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Scottish nationalists can’t rely on demographic change to deliver independence
Scottish independence is often spoken about as if it is an inevitability. Part of the reason for this is the age profile of Scottish nationalists and unionists. Supporters of independence tend to be much younger, so, the logic goes, will eventually outnumber unionists as the population ages. I’m generally sceptical of arguments about the fates […]
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As English identity declines, will British nationalism be activated in England as it has in Scotland and Wales?
English national identity has been the topic of breathless discussion and debate for the past few years. In the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, David Cameron announced that “the millions of voices of England must also be heard.” In 2015, the Conservatives raised the spectre of Scottish nationalism in a bid to win […]
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How might the 2021 Senedd election have looked under the proposed new system?
My blog for Make Votes Matter on the proposed Senedd electoral system. Yesterday, Mark Drakeford and Adam Price published a “joint position statement” on Senedd reform. The agreement proposed the use of a closed list D’Hondt PR system to elect 96 Members of the Senedd (MSs). The system would have 16 constituencies, each electing 6 […]
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Transnational social connectedness and the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union
This paper was produced for the Supervised Individual Study unit of the Advanced Quantitative Methods MRes at the University of Bristol. A PDF of the paper is available here, replication code and data here.
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People are surprisingly good at predicting local election results
I have previously looked at how British Election Study respondents view local crime rates (spoiler: people are very bad at judging local crime). But I had not realised there are also questions, last asked just before the 2019 election, asking respondents which party they thought would win locally. Being honest, I expected the predictions to […]
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2021 Metro Mayor Elections: Labour narrowly gained from the Conservatives while losing to “Did Not Vote”
The eight Combined Authority (“Metro”) Mayor elections in May 2021 were some of Labour’s most successful of the cycle. Despite poor results elsewhere, Labour managed to pick up two mayoralties directly from the Conservatives (West of England and Cambridgeshire) and a third newly created position (West Yorkshire). The gains ended up being overshadowed, partly because […]
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Joint opposition lists help un-skew the Hungarian electoral system, but they’ll still need a 3% lead to win
Five months from the 2022 Parliamentary elections, Hungary’s opposition is just about holding together the coalition needed to mount a credible campaign against Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government. Last month, they chose their candidate for Prime Minister: Péter Márki-Zay, mayor of Hódmezővásárhely. Márki-Zay, a conservative politician with no national experience and practically no party of his […]
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Shopping around: 70% expect to vote for more than one party in future
Before 2019, it was pretty common on social media to see the idea that in certain places – particularly in the north of England – Labour MPs could rely on voters to reelect them no matter what they or the party did. This was never really true (and it was often laced with classism) but […]
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Road crack detection with stacked neural networks
My blog for the Amsterdam Intelligence website. The full Masters Thesis is available here. The municipality of Amsterdam is responsible for 1,727km of roads. Stretched out in a row, this would take you from Amsterdam to the tip of Algeria, and every year these roads need inspecting and maintaining. So how should the Mobility and Public […]
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The Greens’ path to breakthrough runs through the Labour Party
Since the 2019 election, the Greens have been quietly creeping up in polls. Now sat at 5-7% in averages, the party is at its highest point since summer 2019, which was itself the Green’s best polling since before 2015. 5-7% might not seem like a lot, but in a FPTP election with dozens of seats […]
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Owen Winter 