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Marios Richards Profile picture
Marios Richards
@MariosRichards
Frequently wrong. Please correct (effort involved appreciated). Experiments with Data Visualisation: https://t.co/F3XqbLHw5x
Jan 11, 2024 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Is Nigel Farage A Threat To Con->Lab Switchers?

This appears to be the new - heavily discounted - version of "UKIP threatens Con and Lab equally".

The latest @BESResearch is from May 2023 - at which point the polls are in a similar place to where they are now (20pt Lab lead)
/1 I'm going to be looking specifically at people who voted Conservative in 2019 vs their vote intention as of the May 2023 fieldwork.

The Con->Lab sample isn't great (N=960), but it's prob *adequate* for our purpose (and > normal polling cross breaks, >>> than focus gps!)

/2 Image
Aug 21, 2023 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
@mattyglesias You're implicitly taking the 2d political space from polsci (Economi Left-Right/Social Liberal-Auth) - which is fine, it's very well supported.

The issue is that you're assuming that Welfare (and redist in general) is straitforwardly an Economic-axis only thing.

2/2 @mattyglesias That is at best 2/3 right and 1/3 wrong.

E.g. the more auth-leaning half of your Working Class (nobody talks about the social liberal-leaning half of the Working Class!) is quite negative about Welfare and Redistribution (unless convinced it's going only to them).

3/2
Feb 2, 2022 • 22 tweets • 9 min read
It's not hard to find people asserting that Boris Johnson was/is vital to the realignment of the Conservative Party electorate, getting votes from Labour, holding the coalition together.

It *is* hard to find any evidence to back it up.

Chart thread ahead:

/1 The 2019GE campaign is pretty much the peak of Boris Johnson's popularity - so let's compare with May's 2017GE campaign (the one where her popularity 'normalised' brutally) and see how that breaks down for different voter groups.

/2
Jun 20, 2021 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
@jrhopkin I think you** maybe have this a little backwards - I don't think social democratic parties are struggling (in the UK & across the West) because they're *choosing* to focus on identity politics over an economic message that most people can get onboard.

/1 @jrhopkin (** not uniquely and a lot of these people are *very* well informed, so I'm presenting this as a proposition not a certainty!)

I think "cultural axis" politics has taken off *precisely because* there isn't a good left-right dividing line on interests.

/2
Jun 12, 2021 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
@jrhopkin An article that every point moves around the intense political pressures on house prices ...

... without ever once addressing the politics.

/1 @jrhopkin It even references house builders having to convince local residence that them building houses nearby won't effect prices ...

... but still only focuses on the house builder and not the question of why, in this one market, producers have to get asset holder permission.

/2
May 22, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Great blog post on the political impact of the aging population!

I'm just going to add a few charts on the changing political balance of age groups:

/1 So we haven't had a Great Class Inversion ... but we're still on course for a Great Age Inversion:

/2
May 22, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Stupid model I have in my head when I think of UK political cycles (2 changes of governing party since 1979!)

Not intended to
* predict majorities
* be any good

*Some* theoretical justification here from looking at public spending public attitudes cycles.

/1 And if a system that can only deliver an average of two (2) changes of government every 30 years isn't depressing enough, no reason to assume the cycle length is static or stops at 30:

/2
May 14, 2021 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
There's an irritating pious thing I've noticed Labour-supporting commentators do near the end of interviews where they declare "even if Labour *could* move away from these working-class communities, I don't think it should - because they're the true heart of the movement!".

/1 It's irksome not so much of because of the self-righteous tone - someone's got to do it! - but because it's just not honest.

The heart of the Labour movement was never pieces of geography - it was people.

/2
May 12, 2021 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
OLDQUAKE!

If you're a journalist looking for a "Dramatic reversal that has flipped politics upside-down", it's not class, or the Labour Party, or the young - it's over 55s swinging to the Cons for the first time since *1970* and rapidly outpacing <55s for partisanship.

/1 blogs.bath.ac.uk/iprblog/2019/0…

Chart is even better if you include the fact that it gets *even more extreme* in 2019 (but the original article was written 6 months before) - but article still well worth a read.

/2
May 12, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
One last post on the question of Income-Based Voting/Class Reversals.

Here's the Income Quintile x 2019GE vote plot for people aged 17*-57.

/1

* 18 really since I filtered out the people who definitely/maybe couldn't have voted. On mobile/don't want to squint at charts? 2017/15/10/05 appear to boil down to LD-LAB transfers / LAB or CON doing generally better worse - but basically little shift in profile (LAB flattish by income, CON sharp line)

/2
May 12, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Re: class - there's an understandable desire to find a single, broadly comprehensible measure which defines the contemporary divides in UK politics - most particularly the new shifts.

But we already have a *really obvious* candidate with no measurement/subj issues - Age!

/1 Obviously, Age is in this context a compound class - it represents differences of economic interests, differences of values/cognition and differences of habits/expectations.

But that's exactly how people did and do use "class".

/2
May 11, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Quote-tweeting my own thread to do a tldr version (h/t @s8mb) legible on mobile through the wonders of paint-art-charts.

There's a widespread notion that "normal class politics has inverted" laid out clearly here and then linked with a view of class in terms of income.

/1 Crudely, people have an image in their minds of how voting used to be until quite recently *and then it all changed* - "and now the Working Class are more likely to vote Tory and the Middle Class are more likely to vote Labour".

/2
May 11, 2021 • 18 tweets • 7 min read
There are three big problems with this chart/section of the report they're from which I think make this very misleading.

One of them is a straight-up data cleaning/handling error, but the other two are presentational.

/1 Before I launch in - quick caveat, I've skimmed the rest of the report and, while I can't see a clear breakdown of the methodology, I like the look of the rest of the report.

/2
Mar 19, 2021 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
The framing here irks me - I feel like if you're a right-wing journalist, the place to start is why there are so few of you.

More substantively, it's really weird to frame this in monodimensional terms - particularly when using US sources.

/1 One thing everyone knows at this point is that "Left" and "Right" are not terribly helpful if you don't know whether you're looking at a split on economic ideology or on social values.

/2
Nov 22, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Suspect the next year of UK politics will involve a lot of Brexiteers inveighing about the SNP ...

... but through a double-layer of fantasy.

/1 The SNP's fantasy argument is just too obviously identical to the Brexit argument for Brexiteers to say "you want sovereignty and you're pretty sure it'll cost next to nothing/someone else will pay? Ridiculous!".

/2
May 1, 2020 • 4 tweets • 10 min read
@robfordmancs @JXB101 @Afriscopic @DrAlanWager @benwansell @ProfTimBale @UKandEU @michaeljswalker @jamesrbuk @colinrtalbot @sundersays Not so sure about this - obviously all interpretations of the Cursed Axis means have to be tentative and every name it's given is misleading in its own special way.

/1 @robfordmancs @JXB101 @Afriscopic @DrAlanWager @benwansell @ProfTimBale @UKandEU @michaeljswalker @jamesrbuk @colinrtalbot @sundersays Specifically, "Authoritarian" is misleading because it sounds like Authoritarians have a "context-free" approval of Authority ... but everything about Leave voters pivots on whether you're talking about Them or Other People.

/2
Apr 23, 2020 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
@rowena_kay @drjennings @JGForsyth It's a particularly weird deficit for that group because you'd think they'd be quite into Popper.

The error is in all the talk of The Science as if it were a singular noun, when instead it should be treated as a verb (to science = to disagree critically).

/1 @rowena_kay @drjennings @JGForsyth "Scientific Consensus" is the other thing lazy politicians (and journalists!) always reach for.

It's almost a contradiction in terms, but you can think of it as the excreta of science - or the non-living bark constantly shed as the tree grows.

/2
Feb 20, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
If we're talking about things that people (/commentators) like to "explain away" about public immigration sentiment ...

... maybe the place to start should be the fact that immigration restrictionists are *visibly losing the debate*?

/1 The trend on immigration sentiment is starting to look like the pattern for Gay Marriage/toleration of homosexuality - i.e. opponents lose ground in public attitudes every year for decades - and then, suddenly, they lose ground *really fast*

(need a better chart pairing)

/2
Feb 18, 2020 • 8 tweets • 5 min read
@sjwrenlewis @jocanib I wouldn't be shocked, but I've never evidence economic circumstances influences social values.

/1 @sjwrenlewis @jocanib In contrast, there's a lot of evidence that social values have a causative impact on

* economic circumstances - if you're a social liberal you're more likely to move to where the high paying jobs are

/2
Sep 3, 2019 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
@TheScepticIsle @stephenkb Yes, it's weird logic that looks only two weeks ahead.

But I think you can go further - it's lazy logic that pretends Corbyn/NotCorbyn is a binary.

/1 @TheScepticIsle @stephenkb Corbyn entering government as part of a shakey 3 party coalition with a technical majority of 8 is not Corbyn entering government on the back of 60 MP solely Labour majority.

/2
Sep 1, 2019 • 4 tweets • 7 min read
@BruceKHayward @CeddChad @sundersays @K_Niemietz @rolandmcs @mjrharris @YouGov I think the notion that the Remain campaign defined - or ever could define - what Leave "meant" is a complete canard. It bugs me whenever it comes up.

No political party ever gets to swap *their own manifesto pledges* with *how the other side repr. the worst case scenario*.

/1 @BruceKHayward @CeddChad @sundersays @K_Niemietz @rolandmcs @mjrharris @YouGov If Remain had won, would Remainers have been able to say that their mandate to act covered anything and everything Nigel Farage asserted that Remainers were about to do?

Political opponents define worst-case scenarios/frame things in the least flattering light possible.

/2