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Rob Johns

@robjohns75.bsky.social
2.3K followers 706 following 286 posts

Some public opinion

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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
My algorithms laid bare: elections, Scottish universities, and male pattern baldness.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Plaintive, increasingly desperate stuff. But I won't weaken.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Tomorrow: “Norris slams spiders for having eight legs”.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Meaningless correlations, p-hacking, vast swathes of marginally incremental research -- I mean, for those of us in political behaviour this dystopian world is frankly hard to conceive of. www.ft.com/content/52e6...
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
I thought Keir Starmer might need some cheering up and so here's a graph which shows his personal popularity above a regression line. Main message: while he may have the record for the lowest approval ratings ever, that's got a fair bit to do with the unpopularity of his party.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Life’s pretty good (even when working) at @essexsummerschool.bsky.social. If you’re not here this year, see you next year for the 60th anniversary edition.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
With the winner seemingly in little doubt, the betting interest in Makerfield lies elsewhere.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Now, these times can’t both be right. (Don’t worry: of course neither of them was.) #EPSS2026
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
No such thing as the graveyard slot at @epssnet.bsky.social -- relentlessly high quality from start to finish -- so do come along to our panel at 3.20 on Saturday. It's all about attitudes to minority groups. (Well, our paper isn't really, but it is pivotal to the survival of liberal democracy.)
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
This is Manchester we’re talking about!?
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Could Curaçao even do this?
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Can't see data like those without also remembering this YouGov poll from way back in 2019.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
I will continue to post this every #WorldBookDay.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Business schooled.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
Reminds me of modelling turnout using internet samples after the indyref.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
I didn’t respond well to this data-viz outrage.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Every #WorldBookDay.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
@accidentalp.bsky.social
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
Defiant.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
No.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
Merry Christmas, academics!
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
How on earth did she fit in her marking?
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
“Can you pinpoint the moment that you realised that civilisation was utterly irretrievable?”
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
Lovely stuff.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
Q: How important is a representative sample? A:
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
I suppose one option for those beleaguered city executives might be to pay their graduate entrants a bit more.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
This Olé House sounds even better (if such can be imagined) than the original.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
Anyone else on here ever felt a sense of despondency, even despair, at the values and priorities of 52% of fellow citizens?
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
Hard for us to imagine what this must feel like, eh, @danjdevine.bsky.social?
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
Harsh on Jocky Wilson.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Seems a bit disrespectful to Muller.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Not a phrase you read very often.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
A graph of feelings about Labour broken down by a) how many times voted Lab in the 2005, 2010 and 2015 general elections; b) vote in a hypothetical Rejoin referendum. Labour now more popular among Rejoiners who *never* voted for them in 2005-2015 than among Leavers who voted for them *every time*.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
Mere hours after this post, it’s smack-bang relevant again — this time for the old “correlation isn’t causation” idiocy.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
But, even if survey experiments are "better attuned to investigating what can happen than what will happen", they tell us important things about how the public reacts (or doesn't react) to politicians and their commitments. And this one looks pretty supportive of the Oxley quote from the outset:
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
But, crucially, there were diminishing returns on lower numbers. Levels of 150k or 250k did not yield better ratings than 350k. Since ONS forecasts are around 350k even without any policy changes, ‘further and faster’ on migration seems unlikely to reap much political benefit.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
It was variable 1 that mattered: the migration numbers. It made little difference whether the initial target had been hit or missed, or even whether it had been met with ease or missed by miles.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
At the second stage, then, respondents were asked to imagine that it was 2029 and that net migration had turned out as per a graph (example below) showing the trend since 2024 and any target set at Stage 1. Migration outcomes varied between 150K and 750K.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
Everyone was then asked “how well do you expect the Labour government to handle immigration?” Perhaps the key point from the graph below is that none of the treatments led to better expectations of Labour than in the control group.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
In the other corner, a view neatly summed up by @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk here: www.joxleywrites.jmoxley.co.uk/p/they-are-j....
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
Probably less about budget cuts and more a mutual agreement between students, who need more time off for paid work to help cover big fees, and us lot, who are very happy to down teaching tools before Pentecost/Eurovision/the Cup Final [pick your cultural calendar marker]. www.ft.com/content/1517...
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
I understand that there will be mistakes in the probabilistic reasoning of large-language models. Of course there will. But this is just ridiculous.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Why, when obviously it’s Shakespeare?
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
Ahhh, we all remember those iconic moments of campaigns past: the Sheffield rally, the Prescott punch, "nothing has changed" and of course the Asda beers.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Not easy, right? (Unless you're @martamiori.bsky.social.) Here's the de-anonymised version. The graph picks out small differences but the striking thing here is the similarity. Gone is most of the toxicity of the radical right, and gone is most of the tolerance for the big two.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
State-of-the-parties news. @lawrencemckay.bsky.social and I have just run a survey courtesy of @deltapoll.bsky.social. It included 0-10 scales measuring feelings about Labour, the Tories and Reform....but they've been cunningly anonymised below! Can you tell which (un)popularity profile is which?
A graph showing 0 to 10 like-dislike profiles for the Conservatives, Labour and Reform -- but with the names withheld. Each graph shows a skew to dislike, with about a quarter giving the lowest score of 0 and not many respondents to the right of the middle point.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
V. much looking forward to EPSA next year.
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Rob Johns @robjohns75.bsky.social · 22/10/2023
Four albums that meant everything to me in my teens.
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