧵

This Olé House sounds even better (if such can be imagined) than the original.

This time in two weeks, we will launch our autumn/winter seminar series. We have an exciting line-up of four online talks covering a range of topics in political psychology. All presentations are on Thursdays at 12:00 UK. Sign up to attend here!: www.psa.ac.uk/specialist-g...

“Sure, I did say that we needed to be less London-centric, but let’s not go mad here.”

Absolute must-read from @profjanegreen.bsky.social and @martamiori.bsky.social. It's hard to imagine how Labour could be getting it more wrong - not least by talking up the replacement of the Conservatives by Reform, which will only accelerate the cannibalisation of the former's vote by the latter!

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

If Labour and other parties can't find a way to scrutinise, criticise and condemn a policy like this, they give Reform a free ride and make the future less safe & certain for those who come here, work hard and contribute.

📣New #openaccess publication on Western European #party systems within the #Sartori symposium on IPSR. lc.cx/b_xy8Y A short 🧵👇

158. AP-GfK, 2009: "If you had to choose, would you prefer to attend a wedding that served champagne and caviar, wine and chicken breasts, or beer and pigs in a blanket?"

Just out at JOP (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....) : Why do so few working-class people hold office? It's not lack of interest. Noam Lupu and I ran 10 surveys in 8 countries and found no evidence of a social class gap in how often qualified people consider running.

BES Research Fellow @jamesdgriffiths.bsky.social has spoken with The Economist about our Parliamentary Affairs paper on how British voters are volatile, but their choices are now structured by party blocs after the Brexit realignment. Read here: www.economist.com/britain/2025...

1/ How does migration affect political attitudes? Using 380k obs from 104 sending & 28 receiving countries, @filipkostelka.bsky.social, Nicolas Sauger & I find some migrants’ attitudes align with locals, while others exceed origin-host context, reshaping ideological space. 👉 doi.org/10.1111/ajps...

Sir Robert Worcester, legendary pollster and founder of MORI (now Ipsos UK) has died at 91. He taught so many people so much about the value and importance of opinion polls in modern democracies - everyone in our industry and politics owes him a debt of gratitude.

Either have to accept co-payment as a built in part, raise broadbased taxes or both. Frankly at this point I no longer have opinions on what the best way to fund healthcare in the UK is, I just want someone to advance one of those three real-world options.

Radical right accommodation really does not work. New paper out with this exceptionally talented team @katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk doi.org/10.31235/osf...

New blog on indyref mandate 🗳️ By our PI @ailsahenderson.bsky.social, this blog investigates attitudes to #indyref2 timing and whether there is a middle ground on the "mandate" question 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧 Particularly relevant given the FM has set out @snp.org's stall scottishelections.ac.uk/2025/09/03/i...

🚨New Research 🚨 Ahead of the release of Wave 30 of the BES Internet Panel, the team has examined Labour's decline since the 2024 GE. Labour's support has splintered into mostly indecision or left-liberal parties, but they've also lost their few right-wing voters. 🧵⬇️ tinyurl.com/3m62exph

Anyone else on here ever felt a sense of despondency, even despair, at the values and priorities of 52% of fellow citizens?

Hitting ~350k is significant - our recent survey experiment finds no real political benefit to getting overall net migration numbers below their current level See earlier thread on the findings - bsky.app/profile/robj... @robjohns75.bsky.social @williamlallen.bsky.social

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)

Whispers: a lot of the UK’s problems would probably get a bit easier if we put up income tax.

I have a new article out at @polstudies.bsky.social. In "Electoral Hope", I make the case that supposedly irrational "wishful thinking" is actually a crucial part of how voters make rational sense of their role in democracies. OA link: doi.org/10.1177/0032...

Hard for us to imagine what this must feel like, eh, @danjdevine.bsky.social?

Narratives about how hard it is for teenage boys, and subsequently men, to deal with romantic rejection are so weird to read, as a woman who was also once a teenager. Until you realise that they’re entirely built on the premise that girls and women are the gatekeepers to sex and relationships.

Unrelated to my trying to write a grant proposal, here's some stats on: - Reviewer responses at two journals - Reviewer times These are only papers I've handled (N reviewers = 271), with an almost 50/50 split between @jeppjournal.bsky.social and @poqjournal.bsky.social .

Harsh on Jocky Wilson.

This is unconscionable when families with kids must often budget for childcare, high rents, student loans and mortgage repayments.

🇺🇸 New blog! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @cjcarman.bsky.social takes a closer look at our data on Trump support in Scotland ahead of the US President's visit. How popular is DJT? Are Reform UK supporters MAGA? And does the support of young men travel across the pond? Find out below! scottishelections.ac.uk/2025/07/18/t...

📣 Postdoc (75 %, 3 yrs) at @unigreifswald.bsky.social — start autumn 2025 on perhaps Germany’s most beautiful campus. Know someone with a PhD (or nearly done) in Political Science? ⬇️ #PolSci #Postdoc

Irritating quotation from Seldon. Thatcher had a "clear and consistent plan", so the 79-81 crisis was fine. Except her government performed a screeching U-Turn on its core economic (monetarist) policy, despite her rhetoric. I don't expect most people to remember that, but I do expect historians.

Surely my online speed awareness course should be on Teams, not Zoom.

cc: my co-authors

Further confirmation, from today's Ipsos Scotland poll, that the rise of Reform UK in Scotland is a unionist phenomenon - just 2% of 2024 SNP voters would vote for Reform now. Just 8-10% of those who would vote Yes in an independence referendum would vote Reform.

New WP w/ @riazsascha.bsky.social: via >42 million placebo tests, we show type I error inflation in Unexpected Event during Survey Designs (UESD), propose an adjustment, implement via new R package uesdRobust, and demonstrate utility by replicating two top UESD studies. osf.io/preprints/os... 1/9

Seems a bit disrespectful to Muller.

A paltry three points says that Labour has already lost most Corbyn-curious voters in current polling. The big question is: how many would they lose in the kind of it-really-could-be-Farage general election in which they'd otherwise bank on stripping back a fair bit of Green and LD support?

Today: attendees get personalized feedback on projects from PAIR faculty, a class on designing research for impact (@piariggirozzi.bsky.social), and mixed methods (@profannikawerner.bsky.social & @elizabethjevans.bsky.social).