Chris Hanretty

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

2025 Local Elections Handbook and dataset Explore the 2025 local elections results and download a comprehensive results dataset for electoral districts and wards.

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.

Men on trial accused of 'shadow policing' for China on British soil The duo are alleged to have carried out surveillance on Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigners.

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...

The Representation of the People Bill: contours of the debates to come The government’s long-awaited proposals for electoral reforms, published last month, will receive their first scrutiny in the House of Commons next Monday. Ahead of that debate, Alan Renwick analys…

*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.

From representation to meritocracy: Understanding professionalization of the political class through UK parliamentary pay debates, 1911–2011 Abstract. Observers frequently point to the rise of “professional politicians” as a source of public distrust with political elites. This attitude is roote

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

I like to think more data might drown out some bad or incorrect takes, but I don't think that's stopped people before

Would the availability of polling station level results mean more or less analysis of by election results? Would this be good or bad?

Cc Sainte-Laguë-curious @alanrenwick.bsky.social

The Man Who Stole Infinity | Quanta Magazine In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism.

One of the most infamous results in mathematics was plagiarized www.quantamagazine.org/the-man-who-...