Two things that are better about football coverage on German public broadcasters than the British ones: 1. No co-commentator, so no tedious boys' club banter in the commentary. 2. Rather than spending half time telling you what you just watched with your own eyes, they put the news on.

10 days left to submit your abstract for our Analytical Political Theory meeting! This year, we're planning panels on perceptions of public opinion, electoral reform, process preferences and elite attitudes and behaviour. See you in Hannover!

Many congrats @vanessaschwaiger.bsky.social - sounds like a really cool paper! Its findings are very much in line with what we found for GER, POL, SWE and FRA (doi.org/10.1007/978-..., in German only). However, we also found strong signs for political context-effects - do you find that as well?

"Left behind" and an undemocratic mind? Happy to see that my article on the link between perceived marginalization and democratic orientations is now out in @ejprjournal.bsky.social 🧵👇 Read the article here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Does anybody have any good examples of what they spent the DFG's funds for Chancengleicheitsmaßnahmen on?

📢Calling All Creatives! Do you have ideas for what democracy should look like in the future? @peoplepowered.org just launched an open call for visual content (videos, illustrations, graphics) that tells a compelling story about democracy. $1,000 prizes. www.peoplepowered.org/news-content...

Publication day! My contribution to Volume 26 of the Annual Review of Political Science, "Participatory Democracy and Its Limits" is now officially available and is OPEN ACCESS (meaning freely available to all): www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Planning to design and analyse a survey despite not having taken a class like mine below on Designing & Analysing Surveys? You’re the social science equivalent of those people who need rescuing by helicopter from Snowdon having gone up in flip flops with only a light sweater and a bag of Maltesers.

We’re a (relatively) small but mighty department with lots of exciting things to share on many different topics at this year’s inaugural @epssnet.bsky.social You can check out the 13 papers from my @sotonpolitics.bsky.social colleagues (& collaborators) here 👀

🎟️ Registration for FIDE Forum 2026 is open! Because this is a truly participatory forum, you don't just attend—you shape the agenda. Alongside general registration, we have also launched two Open Calls for both workshops and training sessions. Get involved👇 www.fidemocracy.org/europe-forum...

Finally, Jennifer Forestal's macro-level systemic theoretical piece is a call to action for pol comm scholars to conduct more empirically precise and explicitly normative multi-platform studies. She identifies two key methodological challenges and provide critical suggestions for overcoming them.

📢 We are hiring! 2 postdoctoral researchers at the University of Girona on: 🔹 Participatory Constitution-Making 🔹 Direct Democracy, Constitutional Change & Recall 📅 Deadline: 11 June 2026 ⏳ Up to 4 years Please share widely! popgovproject.wordpress.com/postdoc-posi...

Do citizens adhere to deliberative principles when they talk politics? And is there such a thing as a deliberative citizen? Find out in our new paper @pvs-journal.bsky.social!

We're hiring 2 postdocs at @uio.no on my ERC-Cog project on how authoritarian regimes shape scientific knowledge. 3–4 years, U. of Oslo. Deadline: 10 Sept 2026. Great dept., terms, well funded, bustling & green Scandi capital. Apply! 👉 jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/303060/postdoctoral-fello

NEW - Governance Values in Social and Political Belief Systems - https://cup.org/4fSfzaz "...results suggest that orientations towards transparency can be most strongly influenced by other beliefs..." - @tonybertelli.bsky.social, Silvia Cannas & Marika Danielle Csapo #OpenAccess

📢 Open positions! I’m recruiting 2 postdocs + 3 PhD positions at C³S, @goetheuni.bsky.social in #ClimateJustice, environmental inequality, #Demography & #ComputationalSocialScience 🌍📊💻 3–4 years + strong support for training🎒 Deadline: 23 June 2026 More: www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794987/Zen...

The latest policy report from INSPIRE unveils how creative participatory methods can transform youth voices into powerful agents of change in addressing youth employment in the West Midlands and the UK. Access the full report here: bit.ly/Therealities... #INSPIRE #YouthParticipation

Many thanks to everyone who came to the launch of my new book with Tim Monteath “Doing Open Social Science at the London School of Economics yesterday, and to great organisers. The book is free to download here press.lse.ac.uk/books/e/10.3... Thanks too to hundreds of early downloaders!

💥 It's publication day for the paperback edition of 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘋𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘌𝘶𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘦! I'm really grateful @hurstpublishers.bsky.social decided to release the book in paperback 🙏

Just experimented with running a slightly obscure statistical analysis (Q method) with Copilot. It felt like doing stats with Boris Johnson - it constantly made basic errors that it then tried to bullshit its way out of. Terrifying that we are all being encouraged to use these tools in our work.

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

Bürgerschaft in ihren vielfältigen Formen und Facetten steht im Mittelpunkt der Frühjahrstagung 2026 der DVPW-Sektion "Politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte", die vom 18.-20. März 2026 an der Universität Marburg stattfindet. Als Organisator*innen sind... https://www.theorieblog.de/?p=30495

London friends… I’m bringing Democracy’s Second Act to 🇬🇧 March 17, 18-19h, for a conversation with the wonderful @miriamlevin.bsky.social Space is limited so get your free tix here: democracyssecondact.org @demos-uk.bsky.social @involveuk.bsky.social

Will the comprehensive defeat of Reform's ex-academic by the Greens' working class candidate in Gorton and Denton stop all the media reporting as if Reform are the voice of the working class and the Greens are a fringe party of the liberal intelligensia? Again, not holding my breath.

Will Labour's massive loss in Gorton and Denton end their interesting electoral strategy of alienating most of the people who voted for them in order to chase after a smaller block of voters who all research shows have no intention of ever voting for them? Initial reactions suggest, probably not.

Building up surveillance state infrastructure when an authoritarian party is leading in the polls; can't think of anything that might go wrong with that 🤔 www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Today is a good day to remind you that none of the classic vote studies thought very highly of women's political competence.

Thrilled to share my new article in Political Psychology: “The psychology of political attitudinal volatility.” In it, I attempt to answer why do some people change their political views more than others? Open access at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... @ispp-pops.bsky.social

The Algorithmic Hand: Artificial Intelligence, Democracy, and Collective Action at Scale. Check out this new policy paper from our visiting fellow Tiago Peixoto. eprints.soton.ac.uk/506915/ #polisky

CfP: Democratic Innovations as Feminist Publics: Principles and Infrastructures. Get your papers in for this ECPR Joint Sessions workshop, led by our co-director Zohreh Khoban and Olive Mendoza, a collaboration that emerged from our symposium last summer. ecpr.eu/Events/Event... #polisky

This happened to me too, but since I already had 10,000 unread emails in the primary mailbox, I guess another few thousand doesn't matter too much.

Police and Crime Commissioners to be abolished. Called this more than 3 years ago when writing about the distinction between institutionalisation and embedding: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Useful undergrad resource: A brief overview of 200 important concepts in political science link.springer.com/referencewor...

New publication with Emilien Paulis and David Talukder! We examine how regional economic conditions shape public support for direct and deliberative democratic innovations (DIs). Our findings show that common explanations of support for DIs are context-dependent: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This from @benansell.bsky.social is excellent.

The Public Opinion Analytics Lab (POAL) is a collaboration by Southampton, Reading, and the LSE to leverage our strengths in public opinion research for academia and beyond. Today we've published our first methods brief— a short primer on conjoint experiments by the fantastic Thomas Robinson (LSE).

The way that the BBC has reported on this story has been pretty disgusting. Consistently framing it as a melodrama for Andrew (the abuser) and his family, like we should maybe feel a bit sorry for him. We shouldn't; we should be on the side of the trafficked girls. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Looking for postdoc funding? Markus Häggrot has put together this very useful database of opportunities: pt-postdoc-funding.com It is aimed at political theorists, but lots of the schemes are open to other disciplines, so helpful for others too. #polisky

Looking for postdoc funding? Markus Häggrot has put together this very useful database of opportunities: pt-postdoc-funding.com It is aimed at political theorists, but lots of the schemes are open to other disciplines, so helpful for others too. #polisky

Comparative Constitutional Studies early view: O'Flynn on "Constitutional referendums and randomly selected constitutional conventions." www.elgaronline.com/view/journal...

Autumn has arrived on Highfield Campus 🍂🍁

The Monday after the clocks go back. The one day a year that, as a night owl, you can get up at a comfortable time for you and feel like a productive member of society and not some kind of degenerate.

🟡 The Incite-Dem Interactive Forums are novel events where institutional actors are recruited to reflect on how citizen-generated models might be integrated into governance structures, and what adaptations are needed to make them work in practice. ⬇️

The problem of telling the truth after nine years of denial is that most people will quite reasonably assume either 1) you are just making excuses for current failure, or 2) you spent the last nine years being stupid/lying.

Stumbled across what seemed to be an abandoned palace whilst wandering around Lisbon last week.

We are hiring PhDs and postdocs to work on the ERC project GETGOV, where I am the PI. We will investigate governing elites since 1789. I am sure that it will be a lot of fun and result in great research! Postdocs: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... PhDs: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

AI in Politics: Repairing Democratic Connections? New chapter from @tamaraehs.bsky.social, @ortiztudela.bsky.social and I. We explore what the democratic challenges would be if we all had our own AI political adviser. The whole book is available open access: www.steiner-verlag.de/en/Connectiv...

Although not yet available to read (January 2026!), very happy to see our book on political trust online. Co-edited with @mfair.bsky.social and available open access, we think it'll be a useful addition to the field. www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/a-r...

AI in Politics: Repairing Democratic Connections? New chapter from @tamaraehs.bsky.social, @ortiztudela.bsky.social and I. We explore what the democratic challenges would be if we all had our own AI political adviser. The whole book is available open access: www.steiner-verlag.de/en/Connectiv...