Peter Pomerantsev goes to Mongolia and meets the president, an all-purpose post-Soviet entrepreneur turned politician. Specifically, an all-purpose post-Soviet entrepreneur and martial arts champ who named his company after The Godfather. This isn’t just eccentric; in Codes of the Underworld, Diego Gambetta has a fascinating chapter on the role movies played in the making of…
Read More The Godfather, Trump, and PutinMatthew Goodwin is probably in hiding from people demanding that he eats a book, but I can’t help but notice that he massively buries the lede in this paper on the elections. In table 1, his multivariate regression for the change in turnout, Model 3, has the following result. What leaps out at you there?…
Read More Three waves of political mobilisation: the SNP, Brexit, and LabourI never knew until very recently that the standard National Readership Survey socio-demographic classifications – ABC1, C2DE etc – deal with pensioners by classifying them all as working-class unless they are rich enough to be considered independently wealthy and therefore bucketed in with the As. (The rival National Statistics classification doesn’t deal with the retired…
Read More NRS social grades are flawed but at least it’s not Facebook