Ballots & Bullets

Carlos Fuentes, one of Mexico’s greatest novelists – if not the greatest – has died this week aged 83. Renowned for novels such as La región mas transparente (Where the Air is Clear, 1958), La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1962) and the epic Terra Nostra (Our Land, 1975), Carlos Fuentes’ social function continued right …

This is the fourteenth of a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls.By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random variation each individual survey inevitably produces. Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than noise; …

I have read and watched some rum stuff during the course of researching my still-forthcoming book on British politics and fiction.

But, as I explain in this post on my personal blog, Maurice Edelman’s historical novel Disraeli Rising (1975) – a follow-up to his Disraeli in Love (1973) – really does take the biscuit.

Steven Fielding…

Last Sunday, we went voting. My husband and I drove two and a half hours to Shanghai, parked the car in our little secret parking lot close to the French consulate and played our part in electing a new French president. We then had lunch and drove two and a half hours back to Ningbo where I am working at the …

We’ve been producing end-of-session reports detailing the rebellions of government backbenchers for several years now – but we’ve never had to produce one quite so large before.  The Bumper Book of Coalition Rebellions is available free of charge in pdf format (at the end of this post). It details every rebellion and every rebel. How much more fun could you …

Shale gas has, in the space of a few short years, gone from being a little known and little used energy resource to one that is mired in controversy, with arguments raging about the potential environmental impacts of its exploitation and use.  Companies seeking to extract shale gas in the UK, using the technique of hydraulic fracturing (or ‘fracking’), were …

The 21^st century has already borne witness to new forms of insecurity including the instability caused by the Arab Spring and piracy in the Gulf of Aden. Tackling such ‘non-traditional’ security challenges is essential to the economic well being of both the UK and China. Supplies of gas and oil to these countries pass through the Gulf of Aden …

Writing in the Guardian Comment is Free, Dr Matthew Goodwin offers his assessment of what the local elections reveal about support for the far right.

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At 3.24am this morning the number of Liberal Democrat councillors dipped below 3000 for the first time since the party was formed.

If you were being pedantic you’d query that statement.

What really happened was that at 3.24am (when sensible people were fast asleep), I noticed that according to the BBC’s figures, the Lib Dems had lost more than the …

The second issue of the academic journal Political Studies - currently based at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham –  sees publication of research that focuses upon a number of core issues in the discipline.  It opens with a paper by Pippa Norris and Ron Inglehart on the cultural attitudes of Muslims living in …