Robert Ford (academic)
British political scientist

Robert Ford is a British academic and a professor of political science at the University of Manchester. He frequently writes for The Guardian. His interests include diversity, immigration, and right-wing political parties.
Ford wrote Revolt on the Right (2014) alongside Matthew Goodwin, which focuses on the rise of the right-wing UK Independence Party following its success in the 2014 European Parliament election. The book relates the party's history and examines its voter base.
He later edited Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box: 50 Things You Need to Know About British Elections (2015) with Philip Cowley. This was followed by More Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box: Another 50 Things You Need to Know About Elections (2016), also edited by Ford and Cowley.
Ford authored Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics (2020), alongside Maria Sobolewska, which examines British identity, diversity, and immigration in the aftermath of Brexit. He authored The British General Election of 2019 with Tim Bale, Will Jennings, and Paula Surridge about the 2019 general election.
In January 2023, Ford was appointed as a senior research fellow at UK in a Changing Europe, a think tank which examines the ever-changing relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Robert Ford (academic)” as british political scientist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q124538050. VIAF identifies the subject as 309563918. The Library of Congress control number is no2009175237. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Ford (academic)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.