There has never been a more important time to study public policy and public administration. With @fgilardi.bsky.social , I’m chairing the section on these topics for the first @epssnet.bsky.social conference, in Belfast, 18–20 June 2026. Send us your best work: epssnet.org/belfast-2026...

The European Political Science Society is now accepting paper & panel proposals for its annual conference! 📢 Call for Papers: EPSS 2026 – Belfast
 🗓️ June 18–20, 2026
 📍 ICC Belfast
 📬 Deadline: Nov 7, 2025 🧵

Nostalgia ignores pessimism, it forgets: The moon mission was unpopular Novel reading was frowned upon The Walkman was anti-social The Bicycle 'corrupted' women After all, why would anyone have thought the good old days were bad? newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/most-ameri...

🚨 New preprint alert: We show that web-browsing GPT and LLaMA models can infer social media user demographics with reasonable accuracy—using only usernames. This opens new possibilities for social media research in the post-API era but raises important privacy concerns.

Me: do you know who this is? 15yo: isn’t he the actor who played Obelix?

PhD position out at University of Amsterdam We’re looking for a computer scientist interested in LLMs, social media, and politics Offer a lot of freedom and an exciting environment! Please share! werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

📢 In a new online field experiment, we find that #counterspeech with perspective-based messages can reduce online hate speech, and its 🌟amplification🌟 with a large research team across #ETHZurich @ipz.bsky.social @uclspp.bsky.social and beyond www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Just joined @epssnet.bsky.social, very happy to support with the membership fee. Looking forward to Belfast 2026! #epss2026

Yesterday EPSS was founded, today we answer members’ questions. A 🧵 1. Who formed EPSS? EPSS was founded by a supermajority vote of the EPSA Council, made up of 3 EPSAL shareholders & 9 elected, appointed, or ex officio members. 1/

🚨 Big News for European Political Science 🚨 We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the European Political Science Society (EPSS): a new, member-led, not-for-profit association built to support our scholarly community. 🔗 epssnet.org Here’s a thread with everything you need to know. 🧵

My "AI as Governance" piece is now out at @annualreviews.bsky.social of Political Science. It should be free access to everyone and I'm very happy with how it worked out (the second half is an extended spin of Applied Gopnikism to political science @alisongopnik.bsky.social @cshalizi.bsky.social

Societal AI Research Has Become Less Interdisciplinary CS-only teams account for a growing share of work on fairness, safety, and other societal concerns in AI. What does this mean for AI governance and the role of SSH? New working paper, feedback welcome! arxiv.org/abs/2506.08738

📄 @fgilardi.bsky.social created this template for writing abstracts several years ago, and I’ve tried to follow Fabrizio‘s suggestions ever since. PDF: fabriziogilardi.org/resources/pa...

After 4½ years, I’m thrilled to announce that I have successfully defended my PhD dissertation titled “Framing Artificial Intelligence: Understanding How AI Is Framed in EU Political and Media Discourse Using Large Language Models.” PhDone! 🎓

A few days left to submit an abstract!

🎓 Want to do a PhD at an American university in a stable democracy? 📍 Join me at Franklin University Switzerland! 🧠 4-year fully-funded PhD position in my SNF project DIVIDE 🔬 At least 80% working time on research 💰 Salary: 47k–50k CHF annually 👉 More infos here: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/42...

🚨New paper out in @pnas.org with @fgilardi.bsky.social ! Existential AI risks do **not** distract from immediate harms. In our study (n = 10,800), people consistently prioritize current threats - bias, misinformation, job loss - over sci-fi doom! 💥👉 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Just published in @pnas.org @emmahoes.bsky.social and I find that people are far more concerned about AI’s immediate harms than about speculative existential risks. Doomsday talk raises concern about catastrophic outcomes but doesn’t reduce worry about today’s risks www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Call for Papers! 📢 6th Annual Digital Democracy Workshop 🏫 University of Zurich 📅 13-14 November 2025 ⏳ Deadline to submit paper abstracts: 31 May 2025 democracy.dsi.uzh.ch/app/uploads/...

"the accelerating development and deployment of new digital technologies have outpaced the capacity of science—constrained by limited resourcing and restrictions on proprietary data—to effectively assess their impacts"

“But next time if you don’t eat your broccoli you REALLY won’t get dessert!”

Great podcast w/ @alanbeattie.bsky.social on the economics show. Focus on “manufacturing jobs” is a red herring. US tariffs and economic coercion are political tools being used to reorder domestic and international politics. Europe needs to stand up an alternative. www.ft.com/content/88eb...

may the odds be ever in our favour

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:

Curious about the backstory: why would a professor of medicine get a response published to a piece on democratic erosion, asking questions like "What is the rationale for the period chosen?" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

📄NEW PAPER📄 Ever wondered content people actually pay *attention* to online? Our new research reveals that you likely pay attention to far more varied political content than your likes and shares suggest

I'm hiring! I'm looking for 1️⃣ pre-doc and 2️⃣ post-docs. If you're fascinated by media effects, quantitative methods, and open science, please consider applying 🙂 International applications welcome! Application Pre-doc: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie... Application Post-doc: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

Update: QuestionPro seems to be the best alternative

Any tips/recommendations are welcome! P.S. Is Qualtrics pricing itself out of the academic market purposefully, you think?

I am a big fan of www.soscisurvey.de The basics are free anyway but university licenses of various types including for own servers exist as well, I think psychology at UZH even has one. Plus, I've had very good experiences with support as well.

We went for questionpro. Many German institutions are using Limesurvey, implemented on uni surveys (=free if I’m not mistaken).

Fellow academics: what are your experiences with renewing Qualtrics contracts (institutional or individual)? We’re seeing absolutely outrageous price increases.

I really don't like seeing those two numbers together in that sentence 👴🏻

seems like kids nowadays are using instagram as a deliberately bad substitute for tiktok (it's crappy so they spend less time on it)

📢 Our new paper in Political Analysis explains how to use LLMs like GPT-4o, Llama or Mistral to estimate the ideological and policy position of political texts. Our approach is fast, reliable, cost-effective and reproducible and works with texts written in different languages 1/7 cup.org/4axBEXo

Musk’s next move: adding hooks to X‘s logo

‼️ Hiring ‼️ Two (!) positions in my group at @ipz.bsky.social in Zurich 📣 1 postdoc position (3+3 years) 📣 1 PhD position (3,5 years) Application deadline in early March. Job ads & details: tinyurl.com/3p6yhptk We are an international and friendly department with excellent working conditions

In one of my exams, students had to answer open-ended questions about a research paper. I graded them myself but tested GPT-4 with the following inputs: text of the paper, model answer, student answer. Grading scale: 1-6 w/o half grades. - Correlation: 0.85 - Cohen's Kappa (weighted): 0.82

We are hosting the 2025 @aoir.bsky.social Flashpoint Symposium in Bremen! 🎯 CfP "From Platform Governance to Generative AI: Concepts, Methods, and Data for Studying Tech Governance" 📆 3-4 June 2025, Bremen, DE 🗒️ Deadline for Abstracts: 15 February 2025 platform-governance.org/aoir-flashpo...

My new year resolution: changing file name separators from - to _

🚨 New Preview of Our Upcoming Report 🚨 Leaked Meta guidelines suggest harmful speech like "Immigrants are filthy pieces of shit" or "Gays are freaks" may soon be allowed. Does this policy shift reflect public opinion? Our survey across 10 countries finds no evidence of support for such content.

Turns out there’s many, many more academics on LinkedIn than I had thought

Submit your abstracts until January 15 🔆 Would be great to see you at #COMPTEXT2025 in Vienna 🤩

I’m setting up a LinkedIn profile, and it definitely has a Microsoft vibe

🚨 Assistant Professorship in Computational Social Science 🚨 Konstanz has a call for a 6-year junior professorship. stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/2... This is an amazing department & a strong community. Happy to share more about my own (great) experience there! Deadline SOON: 2 DAYS left ‼️