A special treat for listening of this podcast: a new episode of my other podcast, Political Fictions:

"Mark and Cory talk about political TV for the first time, and there’s nowhere better to start than The Thick of It. After rewatching the first series, they talk about which fictional policy proposals ended up becoming reality, why it’s important that focus groups thought Keir Starmer was an eagle, and given that Malcolm Tucker keeps screwing everything up perhaps the secret genius behind the British Government is actually Terri Coverley?"

• Subscribe to Political Fictions in all the usual places, or listen to it via www.politicalfictionspodcast.com.
• You can view the IMDB page for The Thick of It here.
• UK listeners can watch the show on BBC iPlayer.
• If you enjoyed our segment on focus groups, you may my post about them here (note the date).
• Cory’s email newsletter Paperback Rioter.
• Mark’s family of email newsletters.
• Our theme tune is “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) and licensed under the Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Exciting news! This month I’m launching Political Fictions, a new podcast with Cory Hazlehurst, from the Not Enough Champagne podcast. It’s all about TV, film and books featuring politics.

Take a listen to our trailer to find out more.

You can subscribe to Political Fictions in all the usual places, including on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.

You can also follow the podcast via our website, www.politicalfictionspodcast.com.

I will be carrying on with my previous podcast, Never Mind The Bar Charts, but at a lower tempo of episodes.

For the latest episode of Never Mind The Bar Charts I talked with Paul Webb about the report "Britain's Party Members" which has new data on who joins political parties in Britain and what they get up to.

Are Lib Dems the keenest campaigners? Is the emerging two-bloc pattern of British politics reflected in party membership? We talk about these and many more such illuminating questions, revealing some of the basic bedrock on which British politics is built.

Our discussion also includes the report's analysis of political psychology, based on both the big five traits and the dark triad models - showing differences between parties, and we explore how member preferences shape leadership selection, tactical voting, and party strategy.

We start off though with where the data comes from and how much we can trust to it being right.

Show notes

• Britain's Party Members by Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Stavroula Chrona.
• The excellent book that came from the project's earlier work.
• The ESRC Party Members Project website.
• How Cambridge Analytica's impact was hyped.
• Robert McKenzie and the election night swingometer.
• Only 2% of council by-elections turning out to be Conservative-Labour contests.
• Professor Paul Webb's other work.
• Theme tune by Hugo Lee.
• New to listening to podcasts? Here are some tips on how to listen to podcasts.
• Check out some of this show's most popular previous episodes.