Ballots & Bullets

Image by Justin Russell

How do we end up supporting a specific political party? Why do some people in the UK, for instance, call themselves Labour or Conservative supporters, whereas others fail to identify with any individual party at all?

One of the most oft-cited explanations alludes to the role of parents. Through family socialisation, young individuals get to know …

Image by Christian Bauer

At the last Conservative conference, George Osbourne announced “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business”. While he was referring specifically to climate change, he articulated a commonly-held view: that protecting the environment always comes at an economic cost. And so in times of economic hardship, environmental action is a …

In the first post in the Picturing Politics series Prof Katharine Adeney looks at the Pakistan Peoples Party 2013 manifesto, which features a prominent image of Benazir Bhutto, the assassinated former Prime Minister of Pakistan. Prof Adeney looks at what the use of Benazir Bhutto’s image tells us about Pakistani politics and question why, despite Benazir’s continued resonance, the PPP …

We’ve been producing end-of session reports on the behaviour of government MPs at Westminster for almost a decade. Last year’s was a record-breaker: Coalition MPs rebelling more often than MPs in any other session since 1945. This morning we’ve launched the report on the 2012-13 session. It tells a more nuanced story, but with plenty to concern the party whips:…

Image by Jurgen Appelo

Twitter is becoming an indispensable tool for the modern academic. Sceptics might doubt it, but the social media platform is perfectly designed to facilitate the dissemination of research findings, information about research projects and teaching materials. Beyond that, Twitter can significantly enhance the profile of an academic, their research and their respective School and University more …

The School of Politics and International Relations is committed to the use of social media to share our research and further a wider understanding of politics. Our latest project, Picturing Politics, will feature a series of audio and video clips that will see our academics commenting on the political significance of a diverse range of images.

The series is intended to …

Tomorrow, we launch our annual report on the rebelliousness of MPs, packed full of data about the behaviour of MPs in the last session – who’s rebelled, how often, over what. And whether the record-breaking behaviour seen in the first session of the Parliament continued into the second. But how do the public react to MPs who are rebellious?

To …

If you are a political scientist or a political historian or – like me – some hybrid of the two, you really should avoid predicting the future. That said, put a microphone and a camera close to our faces and most of us will do just that.

In the early days of the current coalition government I was asked by …

This is the twenty-fourth in 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 …

The red microphone

Last week I finished a documentary for Radio 4 and I thought that some of you might be interested in knowing more about the process of getting academically grounded research out to hundreds of thousands of listeners.

The subject of the documentary, my second for Radio 4’s Archive Hour strand, is political dystopias, specifically those featured …