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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/09/2026

Obviously I meant one-party government and two-party system not two-party government... My daughter woke me up at 1am, brain clearly not working this morning.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/09/2026

And (b) all these policies for the next manifesto are great and all but maybe Burnham should think of a few things to do in the next few years before then as well?

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/09/2026

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...

theguardian.com

Andy Burnham expected to say he will push ahead with electoral reform plans

Exclusive: Labour conference speech will kick off process that could replace current system with proportional representation

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/09/2026

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.

Screenshot of newspaper article saying: 'Critics of proportional representation have said it would lead to a more chaotic form of government, with unstable coalitions and an inability to pass legislation.'

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Jack Bailey @jack-bailey.co.uk · 28/09/2026

Sick of work this Monday lunchtime? Or perhaps hungover from one too many on the first night of Labour Conference? If so, distract yourself with ✨ 𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱-𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗠𝗥𝗣 𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 ✨ Full interactive at: jack-bailey.co.uk/ward2024

Screenshot showing interactive ward level MRP estimates at the 2024 UK general election.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 17/09/2026

Look forward to seeing everyone shortly, and do say hello if you're here as well!

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 17/09/2026

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.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 17/09/2026

My first paper argues that blocs have long structured voter perceptions of where the parties stand on different issues and how they feel about them (but this blociness has got stronger post-Brexit), and that changes in party viability activated the blocs in terms of voting behaviour in 2024.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 17/09/2026

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 ⬇️

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 04/09/2026

Usually this sort of behaviour gets rewarded. 'Oh you're a terrible teacher and all the students complain? Guess we won't make you do any teaching... oh you're performatively bad at admin? Guess you don't have to do any of that either... You haven't published anything in years? Well, never mind...'

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 04/09/2026

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.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 24/08/2026

Ah fair enough, sorry to miss you though!

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 24/08/2026

It's easy enough to save the annotated pdfs as pdfs, though I don't use zotero to save notes etc so can't really speak to that side of things. I don't think there's a proper integration though.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 24/08/2026

Will probably bring it to EPOP is you can wait a few weeks and want to have a look at one before you buy

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 24/08/2026

I've got a remarkable and I love it - I read quite a lot on eink (kobo for fiction) so used to that side of things and the remarkable works really well for reading pds of papers etc. The writing side of things is pretty good too, way better than e.g. writing on an ipad in my experience.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 12/08/2026

I don't know, bamboozling politicians with equations has worked quite well for the economists...

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 10/08/2026

Working with some government data of locations *in the UK* that contains two points in the sea to the west of Denmark and three off the east of Somalia. Feeling good about the cleanliness of my own data 😂

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 05/08/2026

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...

osf.io

OSF

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 05/08/2026

Yeah I had similar thoughts at one stage because I've gone down some log ratio rabbit holes for other purposes, but the data is a nightmare from a compositional perspective because there are inconsistent choice sets between elections and lots of zeros (particularly poll shares for 'other' parties).

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 05/08/2026

I don't think we can say - we're agnostic to the cause of the errors in the paper because I don't think we can test it from polling data alone, and I think you need a causal story to say whether its driven by one side or the other, with the other bit driven by compositional processes.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 05/08/2026

Lots more analysis in the paper, breaking it down over time and by country, so take a look! osf.io/preprints/so...

osf.io

OSF

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 05/08/2026

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.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 05/08/2026

Breaking it down further by party family, we see a fairly consistent pattern across the left party families but more variation on the right, with polls tending to underestimate Agrarian and Conservative parties, but not Christian Democratic and Far Right parties.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 05/08/2026

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

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 05/08/2026

osf.io

OSF

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/07/2026

Just a few graphs... 😀

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/07/2026

No doubt you’ll all be rushing to pre-order the hardcover for the bargain price of £95 (😬), but should that prove a little steep, we’re pleased to say that the electronic version will be available open access, i.e. free!

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/07/2026

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’.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/07/2026

We argue that Brexit - and the parties’ reactions to it - lead to a sorting process that accelerated a longer-term realignment of British politics around age, education and social values.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/07/2026

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.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/07/2026

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...

Cover of *Electoral Realignment: How Brexit Reshaped British Voting Behaviour*
By Edward Fieldhouse, Jane Green, Christopher Prosser, Geoffrey Evans, Jack Bailey, and Jonathan Mellon

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 20/07/2026

'At this rate I'll beat mummy's record of 15 different PMs by the time I'm 93'

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 17/07/2026

Congrats Will, that's great news and richly deserved!

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Tim Bale @timbale.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Today's absolute must-read for anyone studying/interested in British electoral and party politics over the long term. (Oh, and I'm pretty sure this is indeed a British street despite the classic Citroen in the foreground)!

theconversation.com

The class divide in British politics didn’t erode slowly – it collapsed under New Labour

But the shift has more to do with how parties behave than any changes in the class system.

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Political Studies @polstudies.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Why did class voting in Britain rise, then decline? @olliheath.bsky.social, Humphrey Southall, Paula Aucott & @caprosser.com examine elections from 1885-2024, arguing political agency explains class dealignment better than social change. OPEN ACCESS: buff.ly/klGDUJz @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social

Abstract
Understanding when and why social cleavages shape electoral behaviour is a central concern in the study of democratic politics. While many accounts emphasise the long-term social changes, others point to the role of party strategy. We contribute to this debate by analysing the political evolution of one of the central cleavages of the twentieth century—class—in one of the world’s longest-standing democracies—Britain. Analysing a unique new dataset combining constituency-level results across 37 general elections from 1885 to 2024 with data from eight censuses, applying geospatial redistricting methods, we describe the rise, stability and eventual decline of class-based voting, showing that a strong class cleavage emerged in the early twentieth century, remained stable for decades, but then unravelled rapidly after the 1990s. These patterns are difficult to reconcile with theories that emphasise gradual social change and are more consistent with accounts that stress political agency and representation.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 19/06/2026

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...

doi.org

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 19/06/2026

This paper is part of an ongoing collaboration between Olli, me, and Humphrey and Paula, who are the historical geographers behind www.visionofbritain.org.uk. It's the first peer-reviewed paper to come out of the project, but we've got a lot more data, so hopefully it will be the first of many!

visionofbritain.org.uk

A Vision of Britain through Time | Your national on-line library for local history | Maps, Statistics, Travel Writing and more

A vision of Britain through time...

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 19/06/2026

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.

Meta-analytic changepoint models of the effect of class decile on vote share. In the top panel, points and errors bars are election-specific estimates of the effect of class decile on vote share. Lines and shaded areas are the posterior estimates of the piecewise linear estimate of the evolution of class voting since 1900. The lower panel shows the posterior distribution of the changepoints, which occur in the 1920s (Lab + Con), 1940s and 1990s (Lab), and 2010s (Con).

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 19/06/2026

Once established, the Lab-Con class relationship was remarkably stable from the 1920s into the 1990s, at which point the class-Lab association begins to decline, and then the class-Con association shifts more abruptly in 2017-19.

Marginal effect of class decile on support for Labour, the Conservatives, and Liberals at the constituency level, which shows a moderate working class-Liberal association and middle class-Conservative association between 1885-1900, and then the rapid emergence of a working class-Labour association (and declining Liberal association) from 1900-1924, and a strengthening of the middle class-Conservative association at the same time. From the 1920s-1990s this trend fluctuates but is broadly stable. Starting in the 1990s, the working class-Labour association begins to weaken, while the Conservative class association weakens quite abruptly in 2017.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 19/06/2026

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.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 19/06/2026

doi.org

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 10/06/2026

Or maybe they've misinterpreted the 'NEET crisis' as being there's not enough NEETs.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 10/06/2026

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.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/05/2026

Really delighted to be joining the editorial board of West European Politics - an excellent journal and home to one of my first publications as a grad student and my series of articles on the 2015-24 UK general elections - in excellent company too!

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 14/05/2026

Sure, I'm saying that by the standards of other recent leaders there was nothing particularly notable about Miliband's popularity when he was leader - it was neither particularly high, nor particularly low.

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