🧵1/ Our first meta-science paper (with 350+ coauthors) is published today in Nature. It presents one of the largest-ever reproducibility projects in economics & political science.
Here’s what we found 👇
Not interested 😂
Delighted our paper (with an amazing group of co-authors) is forthcoming in the APSR
Takeaway for Labour and other centre-left parties: fixing public services is key to reducing support for the populist right
👇
📄Published Today in Nature:
500 researchers reproduced 100 studies across the social & behavioral sciences to assess their analytical robustness (led by @balazsaczel.bsky.social & @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social).
Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me...
TLDR: 1/11
🚨 New POAL brief from @victoraraujo.bsky.social & @miriamsorace.bsky.social out now: how to properly evaluate the causal impact of shocks, debates, and political crises on public opinion.
Diagnostics, pitfalls, examples … all in three pages!
Read here: www.poal.co.uk/POAL_brief_U...
AJPS article from @kenbenoit.bsky.social, Scott de Marchi, Conor Laver, Michael Laver, and Jinshuai Ma on using LLMs to analyse political texts.
🧵 1/8 Social science research requires reliable extraction of information from texts to identify authors' preferences on various policies and issues.
Turns out sorting below the threshold is quite hard
HOPE not hate stands in solidarity with Jewish communities in Golders Green and around the country after last night's arson attack.
This cool website tracks and collates union wins & achievements (partially) through automated means - fun to browse & could make for a really interesting dataset!
watcha.site
The Royal Liver Building, Liverpool
The call for papers for #EPOP2026 in Liverpool (17–19 September) is now open!
We welcome submissions across all areas of research on elections, public opinion and parties.
Deadline: 26 April
Submit your proposals here: www.liverpool.ac.uk/politics/eve...
@polstudiesassoc.bsky.social
As @bwalker.uk points out at the other place, progressives being undecided until late *could* be coming up in polls as they will be Don't Knows and will need squeezing for vote intention. We already know that DKs look quite a bit like Labour voters in policy views. So an undercount on the left?
Important data about Gorton & Denton from @bwalker.uk.
1. Only around 5% of Lab 2024 voters switched to Reform vs 36% to Greens.
2. No evidence of support for Reform among under 35s (sub 10%) - it's all over 55s
3. Progressives were undecided til last minute
www.newstatesman.com/politics/pol...
I think it's an important point, but we can learn lots about policy without identifying causal effects, right? E.g. the primary point of this is to describe the structure of a bunch of correlations, which we surely can learn something from
The ultimate economist take Bo 😉
In 2024, 744 parties competed in the Indian general election, 10 times as many as in the UK. Yet we describe both as 2-party systems. Why?
My new post explains how to count like a political scientist: using the *effective* number of parties.
jack-bailey.co.uk/blog/what-is...
A headline in the Times was inaccurate and they have issued this correction: “YouGov is not making changes to its methodology or to any previously published results. We are happy to make this clear”
We are not changing our methodology or results, which accurately predicted Reform's vote at GE2024
If I had to guess (always a bad idea) I suspect there would be changes to the freedom of expression and freedom of association components following on from the Public Order Act 2023 and use of the proscription powers under the Terrorism Act (2/2)
The UK decline (shown below) is particularly marked. It's surprising to see a decline to below levels of the 1970s, when there was (for example) internment without trial in parts of the UK (1/2)
A bit of data science, a bit of social history, what more could you ask for?
Another excellent blog by @laurenleek.eu
open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...
Screenshot of the Wikipedia page for Southampton Test
Oh no, someone left the testing constituency in!
New w/@scottclifford.bsky.social.
Lots of work uses agree-disagree scales, and a lit review shows these are 1) frequently just measured in one direction (agree = higher trait) and 2) correlated with each other.
This has potentially big issues for conclusions.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
This is really worth reading, not least as it highlights how the 'Hero Voter' idea has been twisted beyond all recognition in most commentary and Westminster briefing.
As Maria Sobolewska and I first said in Brexitland, the legacy parties under FPP are like Tinkerbell - they need belief to survive. if people cease to believe they see the best and only options, they can die fast. Is this the moment Labour’s Tinkerbell dies?
Well, no, they’re not just as wrong. The bigger error is not seeing that “trying to win over voters from a party on the opposite end of the spectrum, whose values your core voters oppose” is not same as “chasing voters from party on same side ideologically whose values your core voters like.”
Here's a table in the new @britishelectionstudy.com book (forthcoming). We calculated 'second preferences' - here Labour voters after elections 2015 to 2024.
50% of Labour's 2024 voters had Greens as second preference. 42% the Lib Dems. The left bloc is coalescing behind the most viable left party!
Labour should have focused the campaign more on what voters really care about: the licensing terms of critical national geospatial datasets.
