News and Blog

The WISERD Annual Conference 2026 took place at Cardiff University on Wednesday 8 and Thursday 9 July 2026. Scroll through the gallery below to see some of our favourite moments from the event.                                            …

More people in Wales favour keeping the current Senedd voting system than returning to the old one, according to a new in-depth study of May’s devolved election. Based on a survey of ten thousand people in Wales, the findings show that 35.2% of respondents prefer to keep the system of voting for parties used this…

Horse Race Politics is a free, gamified website that allows users to predict various political outcomes, notably that of the 2026 Welsh Senedd election. It is the third iteration of a platform I built for my MSc and PhD research. This time, it has been designed and built in collaboration with our partners, Focus Games,…

Randomised control trials (RCTs) are often described as the ‘gold standard’ for testing whether new treatments or interventions work. In this blog, Dr Ian Thomas who leads the ADR Wales Housing and Homelessness thematic area, looks at the use of linked administrative data as part of RCTs. Drawing on a pilot trial of an intervention for…

UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has awarded more than £1m to a research team from Swansea and Aberystwyth universities to lead the Welsh Election Study 2026 (WES 2026), a four-year project that will provide high-quality, impartial survey data on political attitudes and voting behaviour in Wales. The collaboration brings together Professor Matt Wall…

On the 30 June and 1 July, the 15th WISERD Annual Conference took place at Aberystwyth University, welcoming over 130 delegates. The agenda comprised 14 paper sessions, two panels, and three symposia and workshops under the theme of ‘Participation and partnership in a time of precarity and polarisation’. For the first time, this year’s agenda…

From 8 to 11 July 2025, the WISERD Politics and Governance Research Network held a four-day Quantitative Methods Bootcamp at Swansea University. This intensive course was led by Dr Kevin Fahey, Assistant Professor in Politics at Nottingham University and included lectures, practical demonstrations, hands-on practice and group work. Its aim was to provide essential training…

Research explores how communities can work together to bring about positive change. Academics will investigate how citizens, civil society organisations and policymakers are collaborating to tackle some of society’s most pressing problems. WISERD has secured £1.6m of funding from the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the three-year research programme, ‘People, Places, and…

Horserace Politics (HRP) offers a pioneering platform that enables users to predict the outcomes of political events in a competitive, gamified environment. HRP is led by WISERD academics Drs Matthew Wall and Louis Bromfield (both at Swansea University’s Department of Politics, Philosophy and International Relations) in collaboration with Focus Games Ltd. – a commercial partner…

This year’s WISERD Annual Conference will take place at Aberystwyth University on Monday 30 June and Tuesday 1 July 2025. The theme of the conference is ‘Participation and partnership in a time of precarity and polarisation’. The theme for the WISERD Annual Conference 2025 talks to widespread concerns regarding the form and function of civil…