Rob Johns

A Brief History of Men are Becoming Less Manly

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This Olé House sounds even better (if such can be imagined) than the original.

Political Psychology | The Political Studies Association (PSA) Political Psychology is a multi-disciplinary group established to provide a forum for collaboration, discussion and support for political psychology scholars and practitioners as well as to facilitate...

This time in two weeks, we will launch our autumn/winter seminar series. We have an exciting line-up of four online talks covering a range of topics in political psychology.

All presentations are on Thursdays at 12:00 UK.

Sign up to attend here!: www.psa.ac.uk/specialist-g...

“Sure, I did say that we needed to be less London-centric, but let’s not go mad here.”

Article - Nuffield Politics Research Centre

Absolute must-read from @profjanegreen.bsky.social and @martamiori.bsky.social. It's hard to imagine how Labour could be getting it more wrong - not least by talking up the replacement of the Conservatives by Reform, which will only accelerate the cannibalisation of the former's vote by the latter!

Some lovely polling published by the Policy Inst at KCL today on partial quotations www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-insti...

If Labour and other parties can't find a way to scrutinise, criticise and condemn a policy like this, they give Reform a free ride and make the future less safe & certain for those who come here, work hard and contribute.

📣New #openaccess publication on Western European #party systems within the #Sartori symposium on IPSR.
lc.cx/b_xy8Y
A short 🧵👇

158. AP-GfK, 2009: "If you had to choose, would you prefer to attend a wedding that served champagne and caviar, wine and chicken breasts, or beer and pigs in a blanket?"

Just out at JOP (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....) : Why do so few working-class people hold office? It's not lack of interest. Noam Lupu and I ran 10 surveys in 8 countries and found no evidence of a social class gap in how often qualified people consider running.

BES Research Fellow @jamesdgriffiths.bsky.social has spoken with The Economist about our Parliamentary Affairs paper on how British voters are volatile, but their choices are now structured by party blocs after the Brexit realignment.

Read here: www.economist.com/britain/2025...

1/ How does migration affect political attitudes? Using 380k obs from 104 sending & 28 receiving countries, @filipkostelka.bsky.social, Nicolas Sauger & I find some migrants’ attitudes align with locals, while others exceed origin-host context, reshaping ideological space.
👉 doi.org/10.1111/ajps...

Sir Robert Worcester, legendary pollster and founder of MORI (now Ipsos UK) has died at 91. He taught so many people so much about the value and importance of opinion polls in modern democracies - everyone in our industry and politics owes him a debt of gratitude.

Either have to accept co-payment as a built in part, raise broadbased taxes or both. Frankly at this point I no longer have opinions on what the best way to fund healthcare in the UK is, I just want someone to advance one of those three real-world options.

Radical right accommodation really does not work.

New paper out with this exceptionally talented team
@katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk

doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Is there a constitutional middle ground in Scotland? Attitudes to indyref mandates Constitutional preferences (Yes or No to independence) in Scotland invoke polarisation far more than they do consensus. Identifying a middle ground on preferences might be difficult, but more than a d...

New blog on indyref mandate 🗳️

By our PI @ailsahenderson.bsky.social, this blog investigates attitudes to #indyref2 timing and whether there is a middle ground on the "mandate" question 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧

Particularly relevant given the FM has set out @snp.org's stall

scottishelections.ac.uk/2025/09/03/i...

🚨New Research 🚨

Ahead of the release of Wave 30 of the BES Internet Panel, the team has examined Labour's decline since the 2024 GE.

Labour's support has splintered into mostly indecision or left-liberal parties, but they've also lost their few right-wing voters.

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tinyurl.com/3m62exph

Anyone else on here ever felt a sense of despondency, even despair, at the values and priorities of 52% of fellow citizens?

I didn't have the time to seek out and tag in every author included above, which makes me feel pretty ungrateful given how helpful they've been to me and hopefully now to @niceonecombo.bsky.social.

Bots and baddies: supporting the integrity of online survey research in the face of a growing challenge - Quality & Quantity Numerous online surveys are impacted by bot and fraudulent data and the techniques employed are becoming increasingly sophisticated. However, many researchers are unaware of this growing challenge and...

And this piece highlights the 'moving target' nature of the problem.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The quiet collapse of surveys: fewer humans (and more AI agents) are answering survey questions I show data on two trends undermining surveys: the collapse of human response rates and the increase of AI agents. I'll also discuss downstream implications and propose some possible solutions.

At least if bots are helping out as interviewers, it'll distract them from doing our surveys as respondents -- the biggest threat to the field and something unavoidable in teaching methods these days. A superb blog by @laurenleek.eu sets out the mess we're in: laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-quiet-...

Comparing Chatbots and Online Surveys for (Longitudinal) Data Collection: An Investigation of Response Characteristics, Data Quality, and User Evaluation As chatbots are gaining more popularity than ever, they have recently been considered as interesting tools for survey administration in social science research. To explore this idea, we investigate...

No, say @claesdevreese.bsky.social and colleagues -- and respondents don't even like chatbot surveys much either.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Chatting about the unaccepted: Self-disclosure of unaccepted news exposure behaviour to a chatbot Conversational technologies such as chatbots have shown to be promising in eliciting self-disclosure in several contexts. Implementing such a technology that fosters self-disclosure can help to ass...

Do chatbots help to improve the quality and honesty of survey responses? Yes, say www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... and dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1....

Finally, some pieces concerning the future of surveys amid AI and LLMs and whatnot. (I understand the abstracts, at least.)

The first is about using LLMs for imputation:

www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/16...

Next, a piece on the (probably over-estimated) effect of mode on rates of satisficing:

Clement S.L., et al. (2023). Satisficing Behaviour in Web Surveys: A Comparison of Web and Paper Mode across Four National Survey Experiments. Survey Methods: Insights from the Field. surveyinsights.org?p=16640

And @usociety.bsky.social have usefully highlighted the limited potential of norm messaging to boost likelihood of response.

www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/wp-content/u...

Since it's too depressing just to talk about plunging response rates and how no one knows what to do about it, here's something related but more fun:

de Leeuw, E, Hox, J, Silber, H, Struminskaya, B & Vis, CJ 2022, The Survey Attitude Scale. doi.org/10.6102/zis3...

Then there's this piece by ‪@rmichaelalvarez.bsky.social and colleagues on the impact of respondent inattention on measures of key variables: ‪https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/article/abs/paying-attention-to-inattentive-survey-respondents/BEDA4CF3245489645859E7E6B022E75A

This piece by @scottclifford.bsky.social and colleagues, about how repeated measures designs are a much better bet than we all thought, is a must for experimental designers: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Back to wording, and it's hard not to enjoy this piece (especially when teaching Gen Z students -- and its dismissal of some media OTT-ness) www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-insti...