Someone compiled all of the Calvin and Hobbes strips about Calvin’s polls of his Dad, which is proof that good people do exist on the internet imgur.com/a/poll-resul...

New publication! Unelected representation may influence how satisfied people are with democracy, opening up important discussions on the role activists play in shaping the legitimacy of liberal representative democracies. You can find out more below 👇

🛑 Chatbots are not fit for giving voting advice 🗳️ Latest study from @liberties.eu on the Hungarian election shows lack of transparency and reliability in the advice. Our research shows that 10-15% by now use chatbots for advice, for young voters up to one quarter. www.liberties.eu/en/stories/h...

My university: "Copilot is Microsoft's AI-powered productivity service that uses large language models (LLMs) to help you create content, analyze information, summarize documents, and complete tasks more efficiently." Microsoft: LOL

(1/9) Can the EU be seen as more legitimate through procedural reforms? The lead candidate system for president of the European Commission was one such attempt. In a new article, @acgoldberg.bsky.social, @pieterdewilde.bsky.social and I have sobering results: doi.org/10.1017/S147... #polisky #EUsky

(1/4) Marius Dotzauer and I recently published a paper examining Europeans' attitudes towards trade restrictions against China. In five EU member states, we find only limited support: doi.org/10.1080/0969... #polisky #ipesky #OA

New blog just dropped! This one is all about estimators—we cover James-Stein, classical test theory, empirical Bayes, penalized regression, and hierarchical models, showing how they all can be used to do a better job than sample stats alone 🤓 haines-lab.com/post/how-to-...

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

Strictly speaking, a postdoc is just a doc who posts

I'm not gonna lie: Macron and his generals singing the Marseillaise to a nuclear weapon is a bit chilling.

I think the main issue is that many people, quite reasonably tbf, don't like the default base data.frame print method... But this is easy to override! gist.github.com/grantmcdermo...

Arendt suggests Eichmann is a clown *rather than* a monster. But why not both—a clown AND a monster? It seems to me a key part of the horror of fascism is precisely its pervasive clownishness. There's a mind-rending indignity in having to take seriously rulers who are fundamentally unserious.

The art of politics is not to do what people think. If it was, there literally wouldn’t be any politics. The art of politics is to convert public opinion in the direction of your policies. Not so subordinate your policies to opinion.

🎉 New paper out in Political Behavior (with @gijsschumacher.bsky.social & @mrooduijn.bsky.social) Why do some people feel stronger emotions about politics than others? 💡Not political knowledge, but interest and confidence-in-knowledge drive emotional engagement. link.springer.com/article/10.1... 🧵

A blog post giving a more thorough take on survey experiments and the credibility revolution: cyrussamii.com?p=4168

The billions of research funds channeled into the pockets of Elsevier and other commercial publisher in return for very little actual value is one of academia's big inefficiencies that will eventually be replaced by more attractive Community-run alternatives

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

After a huge post-election flip in economic perceptions, I thought Democrats and Republicans might be lying to pollsters to send a partisan message — but I was wrong! New in the Journal of Experimental Political Science (open access): doi.org/10.1017/XPS....

Super happy to see this out in @jeppjournal.bsky.social 🎉🎉

the disastrous refusal of the self-styled silicon valley technokings to keep anyone in their lives capable of questioning their increasingly incomprehensible politics has lead to a crisis of thinking so severe that a fifty-eight year old man believes something is important because he knows about it

Unless the article is fully generated (not likely) this is a symptom of a much older problem, which is that people aren’t reading many of the sources they cite — just gesturing at them.

Every time this worry comes up (www.ft.com/content/d419...) I post some Landy et al. (2018). People just answer questions about proportions (of anything) in a rather particular way. So I think it's unlikely that what they are being asked about is as important as you might expect it should be.

Any comparable data for Europe out there?

First they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out (because the message test performed at a low percentile rank compared to other messages in our testing bank for non college men who opt into online surveys through various consumer reward programs)

I wrote a thing about substituting LLMs for survey respondents notstatschat.rbind.io/2025/08/15/i...

If the articles from my PhD were my children this article now published in @bjpols.bsky.social is my favorite. Written together with truly amazing supervisors and mentors, Pieter de Wilde, Oliver Treib, and Lene Aarøe, I had the support I needed in bringing this baby into the world. Summary below 👇

Now in an issue @psrm.bsky.social: I show that the 🇩🇰 Social Democrats could have won policy support for a pro-immigrant platform if their messaging were framed in moral terms. Findings provide a central corrective to the popular notion that the Social Democrats were destined to go anti-immigrant 👇🏻

Dangerous things are happening in Germany. We know that a lack of trust is a significant factor in RR voting. Has anyone also looked at whether RR politicians trust the state? These people always seem to radiate intense hatred for democratic institutions. But maybe that's just for show.

📘🇪🇺 Much more than a report In our new @jcms-eu.bsky.social piece, Lucia Quaglia and I argue that the Draghi and Letta reports go beyond competitiveness - they mark a shift in the EU’s political identity. But this entails huge challenges! Open access here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

It might be my own bias, but I think many of the individual-level dynamics of the rise of the far right are strikingly similar across Western countries.

The Portuguese far right party CH has been growing spectacularly, shattering views of the country as immune to this phenomenon. This has prompted a discussion about where their votes come from. Some thoughts on this, prompted by newly released survey data:

✨NEW PAPER OUT✨ “Far-right challenges to liberal democratic press norms: ‘indexing by proxy’ in a German immigration debate” together with Lance Bennett & @ulrikeklinger.bsky.social in @journal-of-comm.bsky.social. Why do far-right issues keep making the news? 🧵⤵️ academic.oup.com/joc/advance-...

I am often told that public critique of published articles must also solve the issues found. I think this frequently enforced requirement hinders scientific self-correction. Blog post: mmmdata.io/posts/2025/0...

A *null* result I'm very proud of! Led by Rustam Romaniuc, 35 coauthors from all over France tested nudge interventions to boost voter turnout. None worked, and we are possibly not surprised -- but a well-powered null result *is* a result! Paper: kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

Trade policy update.

🚨 New publication 🚨 : Happy to share that my paper, "Losing Touch: The Rhetorical Cost of Governing" is now forthcoming at @cpsjournal.bsky.social. Short 🧵 about the paper here 👇 1/10

Extremely excited to share the first effort of the Revived Genomics of Personality Consortium: A highly-powered, comprehensive GWAS of the Big Five personality traits in 1.14 million participants from 46 cohorts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Interesting how security is nowadays framed as a "core task" of the EU 🙃 (In reality, of course, Flanders simply has a centre-right(ish) government that wants the EU to focus on centre-right goals. But since EU policy is traditionally framed in functionalist terms, they talk of "tasks" instead.)

I am very excited to share a new working paper coauthored with @amaliaab.bsky.social. Using a field experiment, we find that, in the real world, it is more costly to express far-right preferences than other political preferences. osf.io/preprints/os... 1/8

🚨New R package! {easymediation}🚨 The *Simplest* and *Most Correct* Way to Do Causal Mediation Analysis Are you tired of explaining mediation analysis to your colleagues? Just send them this package. github.com/rpsychologis...

Amazed how some scholars still think and argue that a multilevel (or random effects) model 'control for' higher-level characteristics. I often wonder whether multilevel models did more harm than good 👀 #sociology

🗳️ Populism is a warning sign. English local elections show it again: People feel abandoned & look scapegoats. Drawing on own research & others, I argue 👇🏽 💡 To counter populism: We need to reinvest in citizens, e.g. housing, health & dignity. Short 🧵 📖 www.socialeurope.eu/to-counter-p...

"A stronger EU can only be legitimate if it also becomes more democratic itself, with more meaningful EU elections, more powerful European political parties, and more transnational public spheres." (From the section "Regaining internal democratic credibility" in our new @fiia.fi Briefing Paper)

In German politics, European democracy is currently very low on the agenda.

This is a fantastic list of papers on properly dealing with control variables (and other related methodological issues) in social science (and #polisky specifically)! I put it all in a public Zotero group library here www.zotero.org/groups/59433...

Every once in a while, we write articles we truly care about. This is one of them, and I am so happy and proud to see it published at ISQ:

Notably, the text on the left would probably be classified as "populist" or "dangerous polarization" in many pol-sci papers.