Laura Serra

The Greens, Your Party and Labour’s left challenge | British Politics and Policy at LSE With the creation of Your Party and the Green's soaring popularity, Labour is facing a more serious challenge on its left than on its right.

💡New! With the creation of Your Party and the Greens’ soaring popularity, @lauraserra.bsky.social and Jenevieve Treadwell trace the movement of voters to the left, and argue that Labour is facing a more serious challenge on its left than on its right.

blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandp...

Measuring What Matters — Labour Together Knowing what issues are most important to the public is the bedrock of understanding voters. Ironically, its own importance can’t go understated. This report applies some overdue methodological experi...

Overall, we find that immigration looks important in polls because it’s highly salient, not because it outranks daily concerns.

Polling captures the salience, but requires a bit of digging to see the whole picture of public priority.

You can read more here!: www.labourtogether.uk/all-reports/...

The only Legitimate Concerns about asylum seekers are concerns for their well being and safety. For a rich country like ours to incessantly whine about these people as if we are their victims is perhaps the single most pathetic spectacle in British politics over the past quarter century.

Thank you! ☺️

Political Socialisation in the UK: Describing Generational Changes of Values - International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society A growing bulk of research examines intergenerational shifts in attitudes and the extent to which they are attributable to new cohorts of voters being socialised under different socioeconomic and cult...

🚨 New paper with Maria Grasso on generational shifts in political values. Despite talk of rising age polarisation, we show that gaps in attitudes are stable or even narrowing. Economic attitudes move in cycles, while social values have become more liberal – mainly due to generational replacement.

Most British young men reject the far right - UK in a changing Europe Emilia Belknap and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte explain their analysis on the demographics of Reform UK voters in the UK. They argue that while the dominant narrative is that young men are the most likely ...

🚨 🆕 analysis w/ @turnbulldugarte.com: most British young men reject the far right @ukandeu.bsky.social Despite media claims, 71% of young men & 75% of young women say they’d never vote Reform UK. The gender gap exists, but it’s steady across ages—not youth-driven.
🔗 ukandeu.ac.uk/most-british...

A graph from the FT showing government spending by age cohort. Over-70s have more spent on them than any other age cohort.

Print and send this chart (from your newsletter on Tuesday) to every household in the country.

Hollow laughter

Today is #WorldPostDay, marking the establishment of the Universal Postal Union—a UN agency coordinating postal policies globally. The post revolutionised communication and is an increasingly common voting method, so to mark the occasion, here are some of our recent articles on postal voting... 📫 ✉️

Politics is not like selling biscuits, where the task is to find out what people like & flog it to them.

It's a moral activity. It's about arguing for the things you believe in. It's about *shaping* the "median voter".

Farage has moved the centre-ground of politics. His opponents can move it back.

I'll have more to say on Reform's proposals to scrap ILR at some point but for now I'll just note this - anyone telling you this is a popular idea doesn't know the polling. Overwhelming majority of public back giving people who work and pay taxes most or all rights after 5 years or less

🤭🫶🏼🫶🏼

And that’s a wrap for another EPOP
– my all time favourite conference 🫶🏼

Always the greatest pleasure to reconnect with this lovely bunch of people, meet new ones and share ideas over panels and (too many) late nights

what if I don't really care about career stuff but instead actively enjoy choosing to live in a smaller place because I get to be surrounded by interesting people and music and culture and art and things to do! what then Bloomberg!!!!

Do Moderates Do Better? Uncovering Bias in Split Ticket’s WAR Scores

We took a close look at Split Ticket's WAR metric, which has become influential in Democratic circles for suggesting moderates significantly outperform progressives.

Our finding: The metric contains systematic biases that overstate the advantage of moderation. A corrected model shows no advantage.🧵

Violent, lawless, broken Britain? The facts tell a different story The populist narrative of a migrant-driven crimewave is catnip on social media and oil to the wheels of Reform. But it is so far from the truth that we’re in danger of losing sight of the country we l...

Glad to see increased reporting on the disconnect between reality and the public perception of reality. "If you could choose any era to live in Britain, but not your place in society, you’d choose right now"

www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

Youth support for right & far-right parties/ideas is considerably higher in Latin America than Europe, and a lot of that has to do with the different issues championed by these parties...

¿La derecha conquistó a la juventud latinoamericana? El giro hacia la derecha rompe con la tradición progresista de América Latina

A very interesting piece on growing youth far-right support in Latin America (including a couple of quotes from myself and @casmudde.bsky.social), and on how this party family differs from their European cousins. www.connectas.org/analisis/der...

Full video here (en français 🤗)

I was on Swiss TV news the other day discussing the British electoral reform and where it sits in broader trends

(tldr; as I’ve said probably a billion times now, a lot of the concern/excitement around the youth turning to Farage en masse is most likely misplaced - at least for now!)

A very enjoyable and topical read for anyone wondering what the implications of lowering the voting age might be - featuring some of my research on generational shifts in values and voting behaviour! Give it a read ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Restoring trust in our democracy: Our strategy for modern and secure elections

The govt's reforming democracy paper isn't perfect, but it's a serious attempt to make registration easier, to reduce barriers to participation and to increase the number of people voting.

That's a very welcome contrast with the last govt's approach to electoral reform.
www.gov.uk/government/p...

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...

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My first time at #ISPP! Excited to present our research on generations and electoral psychology this weekend.

Hit me up if you are also in Prague and want to hang 🤗

South Korea gender divide update 😲

Young men lean right by 50 points
(74% conservative vs 24% centre-left)

Young women lean left by 22 points
(58% centre-left vs 36% cons)

follow me for more insightful and sophisticated quotes

This is superb.

“There is only one system that has ever truly protected Jews over time, and that is liberalism”

“Illiberalism always turns on Jews. There are no significant counterexamples. In the end, authoritarians protect Jews until they don’t.”