Daniel Allington – Page 3 – Daniel Allington

Who won the Twitter election? Part ii: ‘faithful’ and ‘promiscuous’ followers

Last month, I published an analysis of candidates’ public Twitter followers immediately before the General Election. As I showed, Conservative candidates tended to have more public followers than Labour candidates — but once we control for whether candidates had or had not previously been Members of Parliament, we find that Labour candidates tended to have more public followers than Conservative candidates. SNP candidates tended to have more public followers than Conservative or Labour candidates, although that finding was not statistically significant after controls because of the low numbers involved.

This does not, however, address the question of which party’s candidates had more public followers in total — nor the much more subtle question of how many of each party’s candidates’ public followers exclusively followed candidates of that party, and how many also followed candidates of other parties. To answer that question, we need to know who the candidates’ followers were. Fortunately, I do:

Total public Twitter followers of all candidates in the 2017 General Election, showing how many followed each party's candidates exclusively (solid colour) and how many also followed the candidates of one or more additional parties (transparent) — Total public Twitter followers of all candidates in the 2017 General Election, showing how many followed each party’s candidates exclusively (solid colour) and how many also followed the candidates of one or more additional parties (transparent)

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Who won the Twitter election? Part i: followers, and which party’s candidates tended to have more of them

Just over half a year ago, the Telegraph carried out an analysis appearing to show that ‘the Labour leader’s shadow cabinet d[id]n’t have as wide a reach as their opposite numbers on Twitter’. This conclusion was arrived at by comparing ministers and shadow ministers whose roles were directly parallel: ‘[Jeremy] Corbyn has more followers than Theresa May, while Diane Abbott saw off Amber Rudd, John McDonnell beat Philip Hammond and Keir Starmer edged out David Davis’, but with regard to the others, ‘the Government enjoyed a clean sweep of the board’ (ibid.).

This is interesting, but I don’t find it satisfactory. The Conservative Party’s best known and most popular politicians were mostly in the cabinet. But while Corbyn himself remains the Labour Party’s biggest social media star, its second- and fourth-most popular MPs on Twitter were and are excluded from the shadow cabinet by virtue of not being Corbyn loyalists, while the third-most popular has technically remained a shadow cabinet member but was excluded from the Telegraph’s analysis by virtue of having no Tory opposite number.

So what happens if we look at the public followers of all prospective parliamentary candidates? This happens. (Figures collected in the week before the General Election for a different purpose and re-used here. Small parties excluded. If you want code, here’s my notebook. Hat tip to Democracy Club for its crowdsourced list of politicians’ social media accounts.)

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‘Middle class problems’? Social grade and the ‘most important issue’ in wave 13 of the British Election Study

The findings of wave 13 of the British Election Study are now out. Wave 13 was conducted just after the June 2017 General Election, and analysts all over the country have been crunching the numbers. This is my contribution, and looks at answers to the question, ‘As far as you’re concerned, what is the SINGLE MOST important issue facing the country at the present time?’ This was a free text question, so respondents were able to provide whatever answers they wished, without restriction. What I wanted to find out was whether people of different NRS social grades would express different concerns in their answers to this question. We already know that Labour gained vote share from the Conservatives in more middle class areas and lost it to them in working class areas. Might analysis of those ‘most important issues’ give a hint as to the different priorities of people of different social classes?

I’ll get some analysis of the numbers up before long, but — for now — here’s the chart:

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Did Jewish Labour voters turn towards the Conservative Party or the Liberal Democrats in 2017?

Last week, I published a blog post showing that North London constituencies bucked the national trend by swinging less heavily towards Labour than might otherwise have been expected. I have since repeated the analysis, looking at changes in votes for the Labour Party, Conservative Party, and Liberal Democrats in the twenty British constituencies with the highest Jewish populations. The findings of that analysis are consistent with the view that many British Jews who had previously voted Labour turned away from the party in response to its continued mishandling of its ongoing antisemitism crisis, but — contrary to some indications that ‘the Tories were likely to take huge swathes of Jewish votes’ — they did not turn towards the Conservative Party. Instead, such voters seem more likely to have voted Liberal Democrat.

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The electoral cost of left wing antisemitism

EDIT (2 Jul 2017): See also my subsequent analysis of the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat vote in the 20 British constituencies with the highest Jewish populations

EDIT (12 April 2019): I also analysed 2018 local election results in Barnet: the local authority with the highest Jewish population in the UK. This analysis was reported on the front page of the Jewish Chronicle on 10 May 2018.

The UK’s 2017 general election campaign was marred by overt racism against Jews on the part of some supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps most dramatically expressed in the erection of a vast antisemitic banner in a central location in the city of Bristol. Moreover, it came hard on the heels of the Labour Party’s failure to discipline Corbyn’s long-term ally, Ken Livingstone over his appalling historical distortions with regard to Adolf Hitler and the Zionist movement.

The Labour leadership is riding high at the moment, thanks to its less-severe-than-expected defeat in the face of an utterly shambolic Tory campaign. However, there’s been some discussion as to the electoral cost of its failures with regard to the Jewish community (see e.g. Marcus Dysch in the Jewish Chronicle).

Can we put a figure on that cost? If we look at voting in the part of the country with the highest Jewish population, we find that two percent more Jews in a constituency implies a roughly one percent smaller rise in Labour’s vote share.

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This is what terrorism is

Last night, a man walked into the foyer of the Manchester Arena as the crowds were leaving an Ariana Grande concert. Surrounded by the happy faces of children, he detonated a bomb, killing and injuring as many as possible. Others have also died or been maimed, and all deserve the very deepest sympathy and respect — but girls and young women were undoubtedly the main target. It was an Ariana Grande concert. And even if the killer didn’t know who the members of an Ariana Grande concert audience were likely to be, he will have seen them all around him before he chose to end their lives.

Thoughts must be with the victims and with those for whom they were and are the whole world — and in those family homes where (as a friend wrote this morning) ‘a make-up- and clothes-strewn room is silent.’ And thoughts must also turn to the prevention of further atrocities. The act was possible because of particular security assumptions that now should perhaps be revisited. But it was also possible because of certain fantasies that must no longer be indulged. The killer’s intention should have been inconceivable; it was not.

This is what terrorism is. Never accept a point of view from which it might be justified.

RStudio, Jupyter, Emacs, Vim: nothing that works properly is easy to use and nothing that is easy to use works properly

EDIT: Some of the problems described below are mitigated or resolved by not saving to a network drive. That doesn’t help with all the problems, though. RStudio no longer hangs for minutes at a time and I can now use version control, but the cursor still becomes uncontrollable in long Markdown documents. Also the university’s PCs are set up in such a way that students have to save to a network drive, which means that this is a (partial) fix for me as a researcher but not for me as a teacher.

So I am preparing to teach quantitative analysis of social media data using R, the open source language for statistical programming. I usually do anything code-related in Emacs, because I already know how to use Emacs and you can do everything code-related in Emacs and I don’t want to install and learn the quirks of loads of different IDEs. But that argument won’t make sense from the point of view of my students, firstly because they won’t need to do everything code-related, they’ll just need to create R notebooks, and secondly because they don’t already know how to use Emacs, and learning how to use Emacs is hard because Emacs is weird.

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Writing up empirical research for publication

I read a lot of academic articles in journals across several disciplines, and most of them are pretty good. I also peer review a lot of manuscripts for journals across several disciplines. Most of those are not so good. Here’s a quick explanation of the difference. If you don’t have much experience of writing up primary empirical research for publication and you’re trying to figure out what’s required, this might help you.

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Keeping Corbyn in the Labour Leader’s office, and Labour out of government: ‘socialism fans’ and the culture of Corbynism

Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in September 2015, and (following a vote of no confidence and a leadership challenge) re-elected to the same post in September 2016. In February this year, many of those who had re-elected him expressed disappointment at his effectively unconditional support for Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May’s invocation of the Article 50 process to leave the European Union; perhaps to placate them, Corbyn subsequently called for a demonstration in support of those who would suffer the most from EU withdrawal, but then failed to turn up. Part of the public rationale for Corbyn’s three-line whip on the Brexit vote was that if the party opposed it, then that might lead to a loss of support in predominantly working class constituencies in the North and the Midlands that had voted Leave by large margins: constituencies such as Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central, where the party nevertheless went on to lose vote share in by-elections later the same month. But despite all this — despite Brexit, which Labour Party members and voters had overwhelmingly voted against, and despite what was arguably the worst by-election performance for an opposition party since the late 19th century (see O’Hara 2017) — Corbyn’s supporters in the Labour Party are still for the most part Corbyn’s supporters in the Labour Party, and they’re not going anywhere — and neither, therefore, is the man himself. Asked whether Corbyn’s continued leadership of the party was a good thing, the answer from sidelined Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Tom Watson, was pragmatic: ‘It doesn’t matter; that is the situation’ (interviewed in Walker 2017). This impasse will not endure forever: Prime Minister Theresa May has called for an early General Election, and Corbyn (who has been asking for one since December last year) has given his support. But in the six weeks that we have left until the Labour Party is overwhelmingly (and perhaps irreparably) crushed, it may perhaps be worth reflecting on how it got into this appalling mess.

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Approval ratings among Londoners for the U.K. party leaders, plus the Mayor and the Ex-Mayor

Findings from a recent opinion poll were repeatedly shared on Labour Party-affiliated social media groups over the last weekend. The poll was commissioned by researchers at Queen Mary University of London’s Mile End Institute, and asked people in London both about their voting intentions and about how well they felt that seven particular politicians were doing in their current jobs. Social media users commonly focused on the politicians’ net job approval ratings: that is, the percentage of people saying that each politician was doing well in his/her job minus the percentage of people saying that each politician was doing badly in his/her job. The seven politicians in question were the leaders of the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, and Ukip (i.e. Jeremy Corbyn, Theresa May, Caroline Lucas, Tim Farron, and Paul Nuttall, respectively), plus the Mayor and the ex-Mayor of London (i.e. Sadiq Khan and Boris Johnson, again respectively). If you are not fortunate enough to spend a little part of each week staring at the slow motion car crash that is political social media, you may also have come across the same poll in newspaper reports that similarly focused on the finding that ‘Jeremy Corbyn has a worse personal approval rating even in London than every other major party leader, including Ukip’s Paul Nuttall’ (Peck, 2017).

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