This is cool... someone made a wall calendar template in LaTeX ctan.org/pkg/wallcale...

Always a bit of a problem for a leader if he or she is viewed as a means to an end rather than an intrinsic part of an end in itself

Very happy to share that I am going to be the new Director of the Democracy unit at the @wzb.bsky.social Berlin Social Science Center. I am excited to form a new research unit on democratic politics and to engage with people in Berlin and elsewhere to make liberal democracy more resilient.

The special issue of @cpsjournal.bsky.social “Back from the Brink: Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies”, co-edited by myself and Isabela Mares, was just published. The issue includes 8 articles, many of which set new research agendas. A🧵w/overview 1/10 journals.sagepub.com/toc/CPS/curr...

I suspect that had Labour not contrived to lose so many voters to the Greens and LDs over the past year that they would now be ahead of Reform in the polls, with the Conservatives not too far behind. Which would rather alter the tenor of press coverage compared to when Reform continue to lead.

The proofs are in! Youth Wings of the Populist Radical Right will be published in mid-June by OUP. Covering 10 PRR youth wings across Europe, we show how these organisations act as motors of mobilisation, socialisation, internationalisation, professionalisation, & normalisation for their parties.

A good opportunity for advanced grad students working on Europe to get feedback and meet peers. Apply or share it with your students ✌️

Despite receiving plenty of rejections along the way (a non-trivial amount due to “unclear debate in the literature“), feeling v validated of having decided to write evidence-based papers about when and how Popes go political and why it matters

oh god oh fuck I took the metro to the Tisza rally and all these kids POURED OUT of the train at the stop and started running up the escalators chanting, and briefly held hands with the older people leaving the rally and going down on the escalator, and I think I may actually just cry

First AI restaurant in London?? #LLMcuisine

A pleasure to present my working paper on pre-electoral coalition signals in legislative activity at a fab @psaepop.bsky.social panel at #PSA26 in the beautiful (if slightly daunting) surroundings of the Oxford Exam Schools! A nice introduction to conferencing :)

Die Zeit wieder einmal mit absolut goated Datenjournalismus www.zeit.de/wissen/2026-...

Thrilled that my paper (w/@sarahobolt.bsky.social,@catherinedevries.bsky.social,@simonecremaschi.bsky.social) was accepted at the American Political Science Review! We find that declining public services fuel support for the populist right — and show why the right benefits more than other parties 🧵

AJPS article from @kenbenoit.bsky.social, Scott de Marchi, Conor Laver, Michael Laver, and Jinshuai Ma on using LLMs to analyse political texts. 🧵 1/8 Social science research requires reliable extraction of information from texts to identify authors' preferences on various policies and issues.

Why Europe matters - in 1min 58secs open.substack.com/pub/timothyg...

"For now, the world can still hear whether America’s cultural leaders will choose to stay silent. Mr. Trump is listening, too."

🌀 📊 How powerful are polls in influencing election outcomes? 🗳️ @krausewe.bsky.social & @christinagahn.bsky.social examine how election polls can shape voter behaviour, from bandwagon effects to strategic voting, and why their influence is more complex than it first appears 🤔

Can anyone explain to me what the Blue Labour justification for this is? Who out there will vote Labour because Mahmood prevented a Sudanese Chevening Scholar? And to be honest, why won’t the PM simply overrule her?

Presenting at @lse-ei.bsky.social today - all welcome (so I am told!) Thanks @benbraun.bsky.social and @donatodc.bsky.social for the invite! www.lse.ac.uk/european-ins...

I don't think I've ever seen a party so clearly declare that they're purposefully alienating their core voters.

I am extremely honored, and equally perplexed, that my book has received the Stein Rokkan Prize. Thank you so much to everyone who helped out with this project along the way. So much of the book is the result of feedback by kind people who took the time to listen and read. Thank you.

🤖NEW POST ON AI🤖 Perhaps you're thinking like Brenda from Bristol, 'not another one!' but... I felt that lots of writing about Claude Code doesn't really show you how it works. So I thought well, why not? And along the way some bad literary allusions. 1/n benansell.substack.com/p/the-appren...

Another great episode of this podcast on political behaviour research - this time with @miguelpereira.bsky.social and his important insights on political elites

My book about Britain ends with a memory. Of the first time I ever worked at Broadcasting House as a guest commentator, what that meant to me, and what the BBC means for 🇬🇧’s place in the world. The idea that the World Service could end is awful, and frankly embarrassing for the British Government.

Nick Vivyan, Chris Hanretty (@chanret.bsky.social) and I have a new book out: “Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice”. The core of the book is making the argument that citizens’ views about political issues neither reduce to an ideological orientation nor to a lack of substance. (1/10)

I think this paper is bound to become a classic reference. The time paradox is one of the most powerful ideas in explaining why it is so hard to defeat illiberal forces in a democracy. It’s one of those ideas I keep coming back to since I first heard of it (and that I keep telling everyone about).

New article and special issue! Just out in Comparative Political Studies: “Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies: Information, Legacies, Temporalities", the intro to a special issue on countering illiberalism in liberal democracies. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Thread 🧵1/7

There is an implicit disregard for liberal democracy in all these narratives around the super spin doctors (McSweeney, Cummings etc.) who are allegedly running the country. It turns politics into a sport instead of emphasizing what should count in a democracy: transparency, honesty, accountability

Minneapolis is a place that means a lot to me, so I wrote a short Substack about the city, its people, and what we all owe them. benansell.substack.com/p/my-minneap...

NEW PAPER ALERT! My paper, with @bjornhoyland.bsky.social , on how “policy loss” shapes support for the EU has just been published in @cpsjournal.bsky.social. Check it out! 1/

We’d long planned to publish this excellent @dahrendorfoxford.bsky.social paper by @jyshapiro.bsky.social (@ecfr.eu) today, to coincide with the first anniversary of Trump II — but little could anyone have known *just how* relevant it would be! Do give it a read: bit.ly/4qDhWRm

“How long Germany would be willing to remain an abnormal nation—­denying itself geopolitical ambitions & national­ist pride—­was a question even before the present liberal world order began to unravel. Now, thanks to the American strategic shift, GER has no choice but to become normal again quickly”

Apologies for being self-referential but

When they want to increase public spending, every politician is asked how they will pay for it, but the same is not true (yet) for cutting immigration (because it is incorrectly understood as not having a cost.) I wonder if that will change as the impact on the economy becomes more visible.

So we are already back to the levels of migration of the early 2010s and declining faster... let's hope all those new restrictions, based on previous higher numbers, don't make Britain massively unattractive to those migrants the government DOES wish to attract.

Quite different from my work today substantively + methodologically - but thrilled to share this article based on my undergrad thesis, now out at German Politics & Society 43(3) @berghahnbooks.bsky.social. I analyse how 🇬🇧🇩🇪 state visits portray historical memory + joint future action.

My latest commentary: how to populist-proof your democracy before it's too late… www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

🚨 New working paper 🚨 We often see populist parties like Reform UK blame higher energy bills on climate change policies. What are the political consequences of this strategy? Very early draft; comments and criticisms are welcomed! full draft: z-dickson.github.io/assets/dicks...

They polled Brits who their president is. They had no idea.

Wenn @valentimvicente.bsky.social im Deutschlandfunk ist, dann sollte man sich das natürlich auf jeden Fall anhören

that the upfront costs to come and do scientific research in the UK are too high is a well known terrible fact. perhaps more surprising is that scientific excellence has persisted despite all these hurdles, but this limping cannot go on forever. Soon this fun immigration experiment will break.

So delighted to be working with these fantastic people! Thanks for the warm welcome to the LSE.

Some people in the Brandenburg state government must have read Bolet (2021)

🗳️🇩🇪 How do voters react to new political actors? Some suggest that radical right party success can provoke electoral backlash. @antvalentim.bsky.social and his co-authors argue that such backlash can emerge whenever new political actors disrupt the status quo👇 www.lse.ac.uk/european-ins...

Excited to share my first single-authored dissertation paper! I study how voters react to party differentiation in coalitions. Voters like clear partisan signals, but the gains are short-lived and limited to aligned supporters. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Es mag ja nicht viele belastbare Erkenntnisse in der Sozialwissenschaft geben. Aber dass "Destruktion durch Kopieren und/oder Kooperation" nicht funktioniert -- das ist eine. Und doch hat noch jede europäische Mitte-Rechts-Partei gemeint, es besser zu wissen.

The Spanish centre-right is taking a tumble and the far-right is on the rise. I was lucky enough to present some new causal work on Friday at LSE showing that the PP does better when it signals distinctiveness from VOX. ~1.5K tests, same result. Rejecting far-right benefits centre-right

Private Eye offers up an excellently scornful commentary on the relentless polling. It’s become ridiculous and has oversimplified our politics to dangerous levels of stupid and irresponsible.

New data for legislative scholars! Committee Membership Dataset with @bcastanho.bsky.social, @dmpullan.bsky.social and Firuze Taner: Committee assignments for all MPs (Wikidata IDs!) in 14 countries Harmonized roles/policy areas Data: doi.org/10.7802/2940 Working paper: tinyurl.com/vf54r78p ⬇️

Hague in his 1st conference speech as leader: "I am proud to be British. I believe in the United Kingdom, and so do hundreds of thousands of British blacks and British Asians. I want to see men and women from our ethnic minorities playing their full part in the mainstream of our national life..."