@willdv2002
ESRC Funded PhD student in Politics at Cardiff University, studying electoral reform in Wales (personal account) Research profile: https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/research-staff/daviesw18
Politics experts at a Welsh university have launched a website that brings the excitement of fantasy sports to political forecasting, offering an interactive way to engage with the 2026 Senedd election
We've published the 2025 local elections handbook in collaboration with the University of Exeter's Elections Centre. This includes ward- and candidate-level results from last year's locals. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/2025-local-e...
Experimental participants to us
In launching the Welsh Labour manifesto, Eluned Morgan did not mention Keir Starmer once.
This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Wonโt
Either way, from when I've worked with them DV have been very clear about the importance of impartiality in observing, so I feel confident they probably aren't being funded by a right wing cabal as some have theorised.
Looking forward to their full report, and then their report on #Senedd2026!
Comparing that to the previous Senedd election (pre-Ballot Secrecy Act), only 26% of polling stations in the sample showed family voting. Already too high, but almost 50% is insanity.
Perhaps they just got lucky in the past, perhaps FV has gotten worse, but the point stands it's too high.
Family voting is now illegal under the Ballot Secrecy Act, which has been a focus of DV for years and they played a key role in that getting passed. So it's not surprising that when confronted with the highest level they've observed (49% of polling stations) they'd report this quickly.
Firstly, it's the role of an election observer (as the Electoral Commission sets out) to make sure that information is recorded that can be used to improve elections in the future - this doesn't mean the election is "rigged" or "stolen", it's just about recording the issues in democracy.
Since election observing and Democracy Volunteers is making the rounds on socials, leading to all kinds of conspiracy theories, I feel I should give my two cents at someone who's volunteered with them both in the UK and abroad.
(See wind-ruined haircut at Caerphilly by-election last year)
Imagine devoting your entire career to selling the idea that the British public hates wokery and is clamouring for radical right wing populism, only to then be defeated in an actual election by the most left wing possible coalition of politicians and activists in the country.
It's got to hurt
While you're all messing around on Bluesky: I have a new working paper on the Gallagher index, the most common measure of disproportionality.
TL;DR: I show that it is constrained by the size of the party system, which can cause problems comparing elections across time and space.
"Family voting, where two voters either confer, collude or direct each other on voting is a breach of the Ballot Secrecy Act. Anyone found guilty of breaching these secrecy requirements could face a fine or imprisonment for up to six months."
(Source: www.politico.eu/newsletter/l...)
But it is another example of how Reform boost turnout for progressive parties. They are so profoundly toxic. When you put it alongside the Tories losing their deposit, the right have a serious problem.
Always time for an entry into Welsh politics in May if he fancies another go...
Chapter 1 of Moby Dick, page 1 The phrase โCall me Ishmaelโ, the first sentence of the book, is highlighted in blue, with careful highlighting on the very big C at the start. Above this, written in ballpoint pen โHis nameโ
Love the glimpse into the beautiful mind that notated this used copy of Moby Dick I got
oh come on
Why do I have to pretend that I'm going to print something in order to save it as a PDF. Why do I have to engage in a little ruse.
๐ฎ Full text of the letter calling on the Government to engage with the growing risks First Past the Post now presents
โ๏ธ Signatories include leading academics, political scientists and constitutional experts - including a former Chief Executive of the UK Electoral Commission
๐ Read it in full
this feels like a spoof from The Day Today
Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin
For the craic - The trendines for each pollster from 2024 to now
It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.
I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
Macbeth: SHIT
A screenshot of the zombo.com domain as of yesterday, looking painfully vibe-coded; the "Zombo.com" text is now in a font that looks nigh-identical to Verdana and has an awful washed-out rainbow gradient, the loading circle animation has been replaced with a pinwheel, and apparently the voice has been replaced with some awful TTS equivalent. There is now a description underneath the page which is some of the most repulsive "quirky" corpo-speak an LLM could possibly muster, which I refuse to transcribe.
Apparently the zombocom domain expired yesterday and was presumably bought out by some other jackass who launched this vibe-coded IMPOSTOR
More geographical confusion. Nigel Farage said Reform's new leader in Wales had "come back to the Valleys", so his children could grow up Welsh. Nation Cymru report he had moved from London to Bath in the west of England, about 50-60 miles from Islwyn, across the border
nation.cymru/news/the-new...
ten years ago today no one clapped
๐จ๐จ NEW BLOGPOST ๐จ๐จ
The right wing should be worried about young men. Unlike Europe and the US, British young men are swinging wildly behind progressive parties. Some thoughts on why, and why most of the right are ignoring it.
open.substack.com/pub/joxleywr...
Cardiff University posts ยฃ33.4m deficit for 2024-25 after spending ยฃ24.3m on voluntary severance and redundancies. University of Essex posts ยฃ22.1m loss after spending ยฃ10.8m on severance. Latest round-up from @patrickjack.bsky.social: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/cardiff...