#AffectivePolarization ≠ only #Partisanships 🎉 Ida Bæk Hjermitslev & @markuswagner.bsky.social widen the lens on political identity, looking in Germany, where ideological identities (left/right) are as strong as party IDs and shape how people judge others 🤔

As expected, all three votes today on the aspects of the 'safe third countries' list at EU level were carried by the EPP with the three far-right parties. Each of the votes looked like a variation of this (data via @howtheyvote.eu):

65.1🦋 Do campaigns matter? 🤔 Denmark’s 2022 EU defence opt-out vote show that #Campaign information matters. While fear-based messages influences #Voters at the start, their effect declines as voters learn more. @rsenninger.bsky.social, J.Fenger & D.Beach of @ecprsgeu.bsky.social

🧵I am happy to announce a new article in Political Behavior @polbehavior.bsky.social, “Are the Politically Active Better Represented?”, co-authored with @jenny-oser.bsky.social, @rdassonneville.bsky.social, @professormpersson.bsky.social, and Anders Sundell. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Today in @theguardian.com, I argue that Donald Trump’s foreign-policy playbook is increasingly about attention capture, or what I call geopolitical clickbait. Plus I outline why this matters for Europe & what to do about it. 🧵 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

partycoloR is now on CRAN! Started as a simple idea 6 years ago, now it's a full-featured package. Extract party colors and logos from Wikipedia with one line of code. It's already powering ParlGov Dashboard. install.packages("partycoloR")

🚨Happy to finally see this out in the @ejprjournal.bsky.social (with @leonardocarella.bsky.social) ⁉️ Does growing up when immigration is salient make people vote for parties they agree with on immigration *for the rest of their lives*? doi.org/10.1017/S147...

How can stable personality traits explain less stable PRR voting? Daniel Komaromy, @delaneypeterson.bsky.social, @mrooduijn.bsky.social and I test whether negative contact with immigrants 'activates' these traits. Mostly, it doesn't. But: initial exposure and out-group definition may matter.

Why did antisemitism rise in Germany during the Covid pandemic? And why was this increase concentrated among political centrists, rather than on the fringes? doi.org/10.1017/S153... @kanol.bsky.social @wzb.bsky.social @uni-hamburg.de @politikuhh.bsky.social @socfub.bsky.social

📊 Chart of the week: EU allowance allocation and verified emissions by sector, 2005-2024 ⚓ The 2026 review of the EU ETS must be anchored in facts and focus on the potential benefits of the system to EU competitiveness 🖋️ Thomas Mramor and @tagliapietra.bsky.social 🔗 buff.ly/43w2vgH #EconSky

Friendly reminder: "If one side says it's raining and the other says it is dry, it is NOT your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the window and see which is the truth." – 101 Journalism See through the lies. You're the watchdog. Bark. Bark as loud as you can.

Today, the European Parliament voted to put the Mercosur trade agreement to the European Court of Justice for review. It was a politically momentous decision, very tight and carried by an unusual majority, so it is worth looking a bit deeper into it.

We hear it all the time: Since the turn of the 2010s, thanks to the rise of tech, the US has pulled ahead economically. This idea is everywhere from Washington to Davos—and it's paralyzing Europe But it's simply not true! Let's look at what's really happening, with charts🧵

👉Our findings suggest that the perception of scientific integrity is severely threatened during crisis – right when expertise and guidance may be needed the most.👇 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

BREAKING: Germany now on board with readying the anti-coercion instrument against 🇺🇸 “There is a legally established European toolbox for responding to economic blackmail...we should now consider using these measures,” 🇩🇪finance minister and vice chancellor Lars Klingbeil just said in Berlin.

Good timing for this @kiel.institute study on who is actually paying for Trump's tariffs (short answer: not the exporters):

While some in Europe still wonder whether Trump's US would honour Art. 5 of the NATO treaty, he is arguably breaking Art. 2 with little regard by employing conflict in international economic policy to blackmail allies:

Feels like something cracked today in the transatlantic alliance. Europeans have been swallowing their pride, bitting their tongues, and bending the knee. That strategy may have bought them time but it has now clearly failed. It also had a major cost - it has made the WH think Europe will cave. 1/

What European leaders have been most nervous about is the US pulling back on NATO or Ukraine… but how can Europe trust the US will come to its defense if its trying to seize territory from a NATO country. They can’t. So why cave to keep a security commitment that is not real. 6/

This is on the money from @pkrugman.bsky.social IMHO. “European deterrence has worked. This is basically a howl of frustration on the part of a mad dictator who has just realized that he can’t send in the Marines.”

The 10% tariff will presumably come on top of the 15% rate introduced by the EU-US trade deal. But the text of the agreement says the 15% rate is “all inclusive”, which means no additional tariffs can be stacked. If Trump goes ahead with the 10%, the entire deal will inevitably fall apart.

Who’s going to defend Greenland (assuming it wants to be defended)? Does the mutual solidarity clause apply to Greenland (and who decides about it)? verfassungsblog.de/greenland-an...

We’re organizing a workshop at Aarhus University. Please share and consider submitting! 🗓️ 13–14 April 2026 | 📝 Deadline: Mon, 16 Feb 2026 (extended abstract) — junior scholars prioritized 🎤 Keynotes: @stefwalter.bsky.social (Univ. of Zurich) & @hhuang.bsky.social (Ohio State)

Our Department at Aalborg University is hiring an Associate Professor in Sociology with a focus on quantitative methods: www.stillinger.aau.dk/videnskabeli...

Official confirmation of German participation in European troop deployment to Greenland. First Bundeswehr soldiers to arrive tomorrow. 🇪🇺 / NATO solidarity in action.

What do people in England think about their local area? In this short report I take a look at surveys we conducted with @yougov.co.uk in 2022, 2024 and 2025 to gain some insights... Some key findings...

This is something I wondered about before. There is never a really big moment to celebrate a big EU decision. Like in this case, the vote in the European Parliament is still needed, but by the time that comes around it will be seen as just a confirmation. Still, as Martin says, big decision.

Emmanuel Macron has just confirmed that France will vote against the EU-Mercosur trade deal. The vote is scheduled to take place tomorrow. If Italy votes yes, as it has telegraphed it will, there will be a qualified majority in favour and Ursula von der Leyen will be able to sign it in Paraguay.

Who is really “running” the European Parliament right now? On the margins of the geopolitical changes, the shifts in the EU are also accelerating. In my newest EU-Analytics, I dug into all final votes from December 2025 – and the shift of power to the centre-right & far right is accelerating:

New mix: inflation at about 2%, growth at about 1%. Not great, but not catastrophic either. www.reuters.com/world/europe...

This is exactly right. No Europe, less U.S. global influence. 👇 „But Europe’s greatest value to its transatlantic ally is as a legitimacy engine. (…) With Europe in tow, American preferences were transmuted into those of “the West”, or indeed into global norms. economist.com/europe/2025/...

New in @bjpols.bsky.social! Dave Hope, @lhaffert.bsky.social and I show that low taxes on the rich have a hidden cost: They undermine public support for broad-based taxation. 🖋️ cup.org/45lgPwN

#OpenAccess from @psrm.bsky.social - Monitoring coalition partners in the EU: strategic committee appointments in the European Parliament - https://cup.org/3NjynDg - @pitrieger.bsky.social#OpenAccess #FirstView

A transatlantic showdown over tech policy (as opposed to, say, net zero) could actually have a unifying & galvanising political effect within the EU. The union’s digital regulations are broadly popular and many voters actually want more, not fewer, controls on Big Tech. yougov.co.uk/technology/a...

The uncertainty created by these periodic nationalist backlashes (also in Denmark, for example) unfortunately puts brakes on the much-needed internationalization of European science and academia.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy ramps up the pressure on Europeans to agree on new funding. "I know that Russia is threatening different countries over this decision. But we shouldn't be scared of these threats – we should be scared that Europe will be weak," he writes on Telegram after #EUCO.

In line with the 'credibility revolution', we are thinking about research designs that allow us to get closer to causal effects. Those who use surveys have often turned to survey experiments. At the same time, survey response rates have dropped considerably. Below are the figures for the ESS.

I welcome the decision of the Council on our proposal to continue the immobilisation of Russian Sovereign Assets. We are sending a strong signal to Russia that as long as this brutal war of aggression continues, Russia’s costs will continue to rise.

Die Welt scheint ständig vor dem Kollaps zu stehen. Doch das EU-Verbot hormonaktiver Chemikalien in Spielzeug zeigt wieder: Fortschritt passiert. Belege gibt’s genug.

Thanks to @johnholbein1.bsky.social I learned about this paper on rent control in Berlin. Because I was marking, I immediately downloaded the replication materials. bsky.app/profile/john...

It is almost 10 years since Hanspeter Kriesi published his seminal article on the politicization of European Integration @jcms-eu.bsky.social. A short thread on how things stand as of 2024, with @chesdata.bsky.social, looking at salience, clarity, and unity of party positions towards the EU 🧵:

The European Union has triggered Article 122 to indefinitely immobilise the assets of the Russian Central Bank, worth a whopping €210 billion. I explain what just happened and why this is such a big deal for Europeans. 🧵 Long thread.

The EU 🇪🇺 now adopts fewer legal acts per year, but the regulatory load inside them keeps growing 📈 A new @jeppjournal.bsky.social article by Brandsma et al. measures regulation by counting actual regulatory statements (“Companies shall…”). I plotted their data: fewer acts, more obligations.

🌳 Thrilled to launch The PopulisTree — a new website covering decades of populism in Europe (both national and European elections) using a new taxonomy and dataset. 🔗 populistree.org 📄 More in my brand new article in European Union Politics: 🔗 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

NEW - Company Towns: Single-Industry Dominance and Local Government Capacity - https://cup.org/48yJZcG - @elizabethelder.bsky.social #OpenAccess

When it comes to genetically modified plants, the left in the European Parliament also votes with the far right…

To me, a healthy qualifier to the whole ‚credibility revolution‘ discussion is the paper by Spirling & Steward. We are all trying to do inference to the best explanation (IBE), and different designs come with different pros & cons. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

"[Political science] studies without an explicit identification strategy...constitute nearly 40% of empirical quantitative work."

🌍The latest cleavage: the universalist divide @mrsteenbergen.bsky.social , @dpzollinger.bsky.social , @siljahausermann.bsky.social, @simonbornschier.bsky.social, and @lhaffert.bsky.social provide evidence from the 2024 European Election Study 👇 🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

You lose your wallet. Where are you most likely to get it back? It depends on how much $$$ is in the wallet. But it's better to lose your wallet in: Switzerland 🇨🇭 Norway 🇳🇴 Netherlands 🇳🇱 Denmark 🇩🇰 You're far less likely to get your wallet back in: China 🇨🇳 Morrocco 🇲🇦 Peru 🇵🇪 Kazakhstan 🇰🇿