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Chris Prosser

@caprosser.com

1.8K followers 540 following 230 posts

Political scientist | Co-director British Election Study | Election number crunching for ITV | Trustee McDougall Trust caprosser.com

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · Jan 15

I spent last week p̶r̶o̶c̶r̶a̶s̶t̶i̶n̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g building myself a new website via blogdown/hugo.

Pretty pleased with the result, so check it out: caprosser.com

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 1d

This is great - had always wondered if the telephone call thing was *actually* how they found out they'd won.

In the unlikely event that I won a Nobel prize I'd probably see an unknown international number, assume it was scam, and block it.

Newspaper headline:
Nobel committee unable to reach prize winner who is ‘living his best life’ hiking off grid
Fred Ramsdell was among those honoured with a 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine but might not know because he is somewhere in Idaho and uncontactable

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 1d

Perhaps you would like to join my new grant bid: 'The impact of restaurants on political attitudes: an autoethnographic approach'

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 1d

Judging by the number of review request I've had lately, I see you all had a more productive summer than I did 😐

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 1d

😱 And here I was just doing regular snarking about causal salads...

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 1d

I mean there was this one time this South African guy I lived as a student made dinner, and before that... 😉

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 1d

I'm concerned that this time series *starts* after midnight 😂

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 1d

A conclusion reached by a well justified causal research design no doubt, and not just seeing there's a correlation and asserting the causality runs in one direction... 🤔

Newspaper headline saying:
Enjoying international cuisines makes people more tolerant, UK study finds
Frequent and varied eating found to reduce likelihood of perceiving immigrants as ‘cultural or economic threats’

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 8d

Well sure, but it's the same thing as Starmer saying 'two-thirds of our children should go either to university or take a gold-standard apprenticeship' today.

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 8d

Not sure that's really true - at the 1999 conference Blair said 'today I set a target of 50 per cent of young adults going into higher education in the next century' news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_poli...

Reposted by Chris Prosser

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 9d

🚨Hiring a fully funded (3.5 years) PhD for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social to research social media and politics. Candidates should have quantitative/computational skills and/or be interested in content curation/moderation. UK home candidates only unfortunately. www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/hquftp...

www.royalholloway.ac.uk

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 15d

Just spotted this excellently ironic typo in the acknowledgements of a paper I was reading 😂

A snippet of the acknowledgements section of a journal article in which the author has thanked the reviewers for their attention to detail, but misspelled 'attendtion'

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 22d

It's the first R package I've made, and I won't lie - I had help from ChatGPT. I'm pretty good at R for statistics, but I'm not a programmer...

Anyway I'm quite pleased with it, so do have a look if you think this might be useful!

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 22d

With one line of code you can assign party colours and labels, and sort the legend.

library(gbpartyscales)

share_plot +
scale_colour_party()

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 22d

Imagine you had a dataset of British elections results and wanted to make a plot.

share_plot <- gb_shares %>%
ggplot(aes(x = Election, y = `GB vote %`, colour = Party)) +
geom_line() +
geom_point(size = 3) +
theme_bw() +
scale_x_continuous(breaks = c(2019, 2024))

share_plot

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 22d

The package provides a bunch of scale_*_party() functions that slot into ggplot in the same way that ggplot's scale_* functions work and colour and label the parties by matching party names to aliases.

There's also a party_factor() function that turns party into a labelled and sorted factor.

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 22d

I made a little R package to handle the faff of assigning party names to party colours when making plots about British elections in ggplot.

I made it for myself, but if you're someone that also works on British politics and uses R, you might also find it useful!

github.com/drcaprosser/...

GitHub - drcaprosser/gbpartyscales: Map common party-name synonyms to canonical Great Britain parties and provide ggplot2 colour, fill, shape, and linetype scales with standard labels and sensible leg...

Map common party-name synonyms to canonical Great Britain parties and provide ggplot2 colour, fill, shape, and linetype scales with standard labels and sensible legend orderings. Includes a helper ...

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 27d

Today in 'I'm sure this is a well identified causal effect and definitely not in any way a spurious correlation, can't think of any potential confounding variables at all' 🤔

Newspaper headline saying 'Girls who play after-school sport in UK 50% more likely to later get top jobs, study finds'

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · Sep 4

The year is 3025.

No one could remember what REF was, but the science minster and university leaders gathered for the annual ritual of deferring it.

'Maybe we'll actually do it next year', whispered a newly appointed vice chancellor to their neighbour.

'Don't be daft', replied the old hand.

Times Higher Education (THE) @timeshighered.bsky.social · Sep 4

Science minister Patrick Vallance has announced the next Research Excellence Framework will be paused for three months to review whether its allocation of £2 billion annually in block research funding will support the government’s economic and social missions. @jgro-the.bsky.social reports
#REF

Patrick Vallance hits pause on Research Excellence Framework

Science minister announces review of controversial changes to research environment assessment

www.timeshighereducation.com

Reposted by Chris Prosser

The British Election Study @britishelectionstudy.com · Sep 1

🚨NEW DATA 🚨

The BES team are pleased to announce the release of the 2024 Random Probability Survey Release v1.0.0

You can download the data here: www.britishelectionstudy.com/data-object/...

You can find our release note here:
www.britishelectionstudy.com/uncategorize...

BES 2024 Random Probability Survey Release Note v1.0.0 - The British Election Study

www.britishelectionstudy.com

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · Aug 27

I'm taking over our PhD professional development seminar this year, which covers everything from 'so how do you actually do this PhD thing', to applying for jobs, via writing, ethics, inter alia.

If anyone has run similar things elsewhere, I'd love to see what you cover - please drop me a line!

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · Jun 26

I feel like Shetland would be an excellent location for an institute of quantitative social science 🥵

Met Office - weather and climate @metoffice.gov.uk · Jun 25

Some places could reach heatwave criteria over the coming few days 🥵

Here are your forecast highs for this weekend 👇

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · Jun 25

It'd be great if there was a research fellowship scheme where instead of proposing a single project, you could just say 'look I've got about a dozen papers at various stages of completion and if I had some time I'd probably finally manage to submit some of them'.

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · Jun 19

'What do you mean there's no solution to the fundamental problem of causal inference?!? You're trying to tell me that all of this' [gestures frantically at the edifice of modern social science] 'rests on a series of untestable *assumptions*!?!'

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Be ready to be shocked and offended at university, students told

Guidance has been published by the Office for Students on new free speech rules coming into force this year.

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · May 29

For example, at the 1954 Australian election, did Labor receive:

(a) 2,266,979 votes (Adam Carr/One wikipedia page)
(b) 2,280,098 votes (UWA elections archive/Aus Parli library/another wiki page)
(c) 2,309,399 votes (CLEA - apparently based on the Carr data...)

Who knows... 😂😭

Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · May 29

You'd think something like election results would be an commonly agreed fact, but whenever I use historical data I always end up going down some rabbit hole because different sources say (sometimes very) different things.

Currently being driven mad by mid 20th century Australian elections... 🤯