🔍 Do LLMs really understand political content, or do they just recognize party labels? Here's a striking example from my lecture materials on using LLMs in political science. 🧵

🎉 Online first: LLMs estimate party positions well. How about issue salience? @kenbenoit.bsky.social and Michael Laver show its harder: salience is inherently relative and more implicit. LLM's salience estimates are usable but track experts less closely than positions. 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/0140...

All good things must come to an end... 😊 Today, we wrapped up our workshop at the ECPR Joint Sessions 2026 in Innsbruck on “Blurring or Accident? Voluntary and Involuntary Sources of Ambiguous Party Positions and Their Consequences for Democracy.” #ecprjs26

🎉 Excited to share italyParlR — an open-source R package I built (with the help of Claude Code) to make Italian parliamentary data accessible to researchers, journalists, and data enthusiasts directly in R. github.com/paride92/ita... #OpenData #Italy #Parliament #DataScience #PoliticalScience

Discover @revojoe.bsky.social's picks for top #RStats CRAN pkgs released in February, including ✅ quallmer v0.3.0: Tools for AI-assisted qualitative data coding 🏥 nhanesdata v4.1.0: Access to NHANES data 📏 ggInterval v0.2.4: Visualize intervals w/ ggplot2 Read the post: rworks.dev/posts/Feb-20...

Our new paper is out in Party Politics 🚨

🚨 New WP w/ @leonardocarella.bsky.social on OSF doi.org/10.31235/osf... We usually think that social identities precede preferences We show the reverse is also true: people update their social identities to match their immigration preferences Focus: class identity in 🇬🇧 + Christian identity in 🇮🇹

Currently in FirstView: In “Political DEBATE: Efficient Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Classifiers for Political Text,” Michael Burnham, Kayla Kahn, Ryan Yang Wang, and Rachel Peng introduce DEBATE, a new open source foundation model for classifying political documents.

🚨 3-Year Postdoc in Political Science at Aarhus University 🚨 I’m seeking to recruit a postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu research project 𝑬𝑸𝑼𝑰𝑳𝑰𝑩𝑹𝑰𝑼𝑴 on state-citizen interactions. Link and more information in second post. Position Start: Fall 2026 Application Deadline: ‼️ February 5, 2026, 23:59 CET ‼️

⏰ I’m happy to share that a major paper from my dissertation was published today (🔗 doi.org/10.1017/pan....) in Political Analysis. In the paper, Clemens Lechner and I conduct an extensive validation study on how to measure politicians’ public personality traits using computational text analysis!

NEW - Policlim: A Dataset of Climate Change Discourse in the Political Manifestos of Forty-Five Countries from 1990 to 2022 - https://cup.org/43zzLHc - @marysanford.bsky.social, Silvia Pianta, @nicolasschmid.bsky.social & Giorgio Musto #OpenAccess

Excited to share that as of October 6, I’ve joined the ERC-funded project “Welcoming Immigrants in Central and Eastern Europe: Lessons from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine” (WICE) as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Latvia! #postdoc #polisci

📢 New Publication Alert! Thrilled to share our latest article with @jasminriedl.bsky.social & Johannes Steup 👉 Topical Negative Campaigning Under Spatial Pressure: Party-Level Strategies for Attacks Across Multiple Issues 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/0964...

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but as campaigns unfold, you can fool fewer of the people. New paper w/ Derek Beach and Jannik Fenger on framing effects out in @ejprjournal.bsky.social Open Access: doi.org/10.1017/S147...

📣 MORAL APPEALS IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 📣 New version of @twidmann.bsky.social and my working paper answering: * Have moral appeals increased over time? * Is the tendency to moralize ideologically patterned? * Are some topics consistently more moralized than others? osf.io/preprints/os...

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

This is a great example of how the use of innovative data can bring us a step further with old research questions

📘 64.4 Using a 🇩🇪 dataset of attempted and successful exchanges in the German Bundestag 🏛️ (1990–2020), @eliaskoch.bsky.social & @ankuepfer.bsky.social finds MPs with opposing views seek debate more often, but there is rarely action😱 #Politics #Parliament Read more:

Check out this new blog post @danielcaseycbr.bsky.social and I wrote about using e-newsletters from Australian and UK Members of Parliament as data. #polisky

Excited that my first PhD paper is published in Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties!🎉 🧵 @wurthmann.bsky.social & I examine: Do They Know What They Represent? Parliamentary Candidates’ Perceptions of Their Own Party’s Positions 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/1745...

This Friday (12.09), we kick off the academic year at the #HotPoliticsLab with our very own (and recently appointed!) professor Gijs Schumacher! He will present his work on emotions and political behavior. Join us in the Common Room (REC-B9.22) or online via teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/...

The @crestumr.bsky.social AI & Social Sciences seminar resumes. Wednesday 17th at 5pm (CET), we will receive Pr. @emilymbender.bsky.social . She will talk about her latest book, *The AI Con*, co-authored with Dr. @alexhanna.bsky.social. Join us for what will certainly be a lively conversation.

Had an amazing time at the #SISP in Naples! Presenting my work and exchanging ideas was truly stimulating.

New POPPA article out in Party Politics by Andrej Zaslove, @robert-a-huber.bsky.social, @mauritsmeijers.bsky.social: “The State of Populism: Introducing the 2023 Wave of the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... 1/2

📢 Talk Announcement "ActiveTigger: A Collaborative Text Annotation Research Tool for Computational Social Sciences", by @emilienschultz.bsky.social , Etienne Ollion and Paul Girard. 📜 pretalx.com/pydata-paris-2025/talk/ZHNCF7 📅 pydata.org/paris2025/schedule 🎟 pydata.org/paris2025/tickets

New publication, out in Political Analysis: There is an increasing array of tools to measure facets of morality in political language. But while they ostensibly measure the same concept, do they actually? I and @fhopp.bsky.social set out to see what happens.

Why do parties do what they do? Excited to share my 2nd dissertation paper, just published in @jeppjournal.bsky.social In the paper, I argue that parties seek internal unity and try to keep the team together: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/11 🧵

Social scientists have skills and knowledge that are in demand across a range of sectors leading to a variety of interesting and rewarding careers. Explore our interviews with social scientists to see where a career in social science could take you➡️ acss.org.uk/category/im-...

‘Campaign Communication and Legislative Leadership’ (with Naofumi Fujimura) appeared in the latest issue of Political Science Research and Methods. Paper (open access): doi.org/10.1017/psrm... @psrm.bsky.social Thread below 🧵 1/7

📣 Jobs, jobs, jobs! Aarhus University’s Department of Political Science is hiring: 🔹 Assistant Professor 🗓 Deadline: 25 August 🔗 international.au.dk/about/profil... 🔹 Associate Professor 🗓 Deadline: 8 September 🔗 international.au.dk/about/profil...

#GESISGuide #AI #LLM 🧠 New to #prompting LLMs or want to level up your skills? This guide dives into prompting techniques—from basics to advanced strategies like reasoning models & persona prompting. Includes examples, combos, and key limitations to watch out for. https://t1p.de/yv10f#GESISGuide#AI#LLM#promptingF)

Maybe of interest to everyone working in or curious about Computational Social Science (CSS). If you're looking to build or sharpen your #CSS skills, check out our hands-on courses in the #GESISworkshop program and #GESISfallseminar: 🔗 www.gesis.org/workshops 🔗 www.gesis.org/fallseminar

📢 Next QSSS seminar incoming! Join us for an insightful talk by @ferraraale.bsky.social (WZB) and @marcocozzani.bsky.social (UniFi) #polisci #unibo

Important corrective paper and solid work from @cbarrie.bsky.social: don't mistake game simulations as evidence of intelligence if the game is in the training data.

We are hiring postdocs in Computational Social Science 📍SweCSS, Norrköping, Sweden ⏰Deadline June 3 🔗https://liu.se/en/work-at-liu/vacancies/26854 Please apply // help us spread the word

🚨🚨Tomorrow is the day! Join us in Bologna or online!

📅 Reminder: Don’t miss the upcoming QSSS seminar on May 7! Prof. Kevin Munger (EUI) will present “Bounding Knowledge. Decay From Temporal Extrapolation.” Highly relevant for scholars interested in #polisci and #causalinference. #unibo👇

📢 Next QSSS seminar incoming! Join us for a fascinating talk by Prof. Kevin Munger (European University Institute) on “Bounding Knowledge. Decay From Temporal Extrapolation.” #polisci #causalinference #unibo

🚨 working paper alert🚨 @carotorreblanca.bsky.social, Will Dinneen, and I have published an updated draft of "The Evolving Landscape of Political Science: Two Decades of Scholarship in a Growing Discipline." We hope you will find it interesting. osf.io/preprints/os...

Deadline is tomorrow! If you are researching political elites and want to combine your research with brown cheese and salmon, then there is one day left to apply for our workshop in Oslo. Find the call for papers in the previous post.

🔥Exciting postdoc position in political communication @ascor.bsky.social starting 1 Sep! The postdoc will work w/ @lindabos.bsky.social, @thomasmmeyer.bsky.social & me on media-politics relations + framing effects in the aftermath of elections. Interested?😀Apply by 5 May⬇️ tinyurl.com/4wz3u5vn

Can we understand the mechanisms of a frontier AI model? 📝 Blog post: www.anthropic.com/research/tra... 🧪 "Biology" paper: transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribu... ⚙️ Methods paper: transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribu... Featuring basic multi-step reasoning, planning, introspection and more!

My book is now officially out! How Politicians Polarize introduces and documents the concept of "negative representation" – when representatives focus on the other side rather than their own. Some key findings: 🧵 www.amazon.com/How-Politici...

Got around to pushing all my @cuboulder.info Web Data Science @jupyter.org notebooks to @github.com Enjoy! github.com/cuinfoscienc...

💥Postdoc call 💥 Join my @erc.europa.eu project #YOPOW at Aarhus University 🎇 3-y position (possibility of 1-y extension) ❓How societal norms give rise to biased beliefs about political power in youth 🤖 Computational social science (large-scale text & image data) Deadline May 15: bit.ly/4hIpSeD

🌍 How has the structure of party competition on the environment evolved in recent years? The latest @chesdata.bsky.social dataset 📊 helps us empirically track these trends . The biggest shift isn’t just about party positions, it’s the growing salience of anti-environment stances 📈. 🧵👇

Happy to introduce ItaParlCorpus: a large, annotated, machine-readable dataset of Italian parliamentary speeches 🇮🇹📊. Covering 1948-2022, it includes 2.4M speeches, 470M words from 5830 speakers across 77 parties. Ideal for studying political discourse, party rhetoric and parliamentary behavior! 🔍📖

We had @eollion.bsky.social as a guest speaker at Bologna SICSS last year—an amazing experience! I can only recommend applying and participating to the SICSS in Paris. Less than a week left to apply!

We have a new version of our 𝕡𝕣𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕥𝕤𝕥𝕒𝕓𝕚𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕪 paper now on arxiv! This is a significant update that test *a lot* more data, suggests post-processing techniques, outlines how to compare across models, and tests with new models...