John Curtice

Sir John Kevin Curtice (born 10 December 1953) is a British political scientist who is currently professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research.

He is particularly interested in electoral behaviour and researching political and social attitudes.

He took a keen interest in the debate about Scottish independence.

Curtice was born on 10 December 1953.

He grew up in St Austell in Cornwall and was educated at Truro School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read politics, philosophy and economics, and later transferred to Nuffield College as a postgraduate.

He serves as president of the British Polling Council, vice-chair of the Economic and Social Data Service's Advisory Committee and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Elections, the Executive Committee of the British Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, and the Policy Advisory Committee of the Institute for Public Policy Research.

He was formerly a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and a member of the steering committee of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project.

Curtice was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1992 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2004.

Curtice has frequently appeared on BBC News during broadcast coverage of general elections in the United Kingdom, giving his predictions of the results in 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2017.

With Prof David Firth he developed the methodology used in the exit poll estimation used in the general election coverage.

In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

He has picked up a strong following on social media, and was mentioned frequently on Twitter during the 2017 election, though he shuns this attention, adding "I've no wish to become a media celebrity".

In 2017, he was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.

Curtice was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to the Social Sciences and Politics.

Curtice's wife is a priest of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

They have one daughter.