@chanret.bsky.social
I teach politics at a university in the UK. I'm interested in electoral systems, public opinion, and the politics of non-majoritarian institutions like courts and regulators. ORCID: 0000-0002-8932-9405
And if it's happening at your high tariff institution, it's happening across the sector...
Not your main focus - but why did average alignment get worse in the most recent period? Are the question sets comparable over time?
The Chevening scholars I've had the privilege of knowing have been gifted with intellect, empathy and good judgement. So of course the Home Office is telling them to get lost.
The playful, prolific use of hyperlinks in online journalism (eg Slate, Pitchfork) didn’t anticipate link-rot. Now so many articles are pock-marked with cryptic allusions that some long-dead link once explained. Weird how quickly a new style comes to feel more archaic than the traditional format
Think only this of it, that there's some corner of that square that is forever Royal Holloway
You can get some of this humorous effect with some pidgin Englishes. It looks like what you might get it you machine translated standard Academic English to a pidgin
I filmed this at 5 PM whilst swearing at the stupid vape/bong/tartan tourist tat shop where the fire started, now look below, and you know what folks I want to see every stupid vape/bong/tartan tourist tat shop in this country shut down by lunch tomorrow. 😡🤬🖕
Well, APSA attendees are! It would be good to know how international attendance at APSA has changed.
Out on a Sunday morning, confidently placing myself in the top decile for "looking where I am going"
This is the moment to toy endlessly with citation styles and page layout
We've published the 2025 local elections handbook in collaboration with the University of Exeter's Elections Centre. This includes ward- and candidate-level results from last year's locals. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/2025-local-e...
"Weird aggregates" was my initial reaction too
Is this an artefact of averaging over countries with very different age structures? A representative sample in Indonesia is going to have a lot more gen Z than boomers...
This makes me think of @jack-bailey.co.uk 's half life of the economic vote paper and yardstick/benchmarking models of the economic vote doi.org/10.1017/S000...
This is a very good thread. We can perhaps quibble over self reports, but "average economic growth in the years you've been alive" is a very telling metric
Thank you!
Me sowing/clearing journal submissions before paternity leave: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes! Empty outbox!
Me reaping/returning from paternity leave: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
Congratulations!
If anyone is friends with any Georgian air traffic controllers, buy them a nice bottle of wine. As guardians of pretty much the only narrow gap still available between Europe and Asia that avoids both Iran, the Gulf, Ukraine and Russia, they are under some substantial pressure.
Quite hard to keep up with the various Chinese government influence stories in the UK today. This is not the story I thought I was clicking on www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Yeah, I was very conscious that there were clues in there that were going past me, but it didn't feel like a too-clever-by-half detective novel at all
I can't imagine anyone who understood and appreciated the book really wanting to turn it into a film...
Okay, why did none of you tell me how good AS Byatt's Possession is?
Pleased to see this work with @rozemarijnvandijk.bsky.social @martamiori.bsky.social & @robfordmancs.bsky.social published: We look at the effects of involving party members in candidate selection at the 2019 UK general election: eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...
*Representation of the People Bill update*
Steve Reed has just announced: 'We will repeal in full the power for government to impose a strategy and policy statement on the Electoral Commission'.
A very welcome change. I set out last week why it was needed.
constitution-unit.com/2026/02/26/t...
This would mean that Maths GCSE no longer requires you to know that the area of a rectangle is length x width. Or for Physics GCSE, to know that speed = distance/time. Presumably instead the formulae will be given in the exam paper. This is letting pupils down.
Some new published research from me (first in a while!).
I looked at a century of debates on legislator pay to see how British MPs justified their own salaries. These debates provide a unique window into how Parliamentarians navigated the transition to professional politics. doi.org/10.1093/pa/g...
A lot of my academic focuses on public attitudes about foreign policy and the use of force. The just initiated bombing of Iran lacks many of the components that build and sustain domestic support for military action.
I don't think gerrymandering is really an issue in the UK compared to things like voter ID. Why would parties ignore areas where their support is low *within a constituency*?
I think the emphasis would not be on particular places, but trends: "the more rural the polling station, the lower the Labour vote", that kind of thing