Category Archives: British politics

Opinion polls and what to do with them

Opinion polls remain a key method of predicting what might happen in an election. We are grateful to newspapers and websites for continually paying for polling companies to ask roughly 1000 people how they attend to vote so that we have some idea of what might happen.

However, newspapers (understandably so) hope and expect a headline from their investment in polling. Hence, we see headlines such as ‘Support for Labour shrinks as faith in recovery grows, ICM poll finds’ from The Guardian, or ‘Tories at lowest ebb for 8 years‘ in The Sunday Times. Continue reading Opinion polls and what to do with them

PSA Postgraduate Network Annual Conference

Last week, I presented at the Political Studies Association Postgraduate Network Annual Conference, hosted at Oxford University. Although I have presented at an academic conference before (see here), this was the first in which I was presenting a fully blown original paper (the photo on the right shows the panel that I was part of). Continue reading PSA Postgraduate Network Annual Conference