Merry Christmas, academics!

The 2025 Headline of the Year Nominees 🧵

🇪🇺🇩🇪 Published Today in @bjpols.bsky.social 🇮🇹🇫🇷 How a voting advice application affected voting behavior in three large-scale field experiments: shorturl.at/2ekBj TLDR of our study (with @simonhix.bsky.social & @rlachat.bsky.social) below 👇 1/14

I can’t help thinking that when, in future, people ask what UK political leaders said as it became undeniable that US saw European liberal democracy as its no1 strategic foe, Starmer and others will regret that the answer is “not much, shuffled awkwardly, looked at their feet”.

It can't be emphasised enough: we are on course for either the most disproportional Holyrood result ever, or the SNP will win far fewer seats than projections predict they will.

How on earth did she fit in her marking?

New Scottish Parliament poll, Ipsos 27 Nov - 3 Dec (vs 12-18 Jun): List: SNP ~ 28% (+2) Lab ~ 18% (-4) RUK ~ 17% (+1) Grn ~ 17% (+2) Con ~ 12% (+2) LD ~ 7% (-1) Constituency: SNP ~ 35% (+1) RUK ~ 18% (+4) Lab ~ 16% (-7) Con ~ 11% (+1) Grn ~ 9% (nc) LD ~ 9% (nc)

🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨 AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp 🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK 🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks) 🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy 🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate

You lose your wallet. Where are you most likely to get it back? It depends on how much $$$ is in the wallet. But it's better to lose your wallet in: Switzerland 🇨🇭 Norway 🇳🇴 Netherlands 🇳🇱 Denmark 🇩🇰 You're far less likely to get your wallet back in: China 🇨🇳 Morrocco 🇲🇦 Peru 🇵🇪 Kazakhstan 🇰🇿

As one who would struggle to get beyond the third press-up even on a particularly athletic day, I am hugely impressed by this and will be donating accordingly.

🚨 New working paper 🚨 Can LLMs with reasoning + web search reliably fact-check political claims? We evaluated 15 models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek on 6,000+ PolitiFact claims (2007–2024). Short answer: Not reliably—unless you give them curated evidence. arxiv.org/abs/2511.18749

No real policy motive from No 10 for bringing numbers down further, but is there a political one? Our @ukandeu.bsky.social-funded survey research on net migration says no - small benefit of getting numbers from peak to ~350k but none from further cuts bsky.app/profile/robj...

Turnout decline accounted for (45% compared to 54% from 5 years ago) and petty party gossip aside, there are regions in Southern Italy where a non-fragmented left can win. In this case, with a "lefty" M5S candidate (Fico) moving towards the PD and vice versa.

NEWS - The Politics of Imperial Nostalgia - https://cup.org/4p1QbRA "right-wing opposition to criticism of the imperial past is stronger than left-wing support" - Christopher Claassen & @danjdevine.bsky.social #OpenAccess

Postdoc call‼️ I am opening a call for a postdoctoral position within my ERC project CONSENT. Come to Madrid to be part of my research team and more broadly of the @ipp-csic.bsky.social community. Application deadline: December 10th. Call details: tinyurl.com/yfu83p9m

“Can you pinpoint the moment that you realised that civilisation was utterly irretrievable?”

help

Typically entertaining piece with a review of the research set out here: bsky.app/profile/turn...

I still don't see how it can happen this time with 119 sitting Conservative MPs and Reform way ahead of the Tories in the polls. Farage will correctly expect to win many of those Tory seats. A deal either needs Farage to stand aside in seats he'd win, or the Tories to stand aside in seats they hold

It's depressingly compelling in a way just how closely the political and social reaction to social media mirrors the advent of the printing press.

Strongly suspect that this is what will happen here in 28/9. Tories will replace Badenoch with a leader prepared to try it and Farage (as per 2019 but this time as the senior partner) will continue to deny he'll do a stand-down deal - right up until the point he does one.

Yesterday, we put out a report on the most important issues to voters. We know that immigration now tops the traditional most important issues question (see below from @yougov.co.uk). But that doesn't tell the full story. Here is a rundown of the experiments we did to test this out (A THREAD):

I (partly) blame the lecturers.

Labour now down to 18% in our latest @ipsosintheuk.bsky.social voting intention, the joint lowest we've ever had them - prev. May 2009 (expenses scandal, economic crisis). What's happening in 3 charts ...

Here’s one for the museum of 2025, a bitesize US political daily briefing

Finally some good news.

🚨 NEW in @bjpols.bsky.social : When Partygate hit Westminster, trust in Scottish politicians increased. Our experiments reveal a "contrast effect" - scandals at one level can make the other look better by comparison. Who lost most trust in Westminster? Scottish unionists. Read now #OpenAccess 👇

Lovely stuff.

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.