May 24, 2020Values, voters and the lawThe revelations this weekend that a senior government aide travelled from London to Durham while someone in their household had symptoms of Coronavirus has dominated discussion and media coverage. Some commentators making claims that the next election was being lost in front of our eyes. …Cummings4 min readCummings4 min read
Apr 30, 2020Values, volatility and voting: understanding voters in England 2015–2019Slides from presentation via Zoom at University of York Politics Seminar. Draft Working paper available hereBritish Politics3 min readBritish Politics3 min read
Mar 7, 2020EU referendum identity and the 2019 electionA key story for the 2019 election was whether voters who were at odds with the party they voted for in 2017 over Brexit would switch to a party more in-line with their views. This is a first look at how the EU referendum ‘identities’ voters held related to voting…Brexit4 min readBrexit4 min read
Mar 6, 2020Values and the 2019 electionTo the sound of cheers from election nerds across the country the first academic data on the 2019 election became available today. Although various polling companies have released post-mortems of the election it is only through these surveys that we can begin to see how voters values mattered in 2019. …UK Politics4 min readUK Politics4 min read
Feb 28, 2020Member-onlyUnderstanding English voters, values and national identityTo understand voters positions and vote choices we must understand how their economic and social values combine and how they interact with identity. Since the general election in December 2019 there has been much talk about how Labour should responsd, trying to recapture voters who are more ‘socially Conservative’, more…Labour Party7 min readLabour Party7 min read
Jan 20, 2020What next for Labour?What is an election winning collation for the Labour party? After a fourth election defeat it is understandable that this should be a question to which the party seeks urgent answers, but the magnitude of the defeat in December not only points to answers being complex but also affords Labour…British Politics5 min readBritish Politics5 min read
Jan 10, 2020Values and voting: change since 2010 and challenges for the future.Initial takes on the 2019 election have focussed on the need for Labour to win back the trust of socially conservative voters, while this is undoubtedly true there is a little more to the story as 2010 Labour voters considering voting for the Conservatives were also more moderate on economics…Politics8 min readPolitics8 min read
Nov 13, 2019Who wins in Kensington?Scenarios not ‘nowcasts’: using data to think about polling day. As the general election campaign begins to gain momentum, new polling appears more and more frequently from an even greater range of sources than ever. How can we use the ever-growing data pile to make any sense at all of what might happen on polling day? Some tactical voting sites…Politics5 min readPolitics5 min read
Oct 18, 2019Where are they now? The 2010 Lib Dem vote in 2019At the 2010 general election the Liberal Democrats won 23% of the vote and 57 seats, sufficient for them to be kingmakers in the resulting hung parliament and to go into a coalition government, widely believed to have led to their near wipeout at the 2015 general election. Having failed…Lib Dems3 min readLib Dems3 min read
Oct 16, 2019How to read a constituency(Making sense of vote intention polling in (very) uncertain times) With talk of an early general election, polling volatile and unstable at the national level and the first past the post electoral system under increasing strain it is not a simple task to say with any confidence what the outcome of an election might be. There are numerous tools around…Brexit9 min readBrexit9 min read
