A fun way to start the wknd: We have received the reviews of ”Rallied by thy neighbor: how minority spatial concentration increases voter turnout." […] I am delighted to conditionally accept your article for publication in The Journal of Politics. @rafaelahlskog.bsky.social @turnbulldugarte.com

There’s a new kid in town! Companies are now selling IVF and embryo selection based on genetic testing for traits related to health and even intelligence. We outline methodological and ethical concerns, and warn against risks for social inequality. With the fantastic @gaiaghirardi.bsky.social

This right here is a REALLY cool paper. Must read!

Second thesis article now out in Political Behavior! Using PGIs for ~10 000 full-pair fraternal twins in STR, combined with rich, geo-coded register data, I highlight the compensatory interaction between genetics and family + neighbourhood factors, with regards to voting. 🗳️ doi.org/10.1007/s111...

In this @electoralstudies.bsky.social piece, @rafaelahlskog.bsky.social examines the causality between education and voter-turnout, finding that education does not affect voter turnout in Swedish elections but does matter for the #Europeanelections. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🧬Check out this recent article, “Extraversion Probably Does Not Cause Political Participation. Evidence from Two Genetically Informed Designs,” published in @ispp-pops.bsky.social by Rafael Ahlskog👇 doi.org/10.1111/pops... #polisky

I have donated to Wikipedia occasionally, and will do it again in the future. Support free and factual information on the internet!

📢 Call for Papers for EPSS 2026 conference in Belfast is out: epssnet.org/belfast-2026... This we’’ll feature the last two sections today: 🔝 This week: Comparative Politics of Development & Political Representation 🧵

Vittnesmål om hur det är att vara reporter på Epoch Times (amerikanska). www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/b...

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

1/7 New BMI GWAS out! Using Estonian Biobank (n=204,747) and replication in FinnGen, we show that even in Europe you can still find region-specific biology if you zoom into population-tailored sumstats. Big thanks to co-author @kanwalbatool.bsky.social :)

The 5th Nordic Political Behavior Workshop in Trondheim! @lchristensen.bsky.social @rdassonneville.bsky.social @finseraas.bsky.social et al!

The European Research Council offers up to €2M additional funding for PIs relocating to the EU or a Horizon Europe Associated Country from non-associated third countries under Starting, Consolidator or Advanced Grants. @erc.europa.eu ec.europa.eu/info/funding...

I'm looking for a PhD student to do some trailblazing at the frontier of personality genomics and lifespan gene-environment transactions (start Fall 2026)! If you want to work with me: psychology.msu.edu/graduatestud... (PS @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social is taking a student too, in moral psych/dev!)

I like how the QWERTY keyboard mirrors evolution. Proteins and pathways adapted to a situation persist, even when the situation changes. So we end up with mysteriously complex Rube Goldberg machines across biology that only make sense if you know about clashing type bars in Victorian machines.

PhD position in Economics with a specialization in AI and the Future of Taxes at Uppsala University uu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Call for abstracts: genetics, economic & social issues. We're hosting a 1-day workshop on using genetic data to examine economic & social issues on 12th December at UCL’s Social Research Institute. More info & submission at link below #genetics #socialscience #economics #cohort bit.ly/41EnPmu

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 🧵

A few thoughts on Herasight, the new embryo selection company. First, their whitepaper (drive.google.com/file/d/1EpFi...) implies that competitors like Nucleus have been marketing and selling grossly erroneous risk estimates. This is shocking if true! 🧵

This is cool!

Just got stung by a wasp for the first time since I was kid. I'm genuinely surprised by how much it hurts!

In a recent episode of a podcast about the Lundin Oil war crimes trial, our Associate Professor Johan Brosché and historian Douglas H. Johnson discuss the evidence that systematic war crimes were committed to support the oil industry. 🎧 unpaiddebt.org/e19-question...

At long last, this paper is now published. Does wealth (causally!) confer an advantage in terms of political participation? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨📜 Debut publication alert! Do genetics influence education differently across state borders? 🧬📚 We tested differences in genetic associations with education in East and West 🇩🇪 around reunification! Out now in Psychological Science 👉 doi.org/10.1177/0956... #Sociogenomics #MPRGBiosocial #MPIB A🧵

It's 2025, and I still got a desk reject because of null results today. Anyway, how's your publication bias going?

Humbled to receive the BGA's early career award ☺️ Thank you to my brilliant team #MPRGBiosocial, the @maxplanck.de for investing in early career researchers, @mpib-berlin.bsky.social for the excellent environment, and my many mentors incl @kph3k.bsky.social @tuckerdrob.bsky.social #ScienceTeamSport

The sheer stupidity of this

86 fucking years old.

Following

Wrapping up the semester with two presentations at EPSA 2025: 1️⃣POLECO Thur. 15:00 - Effects of genetic explanations for socioeconomic outcomes on citizens’ perceptions of inequality 2️⃣POLMET Fri. 13:10 - Effects of education field on economic and social ideology within twin pairs Come chat! #EPSA

Reposting this as a commitment device (I've decided not to travel to the US for the foreseeable future).

🧵1/4 🚨 We have finalized our DID textbook! You’ve run out of excuses for sketchy pre-trends and mysterious TWFE coefficients. 📘 Credible Answers to Hard Questions: Differences-in-Differences for Natural Experiments By Chaisemartin & D’Haultfœuille. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

If you think it can’t happen here, remember that it already did. In 1942 soldiers came with rifles to our home and ordered us out. They put us in internment camps. Most of us were citizens.

I once ran into Michael Parenti in a supermarket in Berkeley. We had a very nice, brief conversation about the nature of political science.

there are so many thoroughly antisocial behaviors that would shock and disturb you coming from any other human being but are completely standard for cops

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke, but also me after one day of antibiotics.

Sophie Mainz has been awarded the John Sullivan Award for the best paper by a graduate student presented at any of the panels organized by the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section at last year’s APSA conference. Congratulations to @sophiemainz.bsky.social !

Now published! Congrats Yon Ho on this huge lift conducting dozens of GWAS in Korea and performing meta-analyses with other Asian biobanks reaching a sample size comparable to UK Biobank. The fine-mapping, novel loci, and ancestry-enriched discoveries are very cool. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today, my fantastic PhD student @fqinya.bsky.social is defending her thesis!

New paper with @paulhufe.net Astrid Sandsør and Nicolai Borgen 📝 Causal evidence for gene-environment interaction based on: 🧬 Exogenous within-family genetic differences 🏫 Exogenous variation in school value added

Today marks the start of the fourth annual ESSGN conference, this year hosted in a lovely and sunny Bristol! Follow along!

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...

No other way to put it: this is a monumental contribution and service to the social science genetics community.

Thanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

"Masked security forces captured an opposition leader in the coastal province of New Jersey as regime officials continue their months-long crack-down against pro-democracy elements in the embattled United States. The arrest comes as the regime issued calls for summary detentions without trial."

🧵 What kind of POPE do AMERICANS want?📸 Before the Conclave, @sophiemainz.bsky.social and I asked 1,500 U.S. adults to choose among hypothetical papal candidates. Results: Americans prefer a liberal and *non-political* Pope. The latter might be challenging for Leo XIV. Results ⬇️ Polisky Datasky

OSCU's next talk: Friday May 9th 16:15-17:00 at Stadsbiblioteket by Rafael Ahlskog: 'Working with pre-registrations when using register data'

Some really interesting contrasts in our new "assumption-free heritability" preprint: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The attack on American universities by the Trump administration points to the need to protect the freedom of research in Sweden as well. Professor Hanne Fjelde's article in Forskning & Framsteg highlights 3 vulnerabilities for Swedish humanities and social science research. 👇 fof.se/artikel/vi-b...

Yeah. I've canceled all of my intended US plans for the foreseeable future. So should you.