@jamesrdennison
Political and social scientist Prof @mpc-eui.bsky.social @eui-eu.bsky.social & Pierre Keller Prof @harvardkennedy.bsky.social Interests: attitudes, behaviour, comms, migration, quant, 🇬🇧 & 🇪🇺 politics www.jamesdennison.eu
This is actually what I most wanted to highlight. I remember hearing a Labour MP argue that politics was ultimately just "a game of competitive storytelling", and then reflecting on just how disturbing the implications for democracy, accountability, and policymaking would be if that were wholly true
fuck, I’m sorry, I can’t compete with this
A watercolour study of parrot tulips
Watercolour of parrot tulips, a good subject to struggle with
#botanicalart #watercolour #watercolor
How do institutions communicate about #migration?
With @jamesrdennison.bsky.social & @mcduarte.bsky.social, we built a database of migration communication campaigns in Europe.
We’re expanding it now. Do you know a campaign? Please take this 1-min survey.
eui.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
The bad thing about this happening in a Labour seat is it gives the press a big excuse to ignore the fact Reform’s strategy is failing. They’ve now lost 3 in a row in 3 different countries to 3 different parties because their plan of coming through a split vote isn’t working. Their vote is too low
New evidence estimates that the Israeli military directly killed 75200 Gazans between Oct '23 and Jan '25. 22800 children were killed. Children, women, and the elderly were 56% of the killed. Non-violent deaths were also far higher than pre-"war". www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
Amazing analysis of pub closures in the UK, by @laurenleek.eu, and the corporate interests behind them. Some important political and policy implications open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...
Details of my book launch are now available - everyone welcome. It will be hybrid for those not in London and recorded.
www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/...
New at ESR!
Does moving often as a child weaken social capital later in life?
#RValente #MVacchiano find a more complex picture: childhood moves reduce place attachment, but can strengthen personal agency, supporting social capital in adulthood!
🔥 #OpenAccess: doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcag001
Congrats Leo, this looks excellent.
From context to congruence: Immigration salience and voter socialization Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2026 Leonardo Carella and Francesco Raffaelli This paper considers how issue salience environments affect long-term patterns of political choice via processes of political socialization. Drawing on the well-known ‘impressionable years’ hypothesis, we theorize that voters who grew up in high-immigration salience contexts subsequently exhibit higher levels of voter-party agreement on immigration (issue congruence). We find support for this hypothesis from two studies, which leverage cross-sectional variation within cohorts in exposure to immigration salience in voters’ formative years. The first employs congruence data from a survey of 10 European countries, linked to historical salience data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. The second is a within-country study, measuring salience and congruence from two long-running German public opinion survey series. The analysis suggests that growing up at times when immigration is high on the political agenda can have long-term consequences for the relationship between voters’ preferences on that issue and their political choices, shedding light on the mechanism behind ‘generational realignment’.
Really happy this work with @fraraffaelli.bsky.social found a home at EJPR. We show that growing up at times of high salience of immigration produces cohorts of voters who are more likely to vote for parties that they agree with specifically on immigration.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
It's a shame that in these anti-political times, Jenrick doing extremely lucrative planning favours for mega-rich donors is not something anyone bothers to mention about him
Surely, surely, this will allow most Reform supporters finally to wake up to the fact that they are backing the very same self-serving, corrupt, venal right wing grifters they’ve been trying to reject since the last election?
www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cr...
On the Robert Jenrick defection psychodrama:
His team have been plotting for months, so it was going to blow up at some point!
Most of my Tory sources agree he decided to defect after months of losing momentum in his bid to topple Badenoch as leader, as she started to improve
Spoiled brats are running the world.
Margaret Thatcher was kept in dark over Reagan's attack on Grenada Daily Telegraph. It's an old tradition of the "special relationship."
Image is a popular astronaut meme. An astronaut is looking at the earth from space saying wait, I am worthy of love? An astronaut is behind him holding up flowers and saying always have been
A message for you all to carry through the year
That’s why HAVN designed the EMF-blocking beanie. Powered by our proprietary WaveStopper™ Technology, it forms a barrier that blocks over 99% of WiFi, 5G, and Bluetooth radiation right where it matters most: your brain.
They gentrified the tinfoil hat
"social science has to answer questions that people beyond academia care about..academia can['t] just be self-referential as it grows infinitely. I think there are challenges to understand what’s going on in the United States and the world and to talk about it to broad audiences in plain language.."
Daily Mail+ BORIS JOHNSON: If Labour MPs try to reverse Brexit they will be walking into a hail of machine gun fire - and if that's the fight they want, bring it on! But they should heed my warning before things get bloody...
The worst, most dishonest prime minister we’ve ever had, rocks back and forth in his Daily Mail cubbyhole spewing out idiotic bilge to kid himself that he and his disastrous Brexit weren’t an almighty national fuck-up.
A deeply pathetic threat from an abject failure of a man.
BORIS JOHNSON: If Labour MPs try to reverse Brexit they will be walking into a hail of machine gun fire - and if that's the fight they want, bring it on! But they should heed my warning before things get bloody..
Jo Cox was murdered before the vote by a far-right terrorist & this is the language this complete disgrace chooses to use
This is extremely important
For the historical polling nerds out there, an article about our project with @ropercenter.bsky.social that digitised ~800 surveys by Gallup poll in Britain between 1955 and 1991 has been published in JEPOP. The merged dataset contains over three-quarters of a million respondents.
Damning overview of the nudging literature.
"[We] provide the most comprehensive synthesis of the effectiveness of nudging."
"We find a small aggregated effect size."
"[Our results show] the urgent need for higher quality, preregistered meta-analyses to clarify the true impact [of nudging]."
How hard would it have been to say "of course not... that's not what it's for"? I get that you've got a product to sell, but have some self-respect, man.
This is v good
Very cool paper using physiology to measure issue salience
academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
Breaking. Liz Truss wins this year's FIFA Prize for Economics.