Ballots & Bullets

Image by Johan Larsson

Following on from our league table of Politics departments on Twitter, we have drawn up a list of Politics academics that are also using Twitter.

LSE have already produced an excellent list of academic tweeters, which offered a useful starting place, but we wanted to look specifically at Politics academics and find out exactly how …

Image by Jurgen Appelo

We had a great response to our draft league table and there have been four new additions to the league table: @LSEPubAffairs, @LivUniPol, @PSI_UEA and @SussexPolitics. Here is the final, updated version of the league table.

The follower numbers were accurate as of Monday May 20, 2013.

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Governor Kanokov uses Twitter to report terrorist attacks in his troubled North Caucasus Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria.

State control over most of the national media in Russia has meant that Russian newspapers and TV today are a lot less interesting as a source of political research than they were in the 1990s. The situation regarding the internet is different. This is …

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 …

As the editor of CONCEPT’s twitter feed (@shortnotbrutish) it was with some satisfaction that I saw the number of followers edge past 1,000 the other day. Now, the first thing to say is that 1,000 followers would seem the smallest of small beer were you, say, Lady Gaga (34m followers; about the same population size as Uganda), …

When the government urges us to make sure research has an impact on the real world, I’m not sure this is what they mean.  Just after PMQs yesterday, I tweeted this:

Around 4.30pm, said Philip Davies tweeted back:

I better stop tweeting things like that, or no one in the whips office will ever speak to me again…

Philip …

David Cameron, speaking on breakfast radio in 2009, famously claimed, ‘too many tweets might make a twat’.

So has he been proved right by the recent changes allowing MPs to use devices such as iPads and smartphones whilst in the Chamber? Are MPs using these devices to communicate directly with constituents in a way that engages and informs the …

CONCEPT – The Nottingham Centre for normative Political Theory - has established a Twitter feed of quotes from political philosophers. It’s now been up and running for a month, at @shortnotbrutish.

Here are the five most popular quotes in the first month, as measured by retweets:

1. When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not …