The political psych conference is getting a refresh this year! Please consider presenting your work. Junior faculty -- this is an EXCELLENT opportunity to build your professional network. Abstracts are due this Friday.
Let me be blunt: the way that the UK's media has approached this year's Holyrood election, particularly vis a vis commissioning MRPs, has been the most staggeringly and frankly offensively useless attitude that I have seen in any of the four Holyrood elections I've been able to vote in. Good gods.
The Blackness scale might be one of my favorite parts of the paper. People often talk about identity as continuous (“She’s Black, but she ain’t Black Black”), so we developed a way to capture that perception. We then estimate how much different traits predict those ratings.
The programme for @epssnet.bsky.social's inaugural conference in Belfast is now live.
W\ @anacweeks.bsky.social, we were responsible for chairing the Gender & Sexuality Section.
Our section will have 13 panels over 3 days. You can see the full programme here: lnkd.in/gQbba9ev
I was radicalised by post-9/11 liquids restrictions and am only just being soothed by water fountains -- which for years didn't exist and then for a few more years were well hidden, even in your core British airports. Made it through only thanks to Boots' 2 for £2 on the 750 mls.
I’m also team Last on the Plane for related reasons.
I’m team LTTA. (Despite associating the “if you’ve never missed a flight…” quote with Milton Friedman, who isn’t a hero.) It’s partly wanting to be a Clint Eastwood-style maverick, strolling in amid the worriers, and partly because I drink huge amounts of water and deeply resent paying for it.
Ahead of the local elections, here's an easy guide of how best to assess the results as they come in, including the best metrics to use and some historical benchmarks.
It's on the longer side, but is split into sections and filled with lots of (hopefully) useful data, and completely free-to-read.
So it proves: more open and more conscientious students score higher on features of both qualitative and quantitative research -- and in such similar measure that a) it seems likelier to be about personality and scale response than a methodological preference; b) it ruins the hating.
Asking about one thing at a time on a scale from 'not at all' to 'very much' isn't measuring preferences but likes. And there's probably a general tendency to report liking stuff -- a tendency positively associated with openness and conscientiousness.
I was really looking forward to some hating here (ideally self-hating because let's face it we quantitative types are hard to bear at times) but I don't think it's possible because of the strange dependent variables here, which are billed as preferences but are actually just like-dislike scales.
I just published something on my Substack about one reason, among many, why I don't think communicating public consensus on climate change is anything like as powerful a climate policy tool as people make it out to be.
open.substack.com/pub/drmatthe...
Among the many things I like about this thread, one is the reference to Lincs having “the eleven-plus” rather than having “grammar schools” or “the grammar school system”. That discursive erasure (I know!) of 75-80% of the system is such a giveaway about priorities.
(Do tankers have tillers? Lord knows.)
This tanker will take some turning around but there’s a serious wrench at the tiller here.
Yes. My bank statements reek of the krill you’re describing.
So far as I remember, there was a commitment in 1997 to raise neither income tax nor NI. The penny on NI for the NHS was brought in after 2001 and, while the manifesto hadn't promised not to raise NI, it hadn't been up front about doing so either.
I found the entire 2025 political debate in the UK just baffling.
If you went to Copenhagen, Riga, Berlin, everybody was talking about the dramatic international situation. London? Immigration (again), cost of living, rise of Reform. And opposition leaders did not exactly change the conversation./5
No, I'd say 1997 entrenched the conventional wisdom: Labour lost in 1992 having said that it would increase income tax on higher earners, and won in 1997 having committed pre-campaign not to raise income tax.
It’s not just on the spending side, either. There was never a better opportunity than 2024 to test — and, I think, disprove — the thesis that you can’t win an election if promising increases in direct taxation, even if it’s to pay for obvious and urgent priorities.
The second sentence is just unbelievable 🥺.
Map of projected seats. Constituencies are 64 SNP, 1 Conservative, 2 Labour, 5 Lib Dem, 1 Green, 0 Alba, 0 Reform. Regional list seats are 0 SNP, 8 Conservative, 16 Labour, 4 Lib Dem, 12 Green, 0 Alba, 16 Reform. Lead party per region is Central and Lothians West SNP, Edinburgh and Lothians East SNP, Glasgow SNP, Highlands and Islands SNP, Mid and Fife SNP, North East SNP, South SNP, West SNP. Gallagher Index is 14.5 - a lower index means a more proportional result.
Map of projected runners up and margins. Constituency runner ups are SNP 8, Conservative 9, Labour 36, Lib Dem 4, Green 3, Reform UK 13. In percentage terms, constituency margins of victory are 5 below 5, 12 between 5 and 10, 33 between 10 and 20, 23 above 20. Closest runner up for last list seat in each region is Central and Lothians West Reform UK, Edinburgh and Lothians East Reform UK, Glasgow Green, Highlands and Islands Reform UK, Mid and Fife Lib Dem, North East Conservative, South Reform UK, West Green.
YouGov 23 Mar - 8 Apr seat projection run through usual BBS model, rather than YouGov's MRP figs (vs 2021 on new boundaries); AMS Ideal seats:
SNP ~ 64 (+1); 46
RUK ~ 20 (+20); 26
Lab ~ 15 (-6); 19
Grn ~ 13 (+3); 17
LD ~ 10 (+6); 12
Con ~ 7 (-24); 9
(Projection caveats: ballotbox.scot/projections)
🌟 New publication 🌟
Very happy that our paper “When Legislators Do Not Differentiate: A Field Experiment on British MPs' Responses to Constituent Policy Queries” has been accepted at the British Journal of Political Science!
Current link here: osf.io/preprints/os...
Short thread below 👇
all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant
I tend to agree. Certainly it's not a line that plays to their electoral market. In our June 2025 SCOOP survey, Reform supporters in Scotland were vying with Tories as the most likely to disagree with the statement "The number of English people coming to live in Scotland should be reduced".
(To their credit, the Yes side never made much of this. But, as an uncontrolled English migrant to Scotland back in the day, I feel that I can point it out.)
Funnily enough, then, Reform are strongly anti-independence *and* strongly against the migrants (or, if you prefer, strangers) from the rest of the UK who tipped the referendum vote that way in 2014.
@scotvoting.bsky.social survey data indicated that those born in Scotland voted majority 'Yes'.
Moonglow
youtu.be/4dm3Ml9g_cs?...
🚨NEW DISINFO PAPER🚨 TLDR; disinformation circulates as narratives, not false facts. This paper took five years (!!!) and a rotating cast of collaborators and GRAs. Our case studies include the pee tape, and we have an entire appendix justifying that. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
UK politics now in a bidding war of universal fuel subsidies (sorry, "support") to, per ed davey "keep britain moving". The reality - that consumption must fall - is going to be a nasty surprise