The Call for Papers and Panels for #COMPTEXT2026 in Birmingham (23-25 April) is out; feel free to circulate: shorturl.at/gRg0p! Deadline: January 16!

“You see, the endless renovation of the Stuttgart train station is a symbol of our late-capitalist condition: the project is always ‘in progress,’ yet nothing ever progresses. The construction site itself becomes the true destination.”

Job Alert! We are hiring two post-docs (full time, 4+ years) in our project SCEPTIC - Social, Computational and Ethical Premises of Trust and Informational Cohesion with @annanosthoff.bsky.social @guzoch.bsky.social and Prof. Andreas Peters (uol.de/informatik/s...)

📣 New Preprint! Have you ever wondered what the political content in LLM's training data is? What are the political opinions expressed? What is the proportion of left- vs right-leaning documents in the pre- and post-training data? Do they correlate with the political biases reflected in models?

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

My 2nd dissertation paper is out in @nature.com Humanities and Social Sciences Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I study and explore how associations with 'left' and 'right' vary systematically by semantic and political position.

📢 New Publication Alert! Our (@msaeltzer.bsky.social) latest article, "Issue congruence between candidates' Twitter communication and constituencies in an MMES: Migration as an exemplary case", has just been published in Parliamentary Affairs. academic.oup.com/pa/advance-a...

Now out in Social Networks Network analysis aspires to be “anticategorical,” yet its basic units—relationships—are usually readily categorized ('friendship,' 'love'). Thus, a nontrivial cultural typification is asserted in the very building blocks of most network analyses. doi.org/10.1016/j.so...

Calling all parliaments experts! Say there's a debate in parliament, and a related vote. How frequently would these be on different days? different weeks? I don't mean different readings of bills, because these will also have different debates. @sgparliaments.bsky.social #polisky #parlisky

Can banning political ideologies protect democracy? 🛡️🆚🗣️ Our (w. @valentimvicente.bsky.social) paper finds: punishing individuals might backfire. We study a West German policy banning "extreme left" individuals from working for the state. #Democracy #PoliticalScience 🧵 url: osf.io/usqdb_v2

Happy to share my first published article based on my PhD in Party Politics with @journals.sagepub.com in open access! doi.org/10.1177/1354...

Local reactions to wolf attacks in Germany are not powerful enough to influence the election decisions of many voters www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Quite a strong final statement: "Descriptive research is important and it is a pity that the general obsession with causal estimates disincentivizes researchers from attempting to publish careful and detailed description."

1/2 Another year, another @epsanet.bsky.social This year I had two papers accepted, but no visual proof that I presented joint work with Thomas Bräuninger on (the problems of) dynamic scale usage. I hope some nice people will capture 📸 me again next year in the Post-EPSA era @epssnet.bsky.social

So is it pronounced EPSS or EPSS? #epsa2025

In 1/2 an hour at #epsa2025, I’ll explain @lwarode.bsky.social and my approach to measuring divergence in gov-opp relations measurement based on parliamentary votes and speeches. The panel’s hidden at -1.A.05, so I hope you’ll find your way there (as will I)

A large-scale study of academics’ tweets shows disparities in who shapes academic discourse and how it reaches the public. @prashantgarg.bsky.social @trfetzer.com @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social @uni-of-warwick.bsky.social #AcademicTwitter #ClimateAction www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨New publication @The_JOP on human biases in data annotation (w. Nora Webb Williams, @kevinaslett.bsky.social, John Wilkerson). Extremely important given the increasing societal reliance on AI tools often trained on human coders www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

A Tinder Test of Democratic Norms💋 New paper in @thejop.bsky.social with @bertous.bsky.social We rely on a visual conjoint experiment, cross-sectional data, & panel data to show that affective polarization drives the normalisation of the far right among the centre-right 🇬🇧🇪🇸 doi.org/10.1086/736698

📣 New article alert 📣 Great insights shared by CDSS doctoral candidate Lukas Warode on elite attitudes towards political ideology. Check out the thread and his article for a deeper dive into the research area. Congrats @lwarode.bsky.social!👏

Analysing the associations of 🇩🇪 candidates toward ideology, @lwarode.bsky.social shows that left-leaning elites view 'left' positively & 'right' negatively. This pattern is not mirrored by right-leaning elites, who on average have less positive attitudes towards 'right'. doi.org/10.1080/0140...

The first paper of my dissertation has been published in West European Politics! @wepsocial.bsky.social See the thread below:

Everything required to explain IV estimation, in one picture.

quantitative forscher:innen: fuck ich sitze seit 10 stunden im büro kriege mein fuzzy regression discontinuity design nicht in R implementiert qualitative forscher:innen mit ihrer fokusgruppe:

Who's the most liberal or conservative cardinal? Here are the cardinals' ideal point estimates. credit: @adamramey.bsky.social

Can Bluesky also replace Instagram?

🚀 Our paper (with @eliaskoch.bsky.social) on ‘The Politics of Seeking and Avoiding Discourse in Parliament’ is finally out as EarlyView at the EJPR!

History is overrated. #OpenAccess 📝 #Germany #Prussia

Wow! Three scholars at Columbia, Michigan, & Maryland just introduced a measure of the partisan leanings of employers in the U.S. The data is constructed by linking voter registrations to online worker profiles. VRscores capture the political affiliations of 21.8M workers across 2.6M employers.

Feeling funny, might delete later

Shameless repost from evil X: I finally found some time to finish the introduction for @OpenDiscourseDE 's R package: open-discourse.github.io/opendiscouRs... The package is technically still under (final) development, while a majority of functions are working consistently.