Rewatching Babylon 5 (S1) and struck by the fact that both B5 and Star Trek: DS9 have a season 1 "And Now An Episode Specifically About Our Nazi Analogues". www.imdb.com/title/tt0517... www.imdb.com/title/tt0708...

Vast bonfire of "people voting Radical Right are driven by something - anything - other than wanting to vote for a Radical Right party (i.e. normal voting)" theories.

Ned Richardson-Little@historyned.bsky.social · yesterday

The past few years have been an explicit test of two theories of how to win back AfD voters: first, the CDU just needed to pivot to the hard right under Merz and second that the Linke as a party was too woke and needed to turn to workerist anti-migrant nationalism via BSW. Both failed.

In shock news, economic angst leads people to be more likely to vote Lib-Left than Auth-Right.

Vincent Heddesheimer@vheddesheimer.bsky.social · yesterday

New paper w/ @hannohilbig.bsky.social: we examine how local exposure to the Great Recession affected politics over the long run. Counties where unemployment rose more in 2007–09 moved toward Democrats, not the populist right. The shift remained visible in 2022.

Updated numbers here: Burnham bounce still basically entirely coming from clawing back voters Labour had lost to Greens, Lib Dems and Plaid/SNP. In addition, Burnham now winning 10% of Green 2024 voters - double that from June.

Steve Akehurst@steveakehurst.bsky.social · last wk.

Where is the 'Burnham bounce' coming from? So far, it's largely Labour 2024 voters returning to Labour - mostly those 'progressive defectors' who had previously switched to the Greens. Based on 5 polls with headline VI since 20th July (MiC, Delta, YG, Survation).

Not sure I'll ever get over the fact that every villain I ever thought an unrealistic blithering idiot with half-arsed writing was in fact unrealistically over-written and over-thought - while every 'realistic' villain with a coherent, sympathetic motivation is now clearly 100% literary fiction.

Sharon 🪳🌹@sharonk.bsky.social · 11mo ago

god damn it he explicitly just said this when he was talking with Douthat this year

This is a very common fallacy: You have a theory about how things work, then you notice that the real world doesn't work like your theory. So you interpret this as a *historical* development - in the old days, everything was neat and simple - rather than as a problem with the theory.

Clearing out tabs, stumbled into this - no idea how/why I found it - someone actually sat down to study whether Authoritarians** *are* less funny www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... ** Authoritarianism in political science == Right-Wing Authoritarianism in psychology

Two, resilience is about resisting bad information, either internally or externally, so it falls back into a counter-disinformation project that mistakes the current crisis as one of facts, when its really one of consequences.

This chart goes to underline my general position that looking at election results tends to lead people to massively understate the level of underlying stability in voter attitudes. Shifts in (positive) support for Farage are so small you could reasonably ask whether it's not just noise.

Marios Richards@mariosrichards.bsky.social · 2w ago

Here's a version that's ... slightly less of an eyesore. Can see the small growth of dedicated support and the broader coalition getting back to the breadth of 2014. But DKs and neutrals shrink and the actively disliking majority (60+% of the electorate) consolidate into Strongly Dislike.

Starmer's departure leaves Nigel Farage as by far the most unpopular leader (or senior politician). 56% "very unfavourable" is major problem for Reform - Reform can only win if their opponents divide & people with strong negative views of Farage will be more motivated by anti-Reform tactical voting

YouGov@yougov.co.uk · 2w ago

Latest major party leader net favourability ratings, July 2026 Andy Burnham: +3 Ed Davey: -8 Kemi Badenoch: -11 Zack Polanski: -26 Nigel Farage: -46 yougov.com/en-gb/articl...

One of the issues with using "subjective class" - when survey respondents identify their own class - is that along with everything else you capture an element of "personality/value type who thinks significantly less about other people than the population median".

Dan Kaszeta FRHistS@dankaszeta.bsky.social · 2w ago

Buses, famously for the richer classes and upper orders.

www.economist.com/europe/2026/... In shock news, another state discovers reducing immigration doesn't impact the Radical Right.

Sweden squashed migration. The populist right wants to go further

The Sweden Democrats could be heading for a bigger role in government

economist.com

open.substack.com/pub/mariosri... Tldr; I don't think the 1930s/2010-2020s are exceptional, I think it's 1945-1985 that's weird - that's the period where Authoritarian voters *aren't* voting for Authoritarian parties - which I'd describe as the Surprisingly Long Suppression of the Radical Right.

My Theory of the (Re)Growth of the Radical Right

The Radical Right - aka Extreme Right/Hard Right/Far Right - is a party family that has been studied pretty continuously since 1945[1].

open.substack.com

New post from me on what did, and what apparently did not, contribute to the decline in support for Labour over the last two years (Substack version): open.substack.com/pub/election...

Why was Keir Starmer forced to resign as PM?

Many people are somewhat bemused by Keir Starmer’s resignation as prime minister.

open.substack.com

Just listened to Steve Davies (historian, IEA) reviewing the thesis of his book on the CapX podcast. Starts off arguing that there's been a Great Realignment from politics being about left-right economics to his euphemism for social liberal-authoritarian politics.

A surprising amount of political science - by actual political scientists - seems to just assume-without-testing that voters perceive politicians/parties as closest to them purely on the basis of <gives same/close answers to an easily framed survey question>.

Something I've noticed but never seen captured as a clear concept - there's a significant axis of human variation in how people respond to "members of two conflicting groups have both been subject to abuse from the other".

Elizabeth Taylor@elizabethtaylor47.bsky.social · 3w ago

So because some people (undefined) were abusive on twitter, the poisonous transphobia of GC organisations driving trans people out of society is in some way justified?

It's not true - Andy Burnham could *instead* break the (recently restated) manifesto pledge on tax or EU membership. But he *does* have to do *something proportionate to the majority* or it'll be hard to ask for another one (of any size).

Kevin Schofield@kevinschofied.bsky.social · 3w ago

'Andy Burnham Must Take This Chance To Rewire Westminster And Change The Way Brits Vote' Writing for HuffPost UK, Labour MPs Anna Dixon and Patrick Hurley make the case for proportional representation. www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/andy-b...

Fun podcast on Messaging (ideological framing) vs Politics of Force (incorporate Puerto Rico, impeach Trump). Some talking past each other (I don't think these are contradictory positions and how people respond to the presence/absence of the Politics of Force is not unrelated to values).

Toby Buckle@polphilpod.bsky.social · 3w ago

"political scientists, consultants, commentators think about politics as primarily about policy, & values as secondary to that electorates are the opposite"

Interesting new article on 'partisan intolerance' in the UK. Strength - focussing on concrete examples (headmaster says yes/no to a school talk from a politician not say assassination) and broad, unstipulated groups (Conservative/Labour politician)

Sara Hobolt@sarahobolt.bsky.social · 3w ago

📖 A new BJPolS article in which we develop and test the concept of ‘partisan intolerance’ - the gap between a person’s willingness to interfere with contentious activities by in-partisans versus the same activities by out-partisans - and we find high levels of partisan intolerance in the UK 👇

Hello! Outside of my work at @thinklabour.bsky.social, I’ve been squirrelling away at a polling aggregator. This is www.pollingpolis.co.uk! It has all the usual stuff but, crucially, also has a wee view for Age, Gender and Past Vote, plus much more for customising and sifting through. Have fun!

In our case we argue that the liberal/authoritarian scale contains one such item: support for censorship. We show this single item make women ‘more traditionalist’ We show women associate this item with pornography, and for many women this is an area of threat/safety. 5/8

So, there is a precedent for vetoing an MP's resignation Viscount Chelsea (Henry Cadogan) applied for the Chiltern Hundreds in 1842 The Chancellor (Goulburn) refused because, get this, Cadogan wanted to resign to obstruct an investigation for bribery h/t @fascinatorfun.bsky.social and @gazhay.com

After 16 years of Viktor Orbán's rule, Hungary's state television has suspended its news broadcasts for restructuring. The main state TV channel, M1, displayed a black screen with the following message: "Public media must not lie. We apologize for doing so for many years."

conversely in the uk, we've seen the appeasement brigade gain full control & fall flat on their faces we need to really drive that point home www.liberalcurrents.com/starmer-out/

Starmer Out

Starmer did not "do nothing": he made the country radically more regressive. No wonder he fell.

liberalcurrents.com

My dissertation tests the downward mobility -> populism claim using methods than can be interpreted causally under a set of plausible assumptions. I find downward mobility may cause psychological discontent (e.g., status threat), but no evidence it causes populist support or attitudes. 3/4

Community detection and force directed graph layout for local authorities in England and Wales based on 2021 commuting flows

Of a piece with so much of the political response to the rise of Radical Right parties. 1 - having a fundamentally Bad Theory of what's driving it (bad local economics) 2 - Bad Theory => Unquantified and Unfalsifiable hypothesis about how to fix it (spending hasn't worked...can't have been enough!)

Financial Times@financialtimes.com · last mo.

Hartlepool has had the most regeneration funding per head of anywhere in England. But the response from residents, still struggling with the cost of living, can feel muted. Read more: ft.trib.al/t7R6cMm

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbOG... Spent the first 10-20 minutes assuming this was obviously a spoof/mashup and that Kermit would appear and get his face melted off ... ... but actually it was me whose face was melted off. By timeshock (okay, this is only 2 years after The Prisoner - but still).

Jim Henson's Lost Masterpiece: THE CUBE (1969) Remastered 4K

YouTube video by Blackout's Box - Blackout / Michael Biggins

youtube.com

h/t to @tonybarrett.bsky.social great breakdown chart for my recurrent irk anytime someone speaks airily about "populism/populism on bothsides" growing. Last 30 yrs have been *pretty bad* for the Far Left (populist or o/w) -good luck figuring out when the Global Financial Crisis happened from this!

Matthijs Rooduijn@mrooduijn.bsky.social · last mo.

Linking The PopuList to national election results shows that almost 1 in 4 Europeans now vote for a far-right party, while around 1 in 3 support an anti-establishment party. Support for far-left parties is at its lowest level since 1989: only around 1% now vote for a far-left party.