Reading Politics

Much has been said about spoilt ballots in the Police and Crime Commissioner elections, but no one has thoroughly analysed the evidence.  In this post, Alan Renwick, Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Reading, goes through the data that are available.  He finds that there is evidence of more deliberate spoiling of ballots than usual, but the extent of this was limited.  The main story of the election is low turnout, not high spoiling.

One of the talking points surrounding the Police and Crime Commissioner elections has been the number of spoilt ballot papers.  Many observers at the 41 counts around England and Wales saw ballots with mini-essays on them, rather than votes.  The perception is that some voters expressed their disagreement with the idea of politicizing the police by deliberately casting an invalid vote.

But there are always a few voters who purposefully spoil their ballots and others who do so by mistake.  To see whether there is anything unusual about this election, we need precise numbers.  Unfortunately, these have not been easy to come by.  There is no official agency that gathers information on results across the country.  The closest we have to that is the BBC, but the BBC has published results that exclude rejected votes.  The only way the ordinary citizen can find out about spoilt ballots is to go to the website of each of the 41 local authorities responsible for organizing the counts and check their numbers.

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Reading Politics PhD student Ben Whitham here analyses the sentencing of boat race protester Trenton Oldfield and what it tells us about the politics of class and the pathologies of liberal tolerance.

On Friday, Trenton Oldfield, the man who dived into the Thames to disrupt the 2012 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, was sentenced to six months in jail. Judge Anne Molyneux noted with particular disdain the fact that Oldfield  had been smiling in court throughout her description of his actions, though, as the Telegraph gleefully notes, when the sentence was read out ‘he looked stunned and slowly shook his head from side to side’. The Sun and the Express were also pleased to see the ‘smirk’ wiped from Oldfield’s proverbial boat race. [1]

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Alan Renwick

Iceland held a referendum over the weekend on the reform of its constitution.  The results are now in and show strong public support for change.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that change will actually happen, as, under Iceland’s existing constitution, the referendum result is only advisory.  If constitutional reform is actually to take place, Iceland’s parliament will have to vote for it before the next election (due next spring) and then vote for it again after the election.  Still, there is much interesting material for us to chew over in the outcome of the popular vote.

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Daphne Halikiopoulou has just arrived as Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Reading, having previously been a lecturer at the London School of Economics.  This post, jointly authored with Sofia Vasilopoulou at the University of York, was first published on the LSE’s European Politics and Policy (EUROPP) blog.

As austerity measures continue, Greece plunges further into extremism.  Angela Merkel’s visit to Athens early last week was met with strong reactions by protesters- reactions that tended to be underpinned by a nationalist rhetoric, alluding to a language of liberation,  restoration of national sovereignty, a strong rejection of external involvement, resistance to foreign domination and struggle against external impositions. Protesters dressed in Nazi uniforms marching outside the Greek Parliament held banners inscribing ‘No to the fourth Reich’ while shouting  ‘loanshark’ and ‘Nazi’ to the German Chancellor.

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Cup-cakes have not yet received much attention from political science – but maybe they should. Nadya Ali, a PhD student in Politics at Reading, argues in this post that the cup-cake craze belongs to a wave of nostalgia for the spirit of post-war austerity – a wave that, for all its jollity, may serve a sinister political purpose.

The financial crisis, a double dip recession, deep cuts in public services and the rising cost of a university education are just some of the problems which have beset the British public. This is a Europe-wide problem: the Greeks are out in force, protesting against austerity measures and the Spanish and Portuguese march in their thousands against public-sector cuts, but where are the Brits? Most likely, they are sitting on the sofa with a nice cup of tea, accompanied by a digestive, (or a ginger nut, which is apparently the optimum dunking biscuit) watching “The Great British Bake Off”.

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Alan Renwick

We live-blogged again for the second day of the Commons debate on Lords reform today, covering the opening and closing speeches for the government and the opposition.  Here is the full text.

Day 2 Begins

The second day of the Commons debate on the government’s proposals for reforming the House of Lords will begin shortly. We’ll be blogging on the opening and closing speeches today. As yesterday, the goal is to see whether the claims that are made can be justified with evidence and clear reasoning.

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Alan Renwick

The House of Commons is currently debating the government’s Lords reform proposals.  A two-day debate will culminate in two big votes tomorrow evening.  We held our first ever liveblog during the principal speeches in the first few hours of today’s debate.  You’ll find the complete text of what was said below.  All being well, we’ll be back for the summing up speeches tomorrow night.

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Patrick Porter

One of my favourite all-time quotes about world politics is Alan Taylor’s:

‘Powers will be Powers.’

You will be shocked to know that states often say one thing and do another. They are inconsistent. They are morally maneuverable. They apply standards to others that they exempt themselves from.

So when militarily adventurous states like the US preach that others should abide by a ‘rules-based’ order, an eyebrow or two is raised. When France complains of unilateralism and arrogance, we might recall their own record of testing nukes in the Pacific without asking anyone. When a Sudanese envoy turns up to lament the ruins of the carnage in Syria, its tempting to cry ‘tu quoque.’

Speaking of Syria, what should we make of the drive within the British Government to ban Syrian diplomats from the upcoming Olympic Games?

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Alan Renwick

Political scientists get very excited about Eurovision.  That’s partly just because most people get very excited about Eurovision and political scientists – contrary to popular belief – are not that different from everyone else.  But political scientists get excited for another reason too: Eurovision gives us lots of lots of opportunities to do fun political science.

A quick search for “Eurovision Song Contest” on Google Scholar gets more than three thousand hits.  There’s a whole cottage industry in “eurovisiopsephology” out there.  Probably the hottest issue in the academic literature concerns the evolution of voting blocs.  Numerous studies examine the Wogan hypothesis: that political voting, which was once restricted to an innocent vote swap between Greece and Cyprus, has become ubiquitous.[1]  Some studies (such as this one) back Terry up.  Others suggest things are more complex.  Writing in the august European Journal of Political Economy, for example, Ginsburgh and Noury conclude that cultural proximity matters more than vote trading.  In other words, the Greeks vote for the Cypriots because they really like the way the Cypriots sing, not because they expect votes in return.  And we voted for Jedward last year not because we feel uniquely close to the Irish but because we actually really like Jedward.

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Alan Renwick

How many electoral candidates are voters able meaningfully to choose between?  This is an important question for anyone thinking about designing or evaluating different electoral systems.

Voters often say that they want more choice: ‘voter choice’ was identified as a key desideratum by citizens’ assemblies that investigated electoral reform options in British Columbia and Ontario in 2004 and 2007; it was also highlighted in focus groups conducted by David Farrell and Michael Gallagher in the UK in the late 1990s.

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