‼️Last chance to submit your paper or panel proposal to EPSS 2026 conference in Belfast is TODAY! Don’t miss out - it will be full of great political science and fun social events! 👩‍🏫🥳 epssnet.org/belfast-2026...

On the one hand, daftness. On the other, another poll which underlines how Reform voters are outliers - and current Tory VIs are at least as close and sometimes closer to LD/Lab/Green VIs

Which one is more English?

Never really certain if anyone sees these things on here, but for those who do and are interested, I am shortly stepping down from my role at the Office for Students -- full statement here: www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-an...

Kent County Council is getting underway. Slightly odd arrangements in place where usual press seats have been closed, leaving us in the public gallery, which has 14 seats. Far more than 14 people are here, leading to several journalists and others being left outside of the room. But we’re in.

How are contemporary cleavage structures stabilized in times of declining mass social and political organizations? In this new paper with @davidattewell6.bsky.social @bjpols.bsky.social, we suggest that homogeneous social (educational) networks provide part of the answer. tinyurl.com/49cs8jwp

The number of full-time academic jobs outside the U.S. listed on JOE is down, and lower than during COVID. Could partly be due to increased formalization of European mkt and perhaps less use of JOE.

open.substack.com/pub/geoffmul... A lot of very important points in a short post

This is an important but I'd also add: enjoying the attention and interacting with people. Politics is still partly a popularity contest after all!

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.

🚨 EPSS Belfast 2026 Call for Papers - One week to go! 🚨 Don't forget to submit your paper or panel proposal to the European Political Science Society @epssnet.bsky.social 2026 conference - just one week to go before the deadline: epssnet.org/belfast-2026...

I truly think this is an underappreciated point that much of the "rising far right" polisci literature has missed. We have n->inf findings that bad stuff leads to far right voting. But why _doesn't_ bad stuff lead to far left (or center left) voting? One big answer: A failure of political supply.

My first thought was 'How does this fit into the narrative spun by Matt Goodwin and co'? And then I realised I was only thinking that because of this chap's name. So in a way, their rot has already set in, even within myself.

I hope it is now obvious why pillars of democracy like universities, the law, public broadcasting should be funded so that they are beyond the reach of financial coercion by hostile agents.

The BBC has consistently platformed Matt Goodwin because of his racist views and the veneer of respectability brought by his past life as an academic.

Studying social sciences & humanities makes students more left-leaning, controlling for initial views & major preference, driven by cultural views. Implies that if all students majored in business, college–noncollege ideological gap would shrink by 1/3 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Notable that the government is pursuing the most unpopular options in terms of addressing the funding crisis in HE (and it also won't be enough): www.moreincommon.org.uk/media/1wuozg...

52 per cent say the benefits international students bring outweigh the costs but 30 per cent believe the opposite. 23% want fewer international students: 63% would maintain numbers (39%) or increase (24%). Over half of Reform voters would reduce. (Both govt + opposition aim to reduce the numbers)

New research from @nspmartin.bsky.social, @ralphscott.bsky.social & @rolandkappe.bsky.social shows how school subjects shape politics — arts & humanities students lean liberal, while economics & technical students lean conservative www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/w... @uompols.bsky.social

Very poor from the government: it won't review suitability of X for its communications, and insists on keeping secret its previous review.

The Python Software Foundation has turned down a $1.5m grant from the National Science Foundation as it came with a restriction that they would not operate any programs (at all - not just funded by the grant) that promote diversity, equality or inclusion… pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...

Thread. In all 3 presidential elections with Trump on the ballot, the polls had a Democratic bias, although it decreased over time. But that bias was gone in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections. The bias persisted whenever Trump was on the ballot, and no method of sampling/recruitment prevented it.

I keep being told spending cuts are easy. Honest proposals such as those recently outlined by Policy Exchange show they are not My column www.ft.com/content/f086...

A true "instant classic"

How can we compare the size and structuring power of different cleavages over time? Check out @jacobgunderson.bsky.social 's great paper and dataset for scholars working on cleavages at the party system level! The latest from @dpzollinger.bsky.social and I's Special Issue in @wepsocial.bsky.social.

Agree that this shows a serious misunderstanding of something like YouGov's panel works. But (being generous) it does raise an interesting question around the role of polls in tactical voting. This will only get more important given the potent mix of fragmentation with first past the post!

An additional headache for Lab is that voters Greens appeal to most strongly - in particular students, young grads and Muslims - often cluster together in the same seats, including many where Greens came 2nd last July and are winning local elections. Conditions forming for big Grn FPP breakthrough

Younger people who voted Labour are going Green, young people who couldn't vote or didn't vote are going Green. Many uncertainties in politics but here's one sure thing: this group will be bigger at next GE than now - voting age going down and more people becoming eligible.

I’m really starting to suspect that most of the tech bros haven’t actually read Tolkien, as they certainly don’t understand it. The gentle hobbits save the “hard men” of Gondor, largely through compassion and selflessness. Not the other way around. The Christian parable is barely hidden!

This is absolutely right. It’s about creating a permission structure for violence, whether that violence is conducted by the state directly or simply permitted by the state.

Good to see @dailymail.co.uk @thetimes.com and @telegraphnews.bsky.social all delete their articles - sad the lies went up in the first place

One year ago

Government in waiting!

Via Martin Wolf, here is what happens when populists take control. on.ft.com/47fVDsb Maybe the UK was pitched exactly onto this curve. We got Brexit and Johnson, and it dropped our GDP by 4% relative to not doing that. Elect another populist government in 2029, and maybe we'll get the next 6%

Which means, with rising student numbers, a significant deterioration of workload for colleagues who are lucky to still have a job

Missing here is another way unis are managing costs: a de facto hiring freeze across much of the sector (judging by how few jobs are being advertised)

It is really important that the BBC do better. The Mason piece conflates an 83% Plaid/Reform vote as a "none of the above" view of politics, that is mostly Reform in England, but has a competitor in Wales Key here is a Welsh majority are *very* unfavourable to Reform bsky.app/profile/sund...

"Within a seminar series, women are interrupted more than men... Interruptions that are negative in tenor or tone, or cutoff the presenter mid-sentence, increase for women presenters"

Reform lost by 11% in Caerphilly - because of a surge in turnout, because Reform looked set to win the seat. This illustrates Reform's vulnerability *because* they are leading the polls (in a 6 party system) while being an *unpopular* party. A much bigger problem under FPTP 2029 than PR 2026

Is deliverism a doomed strategy? Does social media have an inherent right-wing bias? And have materialist theories of politics been discredited? Renewal co-editors @morganj0nes.bsky.social and @dmk1793.bsky.social interviewed @whstancil.bsky.social about his controversial political analyses:

Caerphilly, Senedd constituency by-election result: PC: 47.4% (+19.0) REF: 36.0% (+34.2) LAB: 11.0% (-34.9) CON: 2.0% (-15.3) GRN: 1.5% (+1.5) LDEM: 1.5% (-1.2) GWL: 0.3% (+0.3) UKIP: 0.2% (+0.2) Plaid Cymru GAIN from Labour.

A policy *supported by a smaller % of the population* than it would seek to deport!

Stephen on top form this morning @stephenkb.bsky.social. www.ft.com/content/9a1d...

I admire Haidt in a strange way. He's found an absolutely ingenious way of tapping into progressive "ethical concern" brain and redirecting it to conservative "control, order". He did the moral foundations research and boy is he using it. I wish we could invent the opposite public intellectual.

this is a trend on the other site right now, funny imo if you’re allowed to say that these days

Would love to see the education split on this