Chris Hanretty

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-...

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about...

🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples?

We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

📢 Study out in Research & Politics!

We (@lukasbirkenmai1.bsky.social @wurthmann.bsky.social @msaeltzer.bsky.social) find that directly elected MPs talk more about local & deprived places than list MPs on social media.

🔍 doi.org/10.1177/2053...

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Get me the most Belgian street name possible.

No, that’s too Belgian.

Restore Britain will, without apology or fear, deport the third world orcs who break into our country, rape young women and then expect the British to tolerate their presence. There is finally a political party that will defend our home, our people, our shires. Restore Britain.

The UK parliament now has an MP who is openly racist and far right. This is, for the current era, new ground, and it will be interesting to see how - if at all – other MPs respond.

If we're combining votes, does that mean some kind of Borda count, ESC style?

Also: one of the world's largest videoconferencing platforms was founded by someone who speaks a tonal language!

Opus (audio format) - Wikipedia

Most VoIP codecs are international standards which are language agnostic. See, for e.g., en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(a... compressing audio relies on human hearing limitations, not production, and key work has been done by Germans, French and Dutch coders

Reminded of the greatest one line ever, someone describing bitcoin as “Dunning-Krugerrands”

Congratulations!

Costa Rica 2026: A sudden drop in the fragmentation trend (with newly added graph) Costa Rica has swung from having the third-greatest votes fragmentation trend among countries that had established democracies as of 2000 to the record single-election drop in fragmentation ever re…

Re-upping this now that I’ve added a pretty picture showing the remarkable fragmentation trend and its sudden reversal.

fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/2026/02/20/c...

Iceland looks to fast-track vote on joining EU A referendum on resuming membership talks had been expected in 2027, but could come as early as this August.

🚨🚨Biggest #EU news of today: #Iceland looks to fast-track vote on joining EU as referendum on EU accession could come as early as August, departing from original plan for 2027 ref. 🧵
www.politico.eu/article/icel...

That's fine - I will kvetch here about my employer; that doesn't mean this has broader relevance. But still...

It's this contrast which has given me the ick about some academic social science discussions about the impact of AI. It's largely about community impacts, and less "solving problems we couldn't solve before"

ah, sorry, I was reading too quickly!