I imagine the obits will talk about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Leopoldstadt and Shakespeare in Love, God help us. But for my money Arcadia was his best play: elegant, profound, intelligent, humane and deeply moving. There really was no one else operating at his level.

It didn't help many Lib Dem MPs in 2015 😉

Thank you!

Thanks Rob!

I'm not sure I agree. Polls are much more restrictive: they only tell you what people think at this moment (polling hypotheticals does not work). Focus groups allow you to explore how opinion might develop over time. On loud voices, research from the US agrees with you: doi:10.1017/S1537592721000980

Thanks Chris! I'm well aware of the limitations of my quant skills so always open to understanding how to better analyse the data. If you can point me in the direction of a guide to how to work these out I'll gladly follow-up with a blog.

Full paper with the great Julie Sevenans, @pbundi.bsky.social Fred Varone & Stefaan Walgrave here: rdcu.be/eQGm4. Huge thanks to the POLPOP team for collecting the data.

Overall politicians have a relatively good sense of which issues are more important, but their estimations are affected by motivated reasoning; either because they want to believe that voters find the same issues important, or because they don't want to be out of step with voters on important issues

We also looked at whether politicians were good at estimating the relative salience of issues to each other, and found that 72% of the time they correctly estimated the more important issue out of a pair.

So basically if you're a politician and you think that you are out of step with public opinion on an issue (e.g. you are pro-immigration but you perceive that voters are anti-immigration), it might be comforting to perceive that immigration is of lower salience to voters

This confirms my prior qual work on the Lib Dems' U-turn on tuition fees where several decision-makers explained that they thought it was a decision that voters would get over because other issues such as the economy were of greater importance link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Politicians are most likely to under-estimate the salience of a policy when doing so reduces their cognitive dissonance, either because they themselves think a policy is of less significance, or because they perceive their own positional preferences to be incongruent with citizens’ preferences

We surveyed 866 politicians across 4 countries and asked them to estimate the proportion of voters and party supporters who expressed an opinion on various policies. We find that politicians routinely under-estimate the salience of policies to citizens, but more interestingly...