🇬🇧 UK Poll of Polls: 14 June 2026 27% ➡️ Reform 20% 🌹 Labour 19% 🌳 Conservative 13% 🍃 Green 12% 🐥 Lib Dem 6% 👽 Other 3% ✖️ SNP

MORE JOBS! The Dept of Politics is looking to recruit up to SEVEN new lecturers, with five as T&S and two as T&R. Any field is great, but we have gaps in British Politics, Theory, Public Pol, Comparative. The ad for the T&S can be found here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRW437/l... @livunipol.bsky.social

This is probably the most traditional possible behavior for the family of a pope.

A lot of people egging on or enabling the race riots somehow believe that the disorder won’t spill over onto the streets outside their own homes. But it will.

This is no more about the details of immigration policy than the progroms my great great grandparents fled were about Jews committing crimes. It's straightforward racist violence and it needs the strongest possible response.

Just got word that I've received the 2026 Edward S. Corwin Award from the American Political Science Association for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public law. I am speechless — what an immense honor.

This is also one of the benefits of proportional representation: since districts can contain multiple seats (which you can adjust), you don't have to size them to include a certain number of people, which would let you use, say, local authority areas as electoral districts.

I wonder how much of this is the fact that universities now expect students to read entire textbooks on a computer or tablet using buggy ebook apps. My experience of these things has been uniformly terrible and I wouldn’t fare well either.

Peruvian voters really looked at a presidential election and thought: “but have we considered the causal inference literature?” larepublica.pe/politica/202...

Platner epitomises how poorly the US two-party system with weak parties works. Ignoring the fact that he has Nazi tattoos(!), if he ran in here he’d have to demonstrate that his views were consistent with (I presume) Labour’s or become a Novara regular, join Your Party and never become an MP.

🇬🇧 UK Poll of Polls: 7 June 2026 27% ➡️ Reform 20% 🌹 Labour 18% 🌳 Conservative 13% 🍃 Green 12% 🐥 Lib Dem 6% 👽 Other 3% ✖️ SNP

Honestly think it's underestimated how important this is for the shaping of public discourse.

I'd like to say I've been a a productive researcher this week. Instead I've created MandelsonMail.com 👀 View 1,500+ pages of the Peter Mandelson files as his email box and WhatsApp chats. Today's @politico.eu London Playbook described it as "a lot of fun, so it should probably be avoided".

I have just arrived in Bristol! Cool city; a while since I’ve been here. Two observations: noticeably less vertical than Manchester, a lot more loose sweet potatoes too

Day off today and I have two hours to kill in the good city of Bristol. So, Bristolians of Bluesky: what should I do in those two hours?

Funny how, consistent with the common pattern, as AI has got more sophisticated the names of AI services have also become more male or male-coded. From Siri and Alexa to Claude and Grok.

Paying peer reviewers works. Expanded Fast & Fair experiment @biologyopen.bsky.social: • 5.5 vs 37.7 working days to decision with reviews • ~3 vs ~9 reviewer invitations per manuscript • no reduction in editor-assessed review quality • similar acceptance rates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's the teach journalists about counterfactuals challenge ifs.org.uk/news/rapid-f...

lol, what!? One of the weirder Social Forces book reviews ever I've seen. Going out on a limb and guessing Wimer has a negative view of Kenworthy's book?

Last year, we shared a paper showing that Labour's accommodation of the radical right did not work. We now have a new version of the paper online: osf.io/preprints/so...

Last year, we shared a paper showing that Labour's accommodation of the radical right did not work. We now have a new version of the paper online: osf.io/preprints/so...

Yesterday shows that Reform stand to do to Restore what the Tories and Labour did to Reform: draw attention to them and shift the agenda in their favour. It also shows the perils of X. Restore poll at 2-4% (ie not much) but Musk boosts them on X, making them appear more of a threat to Farage.

My research is robust in a Lakatosian sense, which is to say: endlessly patched to avoid contact with reality

Funny to think that the entire course of this parliament might be decided in the next few days.

Partly prompted by @jack-bailey.co.uk's tax posts, decided to make an Excel calculator to replicate (some core) functionality of www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php Assumed someone has created a spreadsheet of this before, so Googled. AI overview provided a formula, but... its wrong

Would probably trade hyper focus for hyper focus on the task at hand

🇬🇧 UK Poll of Polls: 31 May 2026 27% ➡️ Reform 20% 🌹 Labour 19% 🌳 Conservative 13% 🍃 Green 12% 🐥 Lib Dem 5% 👽 Other 3% ✖️ SNP

I’m online for most of the day, and yet I still read some social media comments and think: this person has had a USB port fitted to the back of their skull and is having the internet pumped directly into their brain like diesel into a Ford Transit.

Sometimes students really phone in their dissertations and they don't make for inspired reading. But, every now and again, a student will write something that just blows you away. Such a good feeling.

The reactions to this are mainly focused on the move to the right, but what's really striking in reading Blair's essay in full, is how little Labour's most electorally successful politician understands the current electorate. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

This war has been going on for a long time and as someone sat at a distance to it, it's easy to forget what it really means. Just utterly bewildering that a thing like this can happen in modern Europe.

🇬🇧 UK Poll of Polls: 24 May 2026 27% ➡️ Reform 19% 🌹 Labour 18% 🌳 Conservative 13% 🍃 Green 12% 🐥 Lib Dem 6% 👽 Other 3% ✖️ SNP

We actually have football team support in the BES and could presumably do an MRP of team support (though god knows how computationally expensive that would be)

🇬🇧 UK Poll of Polls: 23 May 2026 28% ➡️ Reform 19% 🌹 Labour 18% 🌳 Conservative 13% 🍃 Green 12% 🐥 Lib Dem 6% 👽 Other 3% ✖️ SNP

A modest case for reform: measure the rate at which someone pays income tax using a s-shaped curve rather than banding (caveat: not an economist) jack-bailey.co.uk/writing/grow...

The worst* thing is that Labour MPs are paralyzed with the conviction that the UK Labour Party has committed some terrible UK-specific crime to be afflicted ... ... by something experienced in *every liberal democracy in the world*. Including ****ing Japan! Japan!

My take on the performance of the Scottish MMP system in the recent election in light of the extended seat product model, and the question of whether the Greens were a de facto “decoy list.” fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/2026/05/21/s...

For my first choice of system, read the hat. That said, mixed-member proportional representation is probably the easiest way forward jack-bailey.co.uk/writing/just...

Probably not that great an argument given the past 15 years. There are also some nice upsides to PR. Not least the reduction in wasted votes and also the fact that countries that use PR tend to grow more quickly than those that do not.

Incredibly common student experience. Pundits work tirelessly to convince you this isn't the norm in college classrooms.

In case you're interested, AI got really good at motion graphics really quick.

@dorianlynskey.bsky.social Love the podcast, but one small correction: Germaine Greer *was not* no platformed at Cardiff University. She came and gave her talk to a packed room (with minimal protest outside). I was the event manager in charge at the time and had to deal with it all first hand!

Just had to use SOHCAHTOA for the first time since secondary school. I guess this stuff does come in handy ... eventually.

🇬🇧 UK Poll of Polls: 20 May 2026 28% ➡️ Reform 19% 🌹 Labour 18% 🌳 Conservative 14% 🍃 Green 12% 🐥 Lib Dem 6% 👽 Other 3% ✖️ SNP

I've written up some idle thoughts I'd had on the income tax system, some of the cliff-edges it creates, and how we might make it continuous instead of banded. The post includes an interactive model to play with too. Caveat: not an economist! jack-bailey.co.uk/writing/grow...

🚨 I'm recruiting a PhD student for a new project on Parties' social group ownership, based in the @vd-researchgroup.bsky.social research group at KU Leuven! Deadline for applying is 26 June, estimated starting date is 1 Oct 2026. All info is here 👉 www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo... Share widely!

Brushing up on geometry and came across this fact about US politics: Abraham Lincoln read and mastered Euclid’s Elements. It actually made me laugh out loud to consider the calibre of President the US once had versus the current office holder, who would probably struggle to finish Where’s Wally?

All countries are parochial. On top that this, being geographically isolated, large in size, or the main world power each aggravates how inward looking a country tends to be. The US -- like the British Empire and others before it -- is all three, hence the navel gazing. Probably not much more to it.

🇬🇧 UK Poll of Polls: 17 May 2026 28% ➡️ Reform 19% 🌹 Labour 18% 🌳 Conservative 14% 🍃 Green 12% 🐥 Lib Dem 6% 👽 Other 3% ✖️ SNP

I promise you Bangaranga means nothing