Joe Chrisp

Wonder if there’s a more surefire way to get research shared on Bluesky than to paint Musk or his businesses in a bad light

Today's stories saying the unemployment rate has risen from 4.6 to 4.7% tell only part of the story. The same data - the Labour Force Survey - shows this rise comes from more people who were inactive starting to look for work and so being classified as unemployed, which is good news 🧵 /1

Not really sure what the balancing of rights and responsibilities has to do with it. Voting is a right and a responsibility. All of the things you name are similar. So your argument is more that you should get the rights and responsibilities in different spheres of life at exactly the same time

What messages might Reform be vulnerable to? Exploring weaknesses in the Farage brand - an experiment.

We know a lot about what makes people vote Reform. But what kind of opposition messages might Reform or Farage be vulnerable to?

Some new @persuasionuk.bsky.social research out today as featured on @newstatesman.com pod! Give it a read if you want.

strongmessagehere.substack.com/p/what-messa...

Alas still not yet the old version

Article abstract, which says: The educational cleavage is restructuring electoral competition in many democracies, yet there has been insufficient attention on how variation in educational content affects this. In order to address this, this article combines English administrative school records with a unique representative panel of adolescents to estimate the within-individual effect of studying different subjects at school on political party preference. This analysis finds that studying arts and humanities subjects leads to greater support for socially liberal parties, whilst studying business and economics increases support for economically right-wing parties. Students who study technical subjects become more likely to support socially conservative and economically right-wing parties. These relationships between particular subjects and party support also persist into adulthood. As such, this article provides new evidence on the importance of subjects taken in secondary school for political socialisation, during the impressionable years of adolescence.

📣 NEW PAPER ALERT! 🚨

"School subject choices in adolescence affect political party support"

Just published in @wepsocial.bsky.social with @nspmartin.bsky.social and @rolandkappe.bsky.social.

doi.org/10.1080/0140...

🧵👇

Completely agree

That's fair particularly re:Economist usage. But in the UK at least there is only one far right party of significance and think you'd be hard pressed to argue it's extreme right. So I'm not sure it's really substituting for the umbrella term, more just a new way of describing Reform specifically

I get that but if the most precise term (PRR) is less stigmatising than the term the media uses, can it really be said to be sanitising them?

While it is obviously annoying to us academics when the media use lazy terminology (in my field '2-child benefit cap' really winds me up), is 'hard right' more sanitised than 'populist radical right'? Right wing media are always using hard left as an insult

Universal Suffrage? The problem of low and unequal turnout and the case for compulsory voting  - The Constitution Society An authoritative new report from Dr David Klemperer advocates for the introduction of compulsory voting at UK general elections.

My new Constitution Society report on compulsory voting has now been published.

I argue that low turnout has left the UK with an unrepresentative electorate. This is creating warped incentives for politicians, and contributing to low growth, high inequality, and rising democratic discontent.

Universal Suffrage? - Campaign for Compulsory Voting This report - authored by Dr. David Klemperer, and published jointly by the Constitution Society and the Campaign for Compulsory Voting - sets out in detail the case for introducing compulsory voting ...

Our campaign launches today with the publication of a new Constitution Society report setting out how low and unequal turnout is undermining UK democracy, and why "Australian-style" compulsory voting is the most effective solution

The 1906, 1964 and 1997 governments all took several years to work out a coherent social security policy; some might ask if Wilson ever got there. If the Starmer government is serious about reducing poverty, this is a natural point for a reset and a proper review of the social safety-net.

While it is true that the fall in the taper rate has pushed UC receipt up the income distribution, the vast majority are in the bottom half. And in your Turn2us link it shows that the Surbiton family receives no UC and only receives child benefit

Problem is the benefit cap will take away a lot of the gain from removing 2-child limit for these families

Keeping the benefit cap obviously really restricts your ability to make a difference with deep poverty in large families and means there is an effective child limit for families out of work. I want both gone but if punishing children for parents' mistake is your thing, keeping Benefit Cap is enough

I don't know whether the £3.5bn figure factors this in. But the cost of removing the 2-child limit tomorrow is c.£2.5bn but £500m of that is actually clawed back from the benefit cap. Unsurprisingly many more households hit the cap without the 2-child limit

Not sure if you meant the 2-child limit or the benefit cap but the interaction between the two of those is quite interesting. I'm not sure the (IMO abhorrent) moral argument many make in favour of 2-child limit even works given the benefit cap exists

Which tbf would have quite a significant impact on child poverty, just not as much bang for your buck as removing 2-child limit

Would be roughly the cost of increasing child benefit by £5 a week

Not to get bogged down in survey methods as we clearly agree but you probably would get more people saying they’re not religious if you asked them ‘Are you religious’ instead of that. I just mean there’s probably some people who half knew it’s not CB who slipped up from not paying attention to Q

Sounds perfect :)

Haven’t seen anyone call it the 2-child benefit limit

I probably agree it doesn’t matter despite finding it annoying but 2-child limit for means tested benefits/UC seems fine to me

That is striking (although it requires a bit more brain power given it’s a trick question). I guess I was wondering if that is just inevitable consequence of ppl not understanding benefits or if the term the media repeatedly uses has had an impact

Find that really quite surprising (and interesting)!

Is this saying that more people saw their age group/generation as an important part of their identity than class, gender or area?

Here’s hoping

Do we think the repeated use of '2-child benefit cap' to describe the 2-child limit matters or is it just pedantry to care? There is def widespread misunderstanding that it applies to child benefit and I would assume some confusion with the benefit cap. But is it a losing battle regardless of terms?

And an even smaller share of employment!