blog posts – chris hanretty

Mother of god, that’s a lot of parties

elections

Political scientists are used to the idea that the number of legislators elected in a district shapes voting behaviour.

Efficiently calculating the distance to the nearest party

code

R

coalitions

I compare different ways to code up the same simulation, and get a 30x speed-up

Fitting fixed exponent laws in political science

elections

code

Some relationships are linear. If I work eight hours and make eight widgets, then an extra hour’s work will probably give me one more widget.

The effective number of parties given the share of the largest component

elections

code

In the Seat Product Model, the Seat Product is used to bound the number of seat-winning parties, which in turn is used to formulate an expectation regarding the seat share…

How many people, in which countries, can use the left-right scale?

polling

code

left-right

You shouldn’t investigate mass-elite linkages on the left-right scale in Brazil. Or South Africa. Or Hong Kong. Or indeed quite a few country years.

What might a Syrian electoral system look like?

elections

Using the existing electoral districts and party list PR would be a reasonable basis for a Syrian election.

Unitarisation and learning to vote without staggering

elections

local government

Unitarisation would probably mean moving away from election by thirds – and this is a good thing, because turnout in all-out elections is higher by around a percentage point.

Assembly sizes are biased towards divisibility

legislatures

The average number of divisors of the size of legislative chambers is greater than the average number of divisors of simulated data which replicates the mean and dispersion of those sizes. It’s therefore easier to split them up into equally-sized districts.

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…

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…

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

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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…

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

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…

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.

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…

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.

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.

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…

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…