Kirill Melnikov finds that #centrality in the #politicalnetwork of #Russian #elites protects them from getting dismissed in his presentation at the ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop on #LLMs and #politicalnetworks.

Can a #Colombian businessperson's network prevent them getting targeted by #FARC? serayyalaz.bsky.social explores the role of #corporatenetworks in #collectiveaction to deter #rebelviolence in her PhD project presented at our ECPR.bsky.social #JointSession workshop on #LLMs and #politicalnetworks.

What do #Swiss voters find when they search for information on #Swiss political actors' stance in different #initiatives? Mykola Makhortykh presents research co-authored with Maryna Sydorova, vihangjumle.bsky.social and vikavzt.bsky.social at our ECPR.bsky.social #JointSession workshop.

Felipe Perilla Reyes presents his #python package #text2rel at our ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop. Check it out if you need to extract in particular familial relationships from scanned historical documents!

Naim Bro demonstrates how you can create narratives about changing #cleavages among #politicalelites in #Chile and beyond (instead of outputs unintelligible to lay audiences) at our ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop.

Our team member Ivan Fomichev is expanding #US #rollcall data back into time to construct historic #covoting networks at our ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop on #LLMs and #politicalnetworks. #Americanists: what are the fun things you could do with that?

Yifei Zhu and his coauthors Songpo Yang, Jiangnan Zhu and Junyan Jiang bring AI agents to the problem of using #LLMs and extracting #politicalnetworks at our ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop.

Curious about how #German #politicalelites are connected to the country's #economicelites? Check out the project of Lisa Garbe, Yuequan Guo, macartan.bsky.social, and Lennard Naumann. wzb.bsky.social

Mert Kılıç is presenting on the influence of #Turkey's far-right parties' influence on the legislative agenda during our @ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop on #LLM and #politicalnetworks.

Spiral staircases, elevators and escalators: Scott Michael Hamilton presents his research on types of #revolvingdoors and their impact on careers in the defence sector and government in the #EU at our @ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop.

@seraphinemaerz.bsky.social is presenting and giving a quick tutorial to the #quallmer R package at our at our @ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop.

Claudia Salas Gimenez shows how parties adjust their #election campaigns on #YouTube at our @ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop on #LLM and #politicalnetworks.

Qian’ge Liu, our team member, is presenting her PhD project on #corruption #networks in #Nigeria for the first time in public. A big thank you to all the participants of the #LLMs and #politicalnetworks @ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop for their feedback!

@alexpiron.bsky.social and @ccrellin.bsky.social use #LLMs on #EU aid data to construct the EU's Humanitarian Aid #Network to explain aid allocation at our @ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop.

Tu Ngo presents his ambitious PhD-project to extract #politicalnetworks of cabinet-level #politicalelites using #LLMs on #wikipedia and other data at our @ECPR #JointSession workshop. Will the shape of these networks constrain leaders in their decision to go to war?

Yesterday was the second day of our @ecpr.bsky.social joint session workshop on #LLMs and #politicalnetworks, again with a marvelous view. #ecprjs26 Here is a recap of yesterday’s highlights:

Jorge Quesada Velazco collects feedback after his presentation of joint work with Tina Freyburg on the #politicalnetworks between #Chinese #economicelites connected to internet providers in #Africa and internet shutdowns.

seraphinemaerz.bsky.social presents her research on how #politicalelites' #illiberal speech and its normalization co-occurs with democratic decline at our ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop.

The first of several papers on #politicalnetworks in #China at our workshop: Zheng Zhang and @pierreflandry.bsky.social dig into the historical #CCP Organizational Department data to give us more fine-grained career and position data of Chinese political elites.

Clare Fenwick presents her approach to creating a database of bureaucratic-politico-business #networks to strengthen the rule of law for NET-ROL, so that you will be able to look up the ties your country's civil servants, regulators and political officeholders have.

Felipe Perilla Reyes talks about how to extract family and marriage relationships from digitized historical sources at our European Consortium for Political Research #JointSession workshop on #LLMs and #politicalnetworks. Keep an eye open for his #text2rel package!

Kirill Solovev presented his joint entity-relation extraction pipeline for the @valpop-project.bsky.social on the networks of populist political actors and public goods distribution. Very sophisticated and flexible method to extract politically relevant network ties from newspaper sources!

It's a wrap! We ended our @ecpr.bsky.social #JointSession workshop on using #LLMs to extract #politicalnetworks in the #Bergisel SKY restaurant on top of the iconic ski jump tower. Thank you all for attending and presenting your ideas, and all the valuable feedback and suggestions!

📢Exciting news: The program for our workshop at the @ECPR #JointSessions in Austria on how to use Large Language Models (LLM) to gather and analyse political elite networks is complete! 📢Check out our website: www.autpol.net/workshop

⏰Reminder: the deadline for submissions is December 10th - submit now!

Is there a gendergap among #China experts? This question arose as we collected our list of over 2000 China experts using a snowballing nomination process. Read our #gender breakdown to find out: www.autpol.net/ps-china-wat...

Check out this @chinaobservers.eu study by @ivanakaraskova.bsky.social and Emma Belmonte on the gender gap in who participates in European panels and podcasts on China: chinaobservers.eu/where-have-a... (in our own study, we had ca. 25% women globally, 39% in Europe: doi.org/10.1017/S104...)

With Ho-fung Hung and @profyangzhang.bsky.social, I had the pleasure of discussing David McCourt's latest book at the @socscihistory.bsky.social conference at the #PalmerHouse (flashback to @mpsa.bsky.social times) in #Chicago. Highly recommended for anyone interested in #Russia or #China experts!

📢 Do you study political #networks and use #AI-tools to gather the necessary data? Join our workshop at the #ECPRJointSessions in #Innsbruck, Austria, April 7-10, 2026, and discuss your approach and findings with like-minded peers! 📢 @ecpr.bsky.social For more information: www.autpol.net/workshop

In the meantime we will continue to explore how opinion diffusion and homophily (the tendency to turn to experts similar to themselves), but also pressure from different governments and other powerful actors influences the conclusions that the China expert community reaches.

And while we’re quite sure that we have managed to capture the core of this network in our article, we continue to reach out to China Watchers in the less represented professions and regions – so if you receive an e-mail from us, please fill out our very short survey!

Who are the experts who explain China to us? We’ve spent the last five years asking China experts to nominate other China experts until we had gathered more than 2000 individuals across the world and in a variety of professions: doi.org/10.1017/S104...

Check out PS's latest article by @fbkeller.bsky.social and @expertsurvey.bsky.social which highlights that while there is a diverse & global community of experts on Chinese politics, it is still dominated by US-based Academics. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1017/S104... #polisky #academisky

Curious about whether outsiders can ever know what’s going on behind closed doors among the most powerful people in China or Russia? Check out my project on the role of country experts and their networks in generating our knowledge of authoritarian regimes: www.autpol.net