Early in my PhD, a colleague finishing his (highly rated) dissertation told me he was stuck on the introduction. After years of hard work, he could no longer find an argument for why any of it actually mattered. This stuck with me ever since. A🧵 about this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

On 7 May 2026, Britain ran a PR experiment: Scottish Parliament: a Mixed-Member Proportional system Welsh Senedd: a (new) Low-Magnitude Party List system Same day, same political context, different outcomes. Which version of PR would be better for Westminster? 🧵

Looks like Orban’s Russia-backed false flag operation could be underway to lead to the cancelling of the Hungarian elections. Predicted recently. Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić has informed Orban of “explosives of devastating power” found at the gas pipeline connecting the two countries. 1/2

New preprint out today (osf.io/preprints/ps...). We tested whether AI agents are actually infiltrating online surveys. Spoiler alert: they aren't Thread 🧵 [1/9]

1/ Happy to release StatsClaw — an open-source multi-agent workflow for building statistical software with AI. w/ @tianzhuqin.bsky.social Site: statsclaw.ai Paper: bit.ly/statsclaw GitHub: github.com/statsclaw/

Excited to share the special issue co-edited with Garzia, Tromborg and Marschall: "Voting Advice Applications: Methodological Innovations, Behavioural Effects, and Research Perspectives". Published in Politics and Governance (@CogitatioPaG)! www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandg... #OpenAccess

Interesting new bot-detection strategy in online samples: academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-...

Jokin järki sentään liikkuu vielä tässä maassa. #yhteiskunta

📢 Out Now! V-Dem Dataset v16 & the V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026 💾 The V-Dem Dataset: v-dem.net/data/the-v-d... 📰 The Report "Unraveling The Democratic Era?”: v-dem.net/publications... 📈 Explore the new data with the V-Dem Graphing tools: v-dem.net/graphing/gra... #PoliSky #PoliSciSky 1/3

Selvisipähän se, miksi Belgia jarrutteli jäädytettyjen varojen hyödyntämisen kanssa.

Vaalitutkimuksesta taas kuuluu! Vuoden 2023 eduskuntavaalien ehdokastutkimus "Tie Arkadianmäelle" on nyt ulkona. Kokoelmassa monta kiinnostavaa lukua, itse olin mukana kolmessa. Linkki tutkimukseen: doi.org/10.61201/ssz... 1/4

WSJ reporting that the U.S. used Claude for the air strikes in Iran. Centcom has been using Claude "for intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios" www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

Did you know there is an open-source framework for building Voting Advice Applications? OpenVAA (openvaa.org) offers a way to develop a VAA for any election. It is fully localisable, accessible, modular and free to use. 1/3

Did you know there is an open-source framework for building Voting Advice Applications? OpenVAA (openvaa.org) offers a way to develop a VAA for any election. It is fully localisable, accessible, modular and free to use. 1/3

Energy Minister Shmyhal said Russia shelled CHP and thermal power plants that were operating only to heat residential areas in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro. He said the targets were purely civilian, leaving hundreds of thousands of families without heat in minus 25 C cold.

🚨New Publication🚨 The role of the VAA VOTESWIPER in polarizing voter choices in the 2025 German Federal Election @mariusfroehle.bsky.social @ronaldschleehauf.bsky.social @judithreinbold.bsky.social and Sebastian Jäckle @pwunifreiburg.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/poi3... A short 🧵on our findings

🎉 Online first: How does owning a home change how people feel about politics? In this article, @mhaslberger.bsky.social and @madselk.bsky.social find that owning a home is linked to feeling more politically included, especially for older people. 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/0140...

Claude Code is an amazing tool for social science researchers. It does not think and it does not interpret properly, but it generates and executes code with a speed and accuracy that I could never have anticipated.

I guess this means goodbye to the three hours of electricity per 24 hours i used to have, i will miss you #UkrainianView

Super excited to be participating in this Una Europa project on "Democracy and AI" ! And looking forward to co-leading the Leuven team with @bzar.bsky.social !

Many social democratic parties have ignored this (and focused on winning back socially conservative voters from the radical right). It has turned them into (even more) lifeless bureaucratic cartel parties whose voters are predominantly pensioners and whose "activists" work for the party or the state

Haluaisitko ymmärtää digitaalista teknologiaa yhteiskunnallisesta näkökulmasta? Nappaa kuunteluun Digitaalisen yhteiskunnan rajapinnoilla MOOC-kurssimme luennot! Myös opintopisteet tarjolla HY:n avoimen kautta jos suorittaa kurssiin littyvät tehtävät. rajapinta.co/2024/05/21/k...

Viime päivien uutisen valossa olisikohan nyt niin että tätäkin päätöstä voisi harkita uudelleen. yle.fi/a/74-20191502

Apologies for being self-referential but

Oli kyllä hyvää pohdintaa. Itselle jäi mieleen ennakointi uudesta maailman järjestyksestä, jossa jakolinja ei ole EU vs. USA, vaan maiden sisällä laitaoikeisto vs. perinteiset puolueet. Lopputuloksena kaoottinen maailma. 1/2 www.hs.fi/kuuntele/aud...

Within the next decade the radical right is going to be the main force on the right in Europe (national and EU level). This includes far-right parties and formerly centre-right parties shifting their position. Moderate conservatism and Christian democracy will largely disappear on the right. 1/

This is a belated post about our paper in @poqjournal.bsky.social. We analyzed 100 survey experiments fielded by TESS (tessexperiments.org), using only information from the proposals to identify intended hypotheses. Here are some of the things we learned:

Very happy to see this out in CPS! We study class identities and their social and political relevance over several decades in Britain, Denmark, Norway, and the US. A small thread: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/SIRW4...

📣 Kicking off 2026 with a new article in @eepolitics.bsky.social! When do voters with left-wing economic views support populist radical right parties? Many supporters of 🇵🇱 PiS are left-authoritarians (left-wing econ & authoritarian socio-cult views)... 1/4 👇 www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EISET...

Yo what the fuck short form videos are bad Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions arxiv.org/pdf/2302.03714 Ht: HowTown

A big part of my old job writing code for ggplot2 graphs, this is something that LLMs have been extremely good at right from the beginning. My workflow in the last three years has changed to prompting a certain style of graphs then editing them.

🇪🇺🇩🇪 Published Today in @bjpols.bsky.social 🇮🇹🇫🇷 How a voting advice application affected voting behavior in three large-scale field experiments: shorturl.at/2ekBj TLDR of our study (with @simonhix.bsky.social & @rlachat.bsky.social) below 👇 1/14

Critics will say that this pretty much summarises GAL-TAN!

🚨Excited to share our new paper published in PNAS (joint with @yamilrvelez.bsky.social and Don Green)! AI can enhance political knowledge and provide balanced information about politics with proper guardrails and vetted sources (e.g., party platforms). www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the invention of smartphones and the advent of social media, which both appeared around the same year, 2008. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I will be defending my dissertation tomorrow in Metsätalo, lecture hall 1 at 13.00. The event is public and anyone is welcome to attend. The event is also livestreamed: tapahtumat.helsinki.fi/en-FI/page/6... The summary of the dissertation is already available: helda.helsinki.fi/items/03aa5d...

Hesarin uutinen huomisesta väitöksestäni. #väitös @helsinki.fi www.hs.fi/politiikka/a...

I will be defending my dissertation tomorrow in Metsätalo, lecture hall 1 at 13.00. The event is public and anyone is welcome to attend. The event is also livestreamed: tapahtumat.helsinki.fi/en-FI/page/6... The summary of the dissertation is already available: helda.helsinki.fi/items/03aa5d...

1/ Does growing up poor always lead to political apathy? Very happy to share my first paper published (open access) in @electoralstudies.bsky.social, where I show that parents' influence mitigates the poverty gap in participation, while economic mobility does not. 🔗 shorturl.at/p5Bac

🤖 AI chatbots can persuade voters 🗳️ @cvargiu.bsky.social and I were recently asked to review a piece for @nature.com, now out, and wrote a short digest about it TLDR: chatting with a LLM can change your mind, even if facts provided are not always accurate check it out 👇 #chatbots #persuasion

🎉 New publication 🎉 Why do #youngpeople vote for the #AfD? This question has kept our research project busy for quite some time, so I'm beyond excited that our first article - co-authored with @timonscheuer.bsky.social - is now out in #GermanPolitics! 🤩 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

AI presents a fundamental threat to our ability to use polls to assess public opinion. Bad actors who are able to infiltrate panels can flip close election polls for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Models will also infer and confirm hypotheses in experiments. Current quality checks fail

Now out @apsrjournal.bsky.social with page numbers! 🫒 We advance a new argument on how economic crises fuel support for far-right parties in left-behind places by tapping into long-standing community narratives shorturl.at/bA55v @catherinedevries.bsky.social

Parents exhibiting greater ideological constraint are more successful at passing along their political views to their children than are less ideologically constrained parents link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🚨 New paper with Maria Grasso on generational shifts in political values. Despite talk of rising age polarisation, we show that gaps in attitudes are stable or even narrowing. Economic attitudes move in cycles, while social values have become more liberal – mainly due to generational replacement.

Aika yllättävä veto, että vaalidataa laitetaan AWS pilveen (Ruotsin servereille). Kyse kuitenkin kriittisestä infrastruktuurista. Vaalitietojen näyttäminen ei ole enää ns. omissa käsissä. Olisi kiva kuulla kyber-osaajien mietteitä tästä. yle.fi/a/74-20191502

Ukraine may be repeating a costly mistake in Pokrovsk. It’s a recurring pattern, seen for example in Vuhledar and Kursk – a reluctance to conduct a controlled, militarily justified withdrawal from a threatened salient when the situation no longer favors the defender. 1/