Today I’m excited to launch Nation, State and Politics - a Substack exploring the powerful role that ideas of nations and nationhood play in shaping the political forces swirling around us today nationstateandpolitics.substack.com/p/nation-sta...

My story revealing that MP Rupert Lowe has been paid £40k from posting on X is in Playbook PM Graph below shows how Lowe has massively overtaken the Reform MPs with his X earnings throughout this year

Here's a slightly crazy diagram illustrating today's major Cabinet reshuffle You're welcome

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...

Latest @thehousemag.bsky.social piece - on how to rank MPs, inc one of my fave academic studies, which put Diane Abbott to the right of Giles Radice. Also includes Rush reference.

Any great PhD or postdoctoral researchers out there who fulfil the attached criteria and who are interested in: 1) Formal logical models of electoral systems 2) Multilevel regression + poststratification 3) Digitising comparative elections data Please let me know! I want to get you to Manchester!

Mega presence for @sotonpolitics.bsky.social at @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social! #PSA25 @dbonansinga.bsky.social and @profannikawerner.bsky.social on populism @rikkidean.bsky.social on democratic resilience @elizabethjevans.bsky.social on feminism Myself on urban-rural divides in trust (1/2)

Just a couple more days left to apply for this one day PhD/ECR event in Manchester next month - travel and accommodation covered!

📣 CALLING ALL QUANT SOCIAL SCIENTISTS! 📣 Do you know of causally identified research that estimates the effect of higher education on political attitudes? @elizabethsim0n.bsky.social and I are currently working on a meta-analysis on this question and we need your help!

Join Dr Alexandru Cernat & Dr @conorgaughan.bsky.social sky.social for a session on Open Data & digital footprints. Learn about anonymizing and linking digital data to surveys, the DIGSURV project, and an online MSc in Data Analytics and Social Statistics. Register: zoom.us/webinar/regi...

You can also see a short summary & discussion of our @psrm.bsky.social paper @bbcmaryam.bsky.social’s excellent The World Today show from Monday 🦸‍♀️ doi.org/10.1017/psrm...

🚨We are so excited to announce that we are hosting the PSA Women & Politics @psawomenpol.bsky.social 2025 Annual Conference here in 📍Southampton! The conference, Troubled Times: Gender and Politics in the 21st Century, will be held from 📅 17 to 18 June! More details are in the CFP linked below.

UK’s poorest households now worse off than poorest households in Slovenia Analysis shows if wage growth continued in line with the pre-2008 trend, the average worker in the UK would be earning £12,000 more per year today, Business and Economics Editor Joel Hills reports www.itv.com/news/2025-03...

Just over two weeks to go to apply for this exciting PhD and ECR event here in Manchester at the end of April - with funding to cover travel and accommodation. Get your abstracts in now! Get the word out to your colleagues and PhD students!

Helpful NYT article showing 30 exclusion restriction violations for studies claiming covid is an instrument for their preferred x variable nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/09/upshot/covid-lockdown-five-year-charts.html

Still a real lack of right-wing presence among UK politicians so far, but overall is looking good 🇬🇧🦋

The majority of Labour, Lib Dem and Green MPs are now on Bluesky And many of these MPs appear to be regularly posting on this platform

Our article 'A Crisis of Political Trust?' led by @viktorv.bsky.social is now out in @bjpols.bsky.social! We use >3,000 surveys in 143 countries between 1958 and 2019, finding that trust in representative institutions has generally been declining in recent decades. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Happy to share that my paper (w/ James Tilley) is now out in @bjpols.bsky.social We show that expenses misconduct by British MPs was not associated with political distrust among their constituents. Open access here: doi.org/10.1017/S000...

I'm assisting @robfordmancs.bsky.social in organising this ECR event for UK in a Changing Europe. Get your papers in, come to Manchester, enjoy the rain, have a drink, go home, tell your mates how good it was.

Another great paper from @sotonpolitics.bsky.social in BJPOLS. This is from one of our great PhD candidates

First ever publication alert! Do you credit all the software you use in your research?👀 In a new article in Computational Communication Research, we investigate when software gets mentioned in research articles and what makes a tool more likely to be cited. Read it here: doi.org/10.5117/CCR2...

Check it out if you haven't already! 👇🏻🚨👇🏻

Really cool work by @chanret.bsky.social and @vlazarov.bsky.social! Speaking of left-right positions of UK MPs, it turns out that their social media followership is also an extremely effective way of generating ideology estimates too 👇👀👇 doi.org/10.1017/S000...

Among MPs with an estimated ideological position (i.e. those who were MPs in 2023 - see www.cambridge.org/core/journal...), the most likely to vote for assisted dying were on the centre-left

Interesting paper and a super useful dataset of MPs' positions in the replication data. At a glance, I'd say the method works better for more obscure MPs (e.g. it correctly identifies almost all of the Socialist Campaign Group as very left-wing but not Corbyn). Neat!

This looks v cool! And useful for when they all (hopefully) migrate here 👏

New (and first) paper from one of our fantastic PhD candidates at @sotonpolitics.bsky.social out in @bjpols.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S000... @conorgaughan.bsky.social will be on the job market soon(ish) so you should keep an eye on him if you're looking to hire in computational social science

"In future, there may be the potential for generating new estimates using this same method via alternative social networking sites, if we see significant uptake by UK politicians." (p.12) 🦋⛅🦋⛅

A mapping of how Bluesky is becoming the new Scientific Twitter mikeyoungacademy.dk/bluesky-is-e...

🌍 "Whether someone voted Leave or Remain in 2016 is not just a good predictor of their views on Brexit, but a reflection of different world views across a range of topics" 🚨🆕 @jydenham.bsky.social @conorgaughan.bsky.social & Tim Oliver on how English voters view the world & the UK’s place within it

🚨 New blog out with UKiCE: 🚨 A taster of some of the work @jydenham.bsky.social, Dr. Tim Oliver and I have been working on 👇🏻 Seven years on, Brexit identities still divide foreign policy views in England and these views cut across a range of areas from the E.U to climate change

Great working with So’ton PhD candidate @conorgaughan.bsky.social on this research. Taster for longer paper on English and Scottish foreign policy views. With Tim Oliver Loughborough also. ukandeu.ac.uk/how-people-v...

Great to see this article out! Looking forward to future studies of the Bluesky network...

Bluesky annoyingly doesn't allow you to edit posts, so the correct DOI link is here: doi.org/10.1017/S000...

🚨Happy to share that my first academic paper has been published by @bjpols.bsky.social! Using work from my PhD thesis, this research provides estimates of left/right position of UK MPs (2019-2024) using their Twitter/X follower networks. Open Access: doi.org/10.1017/S00071…

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #288,456!

This is a fantastic data-driven account of Elon Musk's online radicalisation - with some very nice visualisation. www.wsj.com/tech/elon-mu...?

Made a starter pack. A (non-inclusive) list of kind and supportive political scientists. Includes supportive mentors & colleagues, as well as friendly & fun peers :) go.bsky.app/S4LPfwu

Twitter alternative? News publishers see potential in Blue Sky

After a lull for most of the year since Bluesky dropped its invite-only system in Feburary, the number of new posts and profiles containing the words Twitter/X and 'refugee' or 'asylum' has spiked again over the last three weeks.

The political science network on Bluesky is now at just under 1,600 users with almost 74,000 unique connections! I've also published this network as an interactive graph so if anybody wants to find themselves, follow the link: conorgaughan2.github.io/polisky_netw... (*Not mobile-friendly)

I have 5 more invite codes going spare if anyone knows of anyone still trying to get themselves over here!

New #rstats package incoming! 🚀 With the fantastic @benguinaudeau.bsky.social and @favstats.bsky.social, I introduce: {atr} A package to get and post things here on BlueSky! jbgruber.github.io/atr/index.html

Testing out Blue Sky's API and mapped out the Polisky network using members of @profmusgrave.bsky.social's Political Science feed! The nodes are connected by which users follow each other in the network, coloured by modularity class and sized by their in-degree (i.e: number of followers).

Hi @profmusgrave.bsky.social I am a PhD student in Quant PoliSci, could you please add me to the polisky list?

Our polisci department is now set up, on 👉@sotonpolitics.bsky.social Don't forget that we're also hiring across all ranks with a deadline of 6th October 👇 bsky.app/profile/soto...

Anyone in polisky who knows of anyone else who is looking to get themselves over here, I still have invite codes going spare! 🔵⛅