chris hanretty
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How much do gender and ethnicity affect wannabe MPs’ chances of being selected?
MPs
elections
gender
R
To model the chances of winning a contest, you should use conditional logistic regression, but this requires extra work to turn coefficient values into changes in the…
Sep 27, 2024
Chris Hanretty
Minimal important differences in the social sciences, part 2
measurement
academia
In a previous post, I suggested that one way of determining the minimal important difference is to establish the minimal detectable change. If you don’t know that a change…
Sep 3, 2024
Chris Hanretty
Minimal important differences in the social sciences, part 1
measurement
academia
If I told you that a weight loss drug would cause you to lose fourteen kilograms, give or take four kilograms, I think you would be impressed.
1
Aug 27, 2024
Chris Hanretty
When the biggest party doesn’t form the government
parties
elections
coalitions
Charlotte Minvielle, a former candidate for the New Popular Front (NFP), has an article in the Guardian in which she criticises Emmanuel Macron’s reluctance to consider a…
Aug 9, 2024
Chris Hanretty
The single party majority limbo
parties
elections
In last week’s UK election, the Labour party managed to win 412 of 650 seats (63.4%) on 33.7% of the vote.
Jul 7, 2024
Chris Hanretty
Why wait for Survation?
parties
polling
mrp
The election has now come and gone, and the thing I said definitely wouldn’t happen – Labour winning fewer seats than they won in 1997 – has in fact happened. It seems that…
Jul 3, 2024
Chris Hanretty
How left- or right-wing are parties’ 2024 manifestos?
parties
code
language
Roughly two weeks ago most of the parties released their 2024 general election manifestos.
Jun 26, 2024
Chris Hanretty
Against cosine distance as a measure of disproportionality
elections
proportionality
People who study elections have lots of different ways to measure disproportionality. This is not surprising: measuring disproportionality can either be seen as a problem of…
May 14, 2024
Chris Hanretty
Why is the MRP so variable when the uniform national swing is so predictable?
A general election in the United Kingdom is less than nine months away. As the election nears we can expect more people to ask questions about the accuracy of opinion polling.
Apr 13, 2024
Chris Hanretty
Taking measurement error seriously when comparing measures of party position
parties
measurement
Almost nothing is measured without error. Sometimes we can make the error very small. Particle physicists are able to measure many quantities very accurately. The situation…
Nov 27, 2023
Chris Hanretty
Has the cabinet shifted to the left on economic issues?
This week Rishi Sunak reshuffled his cabinet for the second time. The reshuffle allowed Sunak to get rid of Suella Braverman, who had ignored requests from Downing Street to…
Nov 14, 2023
Chris Hanretty
The relationship between party system polarization and perceptions of clear alternatives
Earlier this week, the European Social Survey released topline results from ESS waves 6 and 10, on “understandings of democracy” (h/t to Pedro Magalhaes for tweeting about…
Oct 25, 2023
Chris Hanretty
Replicating Mueller, “The temporal focus of Campaign Communication”
parties
code
language
Over the past few months I’ve been playing with language models of various sizes.
Oct 13, 2023
Chris Hanretty
Connecting They Work For You to Wikidata
data
legislatures
tl:dr;
R code to produce a lookup table connecting They Work For You constituency codes to Wikidata entities, and the self-same lookup table.
Sep 25, 2023
Chris Hanretty
Gender-representative legislatures are also more age-representative
representation
gender
age
legislatures
Over on Twitter I asked whether anyone knew of literature which showed that parliaments which were more representative with respect to one characteristic were also more…
Jul 7, 2023
Chris Hanretty
University responses to industrial action and grade inflation
academia
tl:dr; policies adopted by my employer are likely to increase the proportion getting a first class degree by roughly three percentage points
Jun 21, 2023
Chris Hanretty
Austerity’s effect on polarization is measure-dependent
parties
In a recent article in the British Journal of Political Science,
Hübscher, Sattler, and Wagner (2023)
investigate the effects of austerity on party system polarization. They…
May 12, 2023
Chris Hanretty
Why doorstep polls are probably wrong
parties
polling
Earlier today Paul Waugh from the Independent posted a tweet showing campaign material from the Green Party.
May 4, 2023
Chris Hanretty
A potted history of expert judgements of left-right positions
parties
measurement
Most of the time when we want to explain what parties do we point to their position on the left-right dimension. Except that we can’t really “point” to anything, because…
Apr 20, 2023
Chris Hanretty
What does ChatGPT know about Conservative MPs?
code
R
parties
MPs
In late March, Patrick Wu and colleagues released a working paper suggesting that ChatGPT could produce a ranking of US Senators from left to right.
Apr 7, 2023
Chris Hanretty
Do parties zig-zag?
code
R
parties
tl:dr version
If you predict a leftward shift when you previously saw a rightward shift, you’re just predicting regression to the mean, not conscious zig-zagging.
Mar 24, 2023
Chris Hanretty
Coalition data II: trials and tibblations
code
R
coalitions
In the previous post, I created a function which could generate all
\(2^N-1\)
possible coalitions of
\(N\)
parties. I placed particular emphasis on making that function as
fa…
Nov 19, 2022
Chris Hanretty
Working with coalition data (part 1)
code
R
coalitions
Coalition formation is an important topic in political science, but coalition data is difficult to work with. When a number of groups come together to form a coalition, they…
Nov 11, 2022
Chris Hanretty
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