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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is a consistent problem with a social liberal/authoritarian divide. Social liberals will lean towards "a progressive govt shouldn't do something that benefits itself/its coalition - that's what authoritarians do!". Authoritarians will echo & amplify this because they are unmoved by hypocrisy.

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

I'm sure that there's a lot more that you could do with these data, so I've made a CSV file of all of the estimates available on GitHub for you to download and work with: github.com/jackobailey/...

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David Attewell @davidattewell6.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

1/ Happy to see @kaitlin-alper.bsky.social, myself, & Andreas Jozwiak's paper out @ejprjournal.bsky.social It's well-known that, on average, women support redistribution more than men. We find that the gender gap is conditional on household income & inequality within couples. tinyurl.com/3nrn53ej

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Apparently someone thought the Robocop franchise appropriate to base not one but *two* animated children's cartoon series in. Haven't felt this level of dissonance since I watched a Transformers movie - family rating - and watched one robot tear out the spine of another robot and beat it with it.

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Alejandro Fernández-Roldán @aleferna.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

🚨 New paper in @electoralstudies.bsky.social with @klaramueller.bsky.social! “How snap election calls shape vote intention uncertainty” We show that when a snap election is called, voters resolve their uncertainty about who to vote for almost *immediately* www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Bizarre conviction that you can simultaneously take public positions *and* remain left-right neutral through your own personal agency. Somehow it's always Americans that assert this *despite their political system being so so very obviously hypermobile*.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

UK parliament is sovereign, it is not actually the case that people can simply break the law by "getting in X days early" - there's no impediment to "individual donations above £X are illegal and that includes the ones that happened two weeks ago". No impediment, that is, except lack of will.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Listening to a podcast talking to Gen Z MP (Rest is Politics) - just as an aside one MP mentioned a friend using their inheritance to help pay off their UK student loan. Nobody in the interview pointed out that this would - in almost any combination of circumstances - be financial self-harm.

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Anna-Sophie Heinze @asheinze.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

💔 Do you ever feel lonely – and have you ever thought of #loneliness as political? I’m super excited about this new publication with @mlewandowsky.bsky.social in @electoralstudies.bsky.social, in which we examine the relationship between loneliness and voting. 👉 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Couple of problems with this argument, but the principal one is that timelines are just ... wrong. For a start, three things need explaining (i) fall of Radical Right politics in 1945 & flat-lining until ~87 (ii) rise ~1988-2000 (iii) rise from ~2010

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Xing - job search website - no longer lets you use boolean (OR/AND/NOT) in searches in the basis (non-paid) service. Which is annoying.

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YouGov @yougov.co.uk · 26/08/2026

Reform voters, and to a lesser extent Tories, are much likelier to think they hold the most common public view across several topics that our survey suggests is not the case, most notably: -2024 rioters -Trans ID -Bregret -Business reg -Lockdowns -Israel-Palestine -Trump yougov.com/en-gb/articl...

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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

The 2024 US Presidential election was heralded as a “vibe shift” with public support swinging away from content moderation and towards freedom of speech. However, the pundits were wrong! In a new study we found that the so-called vibe shift in societal norms was largely an illusion.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

This book - at least the chapter 1 very tight summary of arguments/contents available in tweet below this one - is very good! Explicit norms based model of some of the stuff I've been waffling around (RR voting can shoot up *without an economic driver/without an attitudinal shift in its favour*).

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Re: Nathan Cofnas - seeing a lot of arguments posed as defending "academic freedom"... ...which on inspection aren't about academic freedom but instead just vanilla "post-doc hired to clean business management datasets publicly asserts that vaccines don't work and that that's what he's working on".

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Academic Freedom != Unqualified Free Speech (phil postdoc contracted to write about liberalism can assert that vaccines don't work *both consequence free and be quoted as speaking with the authority of their academic post*)

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

8th May-3rd June 2026 British Election Study is now available, am opening up now if *anyone has any requests*. Context - that's following the local elections but before Starmer announces he'll resign.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Risk tolerance/gender effects is one of the things not captured well by the two political compass factors (that does matter).

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Call me spoiled, but I prefer my academic cranks to either crank about their specialised subject - or crank in a manner that is obviously singular to their discipline. But this stuff ... could be written by any of a hundred interchangeable columnists.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Re: Clacton By-election - keep hearing people present "well, he might have consolidated his vote in Clacton, it go even higher" ... as if that matters. If Nigel Farage spends has to fight another by-election in Clacton - this time because of the thing he was trying to dodge ...

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

More basic than the moral quandary presented is the fact that it's imaginary. If someone says "rape 50 children or the planet blows up" ... before you start arguing consequentialism vs deontology, question 1 should be "Why do you believe these things are connected? What is the model in your head?".

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Inherently hard to get data on, but looking at US poll miss data ( @gelliottmorris.com) and other research about consistent polling errors and it looks like Social Liberalism is a predictor of "Willingness To Sacrifice Time To Answer A Poll"

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

There was one with a better front man - George Galloway. A man who - unlike, say, Nigel Farage - had a long record of gambling on long odds and flipping unlikely seats. Whatever you think of him, he's good at campaigning.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Janan Ganesh continuing the braindead "a save the NHS, hang the Paedos party would clean up" ... ... somehow failing to note that the UK has had parties in this area 1945-2019 (most obv the BNP!) and they consistently failed.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

It's a genuine gift to see an MP reasoning outloud in public with a Labour activist. The downside is that you can see the vast gaps in the chain of reasoning.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

"It Couldn't Happen Now" => "Who Are You Going To Trust? Your Lying Eyes or the fact that Other People Aren't Panicking?"

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Remarkably, I was completely unaware of this thing until now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Euk...

youtube.com

Blake's Junction 7 (2005)

YouTube video by orac1978

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Rewatching Babylon 5 (S1) and struck by the fact that both B5 and Star Trek: DS9 have a season 1 "And Now An Episode Specifically About Our Nazi Analogues". www.imdb.com/title/tt0517... www.imdb.com/title/tt0708...

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Vast bonfire of "people voting Radical Right are driven by something - anything - other than wanting to vote for a Radical Right party (i.e. normal voting)" theories.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

In shock news, economic angst leads people to be more likely to vote Lib-Left than Auth-Right.

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Steve Akehurst @steveakehurst.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Updated numbers here: Burnham bounce still basically entirely coming from clawing back voters Labour had lost to Greens, Lib Dems and Plaid/SNP. In addition, Burnham now winning 10% of Green 2024 voters - double that from June.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Not sure I'll ever get over the fact that every villain I ever thought an unrealistic blithering idiot with half-arsed writing was in fact unrealistically over-written and over-thought - while every 'realistic' villain with a coherent, sympathetic motivation is now clearly 100% literary fiction.

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JW Mason @jwmason.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

This is a very common fallacy: You have a theory about how things work, then you notice that the real world doesn't work like your theory. So you interpret this as a *historical* development - in the old days, everything was neat and simple - rather than as a problem with the theory.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Clearing out tabs, stumbled into this - no idea how/why I found it - someone actually sat down to study whether Authoritarians** *are* less funny www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... ** Authoritarianism in political science == Right-Wing Authoritarianism in psychology

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Two, resilience is about resisting bad information, either internally or externally, so it falls back into a counter-disinformation project that mistakes the current crisis as one of facts, when its really one of consequences.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

This chart goes to underline my general position that looking at election results tends to lead people to massively understate the level of underlying stability in voter attitudes. Shifts in (positive) support for Farage are so small you could reasonably ask whether it's not just noise.

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Rob Ford @robfordmancs.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Starmer's departure leaves Nigel Farage as by far the most unpopular leader (or senior politician). 56% "very unfavourable" is major problem for Reform - Reform can only win if their opponents divide & people with strong negative views of Farage will be more motivated by anti-Reform tactical voting

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

One of the issues with using "subjective class" - when survey respondents identify their own class - is that along with everything else you capture an element of "personality/value type who thinks significantly less about other people than the population median".

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

open.substack.com/pub/mariosri... Tldr; I don't think the 1930s/2010-2020s are exceptional, I think it's 1945-1985 that's weird - that's the period where Authoritarian voters *aren't* voting for Authoritarian parties - which I'd describe as the Surprisingly Long Suppression of the Radical Right.

open.substack.com

My Theory of the (Re)Growth of the Radical Right

The Radical Right - aka Extreme Right/Hard Right/Far Right - is a party family that has been studied pretty continuously since 1945[1].

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Steve Fisher @stevefisher.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

New post from me on what did, and what apparently did not, contribute to the decline in support for Labour over the last two years (Substack version): open.substack.com/pub/election...

open.substack.com

Why was Keir Starmer forced to resign as PM?

Many people are somewhat bemused by Keir Starmer’s resignation as prime minister.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Just listened to Steve Davies (historian, IEA) reviewing the thesis of his book on the CapX podcast. Starts off arguing that there's been a Great Realignment from politics being about left-right economics to his euphemism for social liberal-authoritarian politics.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

A surprising amount of political science - by actual political scientists - seems to just assume-without-testing that voters perceive politicians/parties as closest to them purely on the basis of <gives same/close answers to an easily framed survey question>.

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Something I've noticed but never seen captured as a clear concept - there's a significant axis of human variation in how people respond to "members of two conflicting groups have both been subject to abuse from the other".

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

It's not true - Andy Burnham could *instead* break the (recently restated) manifesto pledge on tax or EU membership. But he *does* have to do *something proportionate to the majority* or it'll be hard to ask for another one (of any size).

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Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Fun podcast on Messaging (ideological framing) vs Politics of Force (incorporate Puerto Rico, impeach Trump). Some talking past each other (I don't think these are contradictory positions and how people respond to the presence/absence of the Politics of Force is not unrelated to values).

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