Given today's @appgfairelections.bsky.social letter, it's worth noting that - as things stand - PR would work out better for every party except Reform and the SNP. FPTP (Electoral Calculus) vs Perfect PR: ➡️ Ref 355 v 189 🌹 Lab 101 v 130 🐥 LD 59 v 78 ✖️ SNP 45 v 20 🌳 Con 35 v 124 🌍 Grn 18 v 91

A++++++++

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre has confirmed he received a message from Donald Trump at the weekend saying he was no longer interested “purely” in peace due to not getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

This is an excellent piece on the purge of public servants from the federal government. So many dedicated and talented people pushed out. We are worse off without their skills. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Jan and Feb tour dates for my film 'Fires and Fascism' announced! I’ll be attending each screening in person for a discussion afterwards about community, what might be drawing people towards Reform, and sharing ideas about what to do next. Trailer and tickets: fires-and-fascism.co.uk

PhD position @ Uni Leeds on justice & UK climate policies shorturl.at/WNqiV supervised by myself and Dr @anneowen.bsky.social - pl consider applying / forwarding to potential candidates 🙏 Please note: only UK fees applicants will be eligible. Application deadline: 6 March 2026

How do central bankers talk when their reputation is at stake? Here's a brief post about a recent study by Christel Koop and myself on the Bank of England: shorturl.at/uGnF7 @kcl-spe.bsky.social @govjournal.bsky.social

Want to come spend two years in the UK working on a research project? Come to KCL on British Academy International Fellowship. Guidance for our internal selection process available here: www.kcl.ac.uk/research/fun... happy to chat about it

2026 Political Networks Conference: 4-7 August 2026 at the University of Manchester. Save the date! More info will be released in early spring. #SNA #polinetworks #polnet #polisky #networkanalysis #politicalnetworks #politicalnets #policynetworks #complexsystems #netsci #polmeth #polisci

We had a good run

This is one of our favorites!

Merry Christmas and friendly reminder that Jesus was a brown, woke, anti-capitalist refugee from the Middle East who had two dads, became a rabbi, wore flowing dresses, ran around with sex workers, preached radical inclusion, railed against income inequality, and was brutally killed by the police.

For this piece, I compiled a systematic dataset of California environmental litigation going back to 1973. Wealthy homeowners and businesses account for the vast majority of lawsuits restricting growth.

Journal article: “the data are available on request” The data:

new from me: are data centers going to wipe out water supplies? how much water does ChatGPT really use? and what's going on with that big correction in Empire of AI? i went long on the conversation around AI and water, and how it's actually about what we want resources to be used for:

An analysis of 700,000+ climate change papers found that the five most climate-vulnerable countries produced 0.04% of them. US, China, Uk, Germany, Australia, meanwhile, account for 52%.

Thanks to @johnholbein1.bsky.social I learned about this paper on rent control in Berlin. Because I was marking, I immediately downloaded the replication materials. bsky.app/profile/john...

We're looking for a colleague (postdoc) 📢 @politikuhh.bsky.social 3+3 years Doing your own research while teaching 2.5 courses per semester Research agenda with links to our team (democracy, digital politics, political competition/behaviour) DL 🗓️ 05/01 stellen.uni-hamburg.de/jobposting/6...

🚨 3-Year Postdoc in Political Science at Aarhus University 🚨 I’m seeking to recruit a postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu research project 𝑬𝑸𝑼𝑰𝑳𝑰𝑩𝑹𝑰𝑼𝑴 on state-citizen interactions. Link and more information in second post. Position Start: Fall 2026 Application Deadline: ‼️ February 5, 2026, 23:59 CET ‼️

“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47% drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, & critical reasoning. Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage.”🧪

We are hiring! The Department of Network and Data Science of Central European University (Vienna) has an open position for an Assistant Professor in network science and computational social science.

We humans have such a hard time letting go... and an equally hard time with abstract risk. There is no saving places like this, we will see bigger storms and higher seas, so it is either find a way to transition or suffer abrupt, too often cataclysmic shifts. Great article.

Geographers in December are like, “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away, this year, to save me from tears, I'll give it to someone spatial”

Republicans in rural Georgia are voting for Democrats for the first time in their lives in order to stop expansion of data centers and escalation of their utility bills, leading to landslide upsets www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/u...

“When researchers randomly displayed these flood risk estimates to 18M people browsing Redfin, those who saw the feature were more likely to search for homes w/ low flood risk, according to a working paper published in the Nat’l Bureau of Economic Research last Nov*.”🧪 * www.nber.org/papers/w33119

Yes but no-one could have predicted this at the time www.thetimes.com/business/eco...

Rachel Reeves says there’s a “hole” in the public finances. A new decade-long Brexit study explains it: a 6–8% hit to GDP – that's £180bn-£240bn a year – means less tax, less investment and less money for everything else. Brexit made Britain poorer. Much poorer.

📣 We're hiring a postdoc in political science for our ReJust project @uni-konstanz.de! Project with Dirk Leuffen @leuffen.bsky.social and Urs Fischbacher 3-year position | Deadline: Dec. 15, 2025 | Start: April 2026 Please share widely 🙏

The proofreader deserves a medal

🚨 New draft 🚨 We built an LLM-enabled system to measure greenwashing scores in 1 million worldwide Facebook ads. We found vast networks of Facebook pages sharing pro-fossil fuel messages & show that ads are targeted at left-leaning areas with fossil fuel investments. Link: doi.org/10.48550/arX...

Based on very cool analysis by @benkeys.bsky.social and Philip Mulder @nber.org www.nber.org/papers/w32579

Ever wondered why some countries get recognition while others struggle to be seen? My book 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘴 is finally out in the world! 📘 academic.oup.com/book/61560

The weird jewellery policy, first in Denmark, is back! I wonder why these kind if strange policies are proposed. Any ideas? One possibility: they distract people from other unpopular policies, or make other unpopular policies seem relatively more reasonable. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Modern rightwing populism is the belief that billionaires will fight for you but they/them baristas are out to get you

Too good not to share, even if it is from twitter.

Quick thread on the BBC and the political and societal significance of recent developments: One of the main reasons the UK has historically been so much less polarised than the US, is that Britain has a shared source of information, consumed and trusted by most people regardless of their politics.

Indeed! Let me add that Brexit has led to levelling up by levelling down and this has -- if anything -- benefitted right-wing populists. brexitcost.org/brexitcost.pdf

During the Great Recession (2008-09) UK GDP fell by 6%. Thankfully, it mostly recovered after 5 years. Since Brexit referendum (2016) UK GDP has fallen between 6% and 8%. Unclear whether and when it will fully recover. www.nber.org/papers/w3445...

congrats to everyone for thinking this through before signing very big contracts to put it on every student’s device at the school or university you run

it me

I do think this sort of open, gutter racism becoming normal enough that they feel comfortable saying it on TV is probably the most damning indictment of the last 5 years.

We are hiring PhDs and postdocs to work on the ERC project GETGOV, where I am the PI. We will investigate governing elites since 1789. I am sure that it will be a lot of fun and result in great research! Postdocs: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... PhDs: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Andrew Bailey, "For the foreseeable future, the impact of Brexit on economic growth in the UK is negative" "Making an economy less open, restricts growth"

Aggregate Result of the 132 Council By-Elections (for 135 Seats) since the 2025 Local Elections: RFM: 48 (+41) LDM: 39 (+13) CON: 14 (-15) LAB: 12 (-32) GRN: 11 (+2) Ind: 6 (-3) Local: 3 (-4) SNP: 1 (-1) PLC: 1 (=) Explore: electionmaps.uk/byelections-...

heartbroken to learn the pope sympathizes with the poor. how can i continue to believe in god

Very possibly no political official in history has made so much corrupt money at a pace like this. Mobutu and Marcos looted a greater share of their countries’ wealth over decades but in absolute terms and in speed, Trump shamelessly puts them to shame.

Congrats to Joel Mokyr on winning the Economics Nobel Prize! Throwback to two years ago, when he visited King's College London and gave a talk on his upcoming book about Europe and China's divergent economic and political paths over the past millennium youtu.be/Ti8JkeXrDqs?... @kcl-spe.bsky.social

The iron law of climate politics: everyone is "in favour of climate action" [as long as it means zero change to existing lifestyles]

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.