Brian Boyle

Happy to share that our article (@heinzbrandenburg.bsky.social and Yulia Lemesheva) which looks at representation on BBC Question Time has now been published at IJPP journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... @nclpolitics.bsky.social @strathpolir.bsky.social

Universities cannot expect researchers to take risks if they are repeatedly at risk of redundancy while losing professional services support, grappling with the gratuitous vagaries of home and international student number swings and both teaching and assessing in an age of unregulated AI.

New opinion piece with @profjanegreen.bsky.social in @financialtimes.com ⬇️📊 We argue that five parties in the polls doesn't mean five-way races. What's really going on is a scramble within each bloc over who can win, fought out seat by seat.

Picked up a copy of "Hyperpolitics" on a whim after seeing it promoted all over the place and I can only conclude that Verso have an amazing marketing department because there's not much substance here and the evidence base is weak.

Job Alert! We now have another position in computational social science. In the context of an interdisciplinary method center, we offer a 4+1 year 100% postdoc position with no teaching! If you have any questions, send me a PM. uol.de/en/job/postd...

New project and dashboard on football and politics: footballinparliament.com Stefan Couperus, Martijn Schoonvelde, and I (supporters of FC Groningen, AZ Alkmaar, and Borussia Mönchengladbach, guess who’s who) were wondering how and why politicians talk about football clubs. 1/5

🚨New Publication for @repjournal.bsky.social Does non-voting incur a partisan bias? #polisky #cdnpoli doi.org/10.1080/0034...

Newcastle is hiring a Lecturer in Public Policy (T&R permanent), if anyone has any questions about the city or University feel free to get in touch! Closing date is 7th August

All I can really do at this point while grading

STOP INTERVIEWING RANDOM MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC WHO ARE HANGING AROUND THE TOWN CENTRE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON YOU MAY AS WELL ASK A CAT FOR HOW REFLECTIVE OF PUBLIC OPINION IT IS www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I have a new paper on the Gallagher index: the most common measure of electoral disproportionality. We often assume it runs from 0 (perfect 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺) to 1 (perfect 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺). But I show that in most party systems, 1 is not a possible value. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

#UKHE! You know how we're told that 'students want less choice' against what we know to be reality & against pedagogical & disciplinary needs? Finally found the Nous report that supposedly backs that up, & it's based on a survey that asks about the *choice of major* nousgroup.com/assets/docs/...

Last year, we shared a paper showing that Labour's accommodation of the radical right did not work. We now have a new version of the paper online: osf.io/preprints/so...

To cover a colleague's grant buy-out, we @nclpolitics.bsky.social have a one year post to advertise in Political Philosophy! Newcastle is a great city and we have lovely students, so why not apply? jobs.ncl.ac.uk/job/Newcastl...

As a lifelong MMA fan, this shit sucks so much. We should not have a gladiatorial pit on the White House lawn like some kind of Temu Rome For decades, MMA was my mindless escape from personal and political stress. Now it's work. They turned the only sport I like into work

Very excited to have been awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant with @lottehargrave.bsky.social for a project I've been desperate to work on since my PhD. Look out for us presenting this at conferences soon!

Very happy that our piece in Scottish Election Analysis 2026 is out bit.ly/49bWmww. Some interesting (& unsettling) insights into how voters are using AI to engage with elections. Thread from @strathplacelab.bsky.social | with @tbalogh.bsky.social @elisefrelin.bsky.social @zdgreene.bsky.social

🚨 I'm recruiting a PhD student for a new project on Parties' social group ownership, based in the @vd-researchgroup.bsky.social research group at KU Leuven! Deadline for applying is 26 June, estimated starting date is 1 Oct 2026. All info is here 👉 www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo... Share widely!

Coming to @ecprgender.bsky.social #ECPG2026 and working with quant methods or curious about using them in gender & politics research? Come along & meet other researchers at the @strathplacelab.bsky.social pre-conference social 🍻 📍 Two by Two Brewery 🕡 18:30, 14 June RSVP here: bit.ly/4dPyr8F

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Looking forward to being back in Mannheim next week. If you are keen to hear how political parties are rewarded and punished for taking non-ambiguous positions on trans rights, then you might find this paper I'll be presenting (w\ @bogatyrev.bsky.social) of interest!

Got to present this early draft paper today at a neat workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social. It's my attempt to grapple with the need for struggle and friction in learning in a world where LLMs remove all that friction. Read the whole thing at stats.andrewheiss.com/pinky-lychee/

🚨 New Research Recently accepted at the @bjpols.bsky.social, our paper shows that Brexit led to weaker British 🇬🇧 identities among Remainers! You can read the paper by @jaclarner.bsky.social, me, and @danielwincott.bsky.social here: tinyurl.com/mrj96ywu

Finally done (for now). If you study elections, want to use the Constituency-Levels Election Archive, but don't like bugs, then say hello to `clean_clea`, now on GitHub: github.com/jackobailey/...

🚨 New paper with great co-authors (@oguzhan-alkan.bsky.social @rdassonneville.bsky.social @zeynsom.bsky.social) in Political Behavior! How well do citizens perceive where parties stand? 🤔 Open access: rdcu.be/fb83Z

The takeaway: LLM agents are not infiltrating the platforms researchers actually use. Outside of one platform already notorious for pre-LLM bot problems, they just aren't there. The human data quality problem on the other hand is large, systematic, and fixable through platform choice. [9/9]

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

Is partner partisanship associated with vote choice? @cerifowler.bsky.social finds that it was for the 2016 Brexit Referendum & subsequent elections in the UK & argues that this can help us understand gender gaps in vote choice. Read OPEN ACCESS: buff.ly/D8Fdnbw @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social #polsky

📢 New article 🌟 👥 @silkegoubin.bsky.social , @olijacques.bsky.social , @staffankumlin.bsky.social (ISV), & @dweisstanner.bsky.social 👉 Why Some Want Something for Nothing: Three Explanations for Unfunded Spending Demand 📗 Open Access in Scandinavian Political Studies 🔗 doi.org/10.1111/1467...

"Young people who were studying humanities subjects in school, namely history and art, became more likely to support more socially liberal parties. Those studying a technical subject, such as design and technology, became more supportive of more radical right parties."

and if you have a billion images to work with (like me teaching dataviz lol), this by @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social is super helpful for an initial pass at making alt text for plots

If you use #QuartoPub for any PDF documents for teaching and you need to meet impending PDF accessibility rules, upgrade to v1.9, add format: typst: pdf-standard: ua-1 to the YAML front matter, and it'll work!

Great to speak with @meganekenyon.bsky.social of @newstatesman1913.bsky.social on location about the result in Gorton and Denton, including the role of party blocs! Clipped my bit below, but you can watch the whole video here (bonus, there is a cat!): youtu.be/dUh_1XuAg-g?...

@martamiori.bsky.social and I have been writing, since 2024, about why Labour's 'Reform' challenge and emphasis was based on a misunderstanding of Labour's vote. Here for anyone interested: politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

While you're all messing around on Bluesky: I have a new working paper on the Gallagher index, the most common measure of disproportionality. TL;DR: I show that it is constrained by the size of the party system, which can cause problems comparing elections across time and space.

Just to put this in context for you, this would nearly double the deficits posted by the big unis in deepest trouble if they had to pay in a one-shot. Now no doubt they will try another Heath Robinson financial vehicle to do so if needs must, but some simply won't be able to pay if on this scale.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

The moral panic about young men is the new version of “UKIP is winning over former Labour voters” (also a Goodwin argument). Both rely on anecdote more than data, and do significant damage to public understanding of the radical right. Young men are the second *least* pro-Reform group in the UK.

partycoloR is now on CRAN! Started as a simple idea 6 years ago, now it's a full-featured package. Extract party colors and logos from Wikipedia with one line of code. It's already powering ParlGov Dashboard. install.packages("partycoloR")

What you do need training on is how to identify AI generated images, video, and text - and how to learn the pitfalls of GenAI tech like their habit of confirming whatever you say to them. This is not what is being proposed. They won't want people to be AI-sceptics.

"This is how you navigate to a website and type a sentence." You do not need training to use ChatGPT. This would be the government absolutely flushing money down the toilet (the toilet here is AI "consultancy" firms who will happily quote you enormous sums to deliver this non-task).

I'm looking forward to the Reform Party fighting corruption, putting a few quid in workers' pocket and turning the country around like they did when they were Conservatives

Ever wondered why Germany, in 2001 only the seventh country in the world after the Nordic ones and Netherlands to have more than 30% of MPs female, has since completed stagnated and been overtaken by 50-odd countries? In this newly published paper, @maarja.bsky.social and I try to explain that.

Congratulations to my amazing @ucddublin.bsky.social @ucdpolitics.bsky.social colleague @stefanmueller.bsky.social on his latest project www.ucd.ie/newsandopini...

Very interesting new publication by Leonie Rettig and @lukasisermann.com on descriptive attributes as voting heuristics - specifically age and gender: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Well that’s me locked out. No pay for the foreseeable future, all because I refuse to reschedule lost teaching, for which I have already lost pay as part of the strike. Please donate to support @sheffielducu.bsky.social members like me at www.gofundme.com/f/heubvb-sup...