Welcome to Political Calculus

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I write this in the possible throes of a Twitter doom-loop, which may turn out to be yet another social media collective freakout that peters into nothing. But if it doesn’t I guess we won’t find out on Twitter and will be trawling Substacks to learn what went wrong. Which is a oblique way of saying, it might be time for me to move on from lengthy data Twitter threads to a longer-form of social media writing.

So what is this Substack for? Put simply it’s a place for me to indulge in talking about politics, typically my own research and other work I’m interested in, and usually with a tilt towards quantitative analysis of political data. Hence the Substack name.

Who am I? I’m a political scientist based at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College. My research is broadly in the area of ‘political economy’, which is arguably the most amorphously defined field in the social sciences. For me, that largely means an economics-inspired analysis of politics - individual self-interested people trying to get what they want in a world of political constraints. But I reserve the right to make political economy whatever I want it to be on a given day.

What kind of stuff will you find here? Those people who know my work - or my Twitter account - already will know I like graphs and figures. Politics can’t simply be boiled down to spreadsheets of data and whizz-bang graphics. Ideas, narratives, charisma, identity - all important. But but but… there are predictable things out there. Despite the handwringing every few years, survey companies are pretty good at predicting how elections will turn out. MPs, Congressional Representatives, legislators around the world vote in fairly predictable ways. And you and I make decisions all the time that are systematic in some way - we’re not random Brownian particles bouncing around aimlessly. One would hope.

One of the things in particular I’ll write about here is my forthcoming book on political economy, Why Politics Fails, coming out in March 2023 with Viking/Penguin in the UK and PublicAffairs in North America. If you click through - and I hope you do - you’ll get a sense of what the book is about plus get to compare the British and North American cover designs!

Closer to the release date, I’ll talk more about the book. But briefly, it asks why it’s so hard to get things we collectively want - democracy, equality, solidarity, security, and prosperity - and how we can harness politics more effectively to reach these goals. The book is a plea to take politics seriously and not hope that we can simply magic conflict away through technology, markets, or the myth of a ‘strong leader, who gets things done’.

But there’s more. I have just finished a multi-year grant from the European Research Council on wealth inequality and will be spending the next few months continuing to analyse data and write-up papers from the project. So if you’re interested in the intersection of wealth, housing, and politics, I hope you’ll find plenty to chew on. In particular, I have run a large number of surveys in the UK and Europe, which provide insight into how people’s wealth affects what they want the government to do - and who they want in charge.

On which note - the first substantive post, which should drop later today, looks at a survey I ran a couple of weeks ago in the UK with a whole host of questions on vote choice, attitudes to wealth taxation, and housing wealth. I can promise graphs.

Until then.