Chris Prosser

Critics of proportional representation: 'Yes, yes, I know that in reality politics under first-pass-the-post has been chaotic for the last decade, but in theory it provides stable two-party government, and that's what matters'.* * Not actually true in theory either.

Critics of proportional representation: 'Yes, yes, I know that in reality politics under first-pass-the-post has been chaotic for the last decade, but in theory it provides stable two-party government, and that's what matters'.* * Not actually true in theory either.

But more generally - potentially exciting development for those of us who care about electoral systems, though: (a) I'll believe it when I see it (<cough> Jenkins Commission </cough>) www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I’m at @psaepop.bsky.social #EPOP2026 in Liverpool for the next few days, presenting papers on: 1. The bloc structure of British voting behaviour (Friday 14:10-15:40, LT 3) 2. The urban-rural divide in British politics (16:00-17:30, Flex 1) Quick summaries of both below ⬇️

The second uses travel time data to classify places into an urban-rural typology, and using redistricted election and census data 1970-2024, argues that the rising urban-rural divide is driven by the activation of demographic differences between these types of places, not changing composition.

I’m at @psaepop.bsky.social #EPOP2026 in Liverpool for the next few days, presenting papers on: 1. The bloc structure of British voting behaviour (Friday 14:10-15:40, LT 3) 2. The urban-rural divide in British politics (16:00-17:30, Flex 1) Quick summaries of both below ⬇️

Maybe it's true of other organisations as well but I'm always amazed by how unwilling universities seem to be to do something about people who basically don't do their jobs.

New working paper from Stuart Perrett, @drjennings.bsky.social , @jonmellon.bsky.social , @cbwlezien.bsky.social and me: Do polls underestimate support for right-wing parties? Assessing variation in polling error by party family osf.io/preprints/so...

Obviously, 'on average' doesn't mean polls are always-and-everywhere biased to the left - there is a lot of heterogeneity between elections - but elections are much more likely to have a leftward polling bias than a rightward one.

New working paper from Stuart Perrett, @drjennings.bsky.social , @jonmellon.bsky.social , @cbwlezien.bsky.social and me: Do polls underestimate support for right-wing parties? Assessing variation in polling error by party family osf.io/preprints/so...

Using ~8.5k election-poll-party observations from 372 elections in 32 countries, we find a persistent partisan asymmetry: polls tend to overestimate the left relative to the right. On average across elections, polls the month before an election overstated the left by about 1.4 points

It’s not out for another six months or so, but *Electoral Realignment: How Brexit Reshaped British Voting Behaviour*, my book with Ed Fieldhouse, @profjanegreen.bsky.social , Geoff Evans, @jack-bailey.co.uk and @jonmellon.bsky.social, is up on the OUP website! global.oup.com/academic/pro...

This realignment persisted beyond the 2019 ‘Brexit election’ because the electoral shocks that followed (e.g. the pandemic and cost of living crisis) were primarily about competence rather than ideology - shifting the electoral ‘tides’ but not the electoral ‘tribes’.

It’s not out for another six months or so, but *Electoral Realignment: How Brexit Reshaped British Voting Behaviour*, my book with Ed Fieldhouse, @profjanegreen.bsky.social , Geoff Evans, @jack-bailey.co.uk and @jonmellon.bsky.social, is up on the OUP website! global.oup.com/academic/pro...

We use more than sixty years of British Election Study data to examine how electoral shocks - and Brexit in particular - have transformed the relationship between voters’ social characteristics, political values and party choices.

New paper from me, Olli Heath, Humphrey Southall and Paula Aucott, just out in @polstudies.bsky.social: The rise and fall of class voting in Britain, 1885–2024 We link ~140 years of census and election data to map the relationship between class and vote in Britain doi.org/10.1177/0032...

Using a Bayesian changepoint model, we try and pin down when the class-vote association changed: the stabilisation of class voting in the 1920s; a brief drop for Labour after the Second World War; and then a more significant turn for Labour in the Blair era, and the Conservative around Brexit.

New paper from me, Olli Heath, Humphrey Southall and Paula Aucott, just out in @polstudies.bsky.social: The rise and fall of class voting in Britain, 1885–2024 We link ~140 years of census and election data to map the relationship between class and vote in Britain doi.org/10.1177/0032...

We show that there is clear evidence of class Lib-Con voting in the late Victorian era, but the Liberals were rapidly supplanted and surpassed by the emergence of Labour in the first decades of the 20th century.

Sometimes its hard to escape the feeling that someone in government has built a model of how policies might affect economic growth but accidently flipped the sign on the output.