Egon Schiele (1907)

What really drives someone to support violent extremism? I am thrilled to share our new article published today in PNAS. Together with an incredible team of collaborators, we conducted a preregistered study across 58 countries with over 18,000 participants. This is what we found.

GB News is platforming an extremist narrative that is central to the socialisation of violence, including to the terrorist rampages in Europe and New Zealand & the USA www.reuters.com/world/europe... www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/3/...

🚨 Job alert! 🚨 We are looking for a PhD candidate for my Vidi project on factual belief polarization and its attitudinal consequences. The position will be at the Department of Political Science of Radboud University (Netherlands). Check out the full job profile below! www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Why do some people want to migrate while others don’t—even in similar conditions?🌍 My new #openaccess article in IMR shows how psychology🧠—notably values, risk tolerance, and personality—predict both aspiration and irregularity willingness.🔎🔓 journals.sagepub.com/eprint/XEJZT...

Much research concludes that partisans tolerate anti-democratic behavior, such as electoral subversion, because they rarely punish it at the ballot box. But refusing to vote against your party and actively supporting democratic subversion are not the same thing. My new paper in @bjpols.bsky.social:

Citizens tend to lose faith in meritocracy as inequality rises within their country over time. #SocialPsyc

Are we underestimating popular discontent with welfare state change, and the damage done to political-institutional trust? New measures of "welfare state emotions" suggest as much. With Tor Syrstad and Atle Haugsgjerd. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Tajfel et al. (1971) is the go to source in political behavior when introducing social identity theory (SIT). One of the main contributions of that text is that mere artificial group categorization results in discrimination. This is mostly ignored in political behavior research using SIT.

Fontana thinking his 6000+ experiments may not have been enough to feel confident in his conclusions in the 18th century while we expect our singular experiments and their standalone replications to do wonders some 250 years later... (excerpt from the intro of Jutta Schickore's About Experiment)

Meet your greens. Fascinating read worksinprogress.co/issue/sculpt...

What happens when politicians pivot during a crisis? I examine Trump’s July 2020 mask pivot. It increased Republican mask use, closing 40% of the partisan gap. But paradoxically, beliefs about masks' efficacy didn’t change. doi.org/10.1177/0003... @asanews.bsky.social #Trump #PublicHealth

This is a truly exceptional analysis of British parliamentary speeches on immigration by @theguardian.com showing we are living in a uniquely nativist era.

If you are teaching any kind of statistics, probability or modeling classes, you'll love this website. Contains dozens of interactive simulations of random processes, with sliders, different visualizat options, and full numeric log ouput: www.randomservices.org/random/apps/...

Our article with @honoratam.bsky.social on ✨motivated causal judgements✨ is out in @polpsyispp.bsky.social! When something bad happens, whose actions produced the outcome and who bears responsibility? It depends much more on the identity of the actors than on the details of the situation.

In the past, Republicans had more trust in scientists than Democrats. This is no longer the case. In POQ, Schulam et al. identify demographic changes in political parties as a source of polarized trust in the scientific community. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

This is the core issue bsky.app/profile/ryan...

“Visible state violence against sympathetic civilians was the beginning of the end for Jim Crow. It may be a turning point now, too.” Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/o...

Yesterday marked 10 years since C‑REX was founded. This thread highlight what the center has done — research, PhDs, datasets, events, policy engagement and international partnerships. THREAD 🧵 www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/

Two new articles in Party Politics With @gessler.bsky.social Measuring party positions and issue salience with mass media and manifesto data" doi.org/10.1177/1354... With Hanspeter Kriesi "Restructuring party systems in Northwestern Europe" doi.org/10.1177/1354... Feedback very welcome!

Each week, about 12 people are killed in homicides in England and Wales. But who is most likely to be killed? This thread summarises what we know about who is most likely to be a victim of homicide. 🧵

Our first joint article with the PhD researchers of my research group @rexklima.bsky.social has just been published! 🎉 "Explaining Attitudes Towards #Climate #Action in Germany: AfD vs. the Greens, the East vs. the West, Wind vs. Solar Energy" is now out. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... (1/4)

🧵New preprint: Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why? To find out, we studied kids, who show the same tendency but *before* political identities take hold. With developmental data, we can see the basic psychological ingredients. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 1/11

Do Americans judge acts of partisan political violence impartially? No. We show that Democrats and Republicans exhibit clear partisan bias: both see the same violent act as more justified when it targets the other party than when it targets their own side. osf.io/preprints/so... #polisky

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

New publication with @turnbulldugarte.com in @psrm.bsky.social! 🧵 We study whether citizens’ liberal values are selective: do people support policies based on who promotes them? Short answer: Yes, and it's driven by ethnic out-group disidentification. (1/11) 👇 doi.org/10.1017/psrm...

Interested in pursuing a career in climate governance, policy or politics research? Do you have a relevant PhD degree in political science, public administration or international relations? Then you should check out this opportunity! www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

I maintain that this is an excellent benchmark for d-type effect sizes: Sleep satisfaction & duration declined with childbirth & reached a nadir during the first 3 months postpartum, with women more strongly affected (satisfaction d = -0.79, duration minus 62 min, d = -0.90)>

The 1️⃣article of our 5️⃣0️⃣Anniversary Special Issue "Debating European Politics: Advances and Perspectives" is out!🎉 "The rise of populism and the new cleavage" by Hanspeter Kriesi, describing contemporary populism is likely to be a temporary phenomen. 🔗https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2025.2591874

From October 2025 - The Gendered Persistence of Authoritarian Indoctrination - cup.org/3WCwC5v - Nourhan A. Elsayed, @hannohilbig.bsky.social, @riazsascha.bsky.social & @dziblatt.bsky.social #OpenAccess

Partisan voters can reward candidates who stick to the party line even on unpopular issues. Under uncertainty, voters infer that ideologically rigid candidates are also more likely to back the party's other, more popular positions academic.oup.com/sf/advance-a...

A critique of our (w/ @bertous.bsky.social) paper “Instrumentally inclusive” has just been published. Our response is under review (see below on process) but we feel obliged to share our draft for balance since the comment has been released without the response. osf.io/rn6h3/files/...

New article by @rmuriaas.bsky.social and I: While seniority can benefit all parliamentarians and serve as a powerful resource, it does not confer power equally. Women face structural barriers to accessing seniority, and even when they attain it, their legitimacy and influence remains contested.

My new article with @leberntzen.bsky.social out in @scandpolstud.bsky.social! Can politicians calm conflict as effectively as they can inflame it? Our experimental evidence from Norway suggests that they cannot. 🧵

„the importance of sample size stemmed from small effect sizes across studies (perhaps smaller than researchers may have anticipated), highlighting a tension between commonly used power calculi and determining what constitutes a “meaningful effect.“

Thrilled to share my new article in Political Psychology: “The psychology of political attitudinal volatility.” In it, I attempt to answer why do some people change their political views more than others? Open access at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... @ispp-pops.bsky.social

Do Americans judge acts of partisan political violence impartially? No. We show that Democrats and Republicans exhibit clear partisan bias: both see the same violent act as more justified when it targets the other party than when it targets their own side. osf.io/preprints/so... #polisky

New article with @draege.bsky.social out in Scandinavian Political Studies: “Asymmetric Influence: Politicians Can Fuel but Not Dampen Conflict.” We test whether politicians in one of the world’s least polarized democracies, Norway, can calm conflict as effectively as they can inflame it. #polisky

On average across traits, the three methods produced remarkably similar estimates of ~30%. Most (~85%) of this variance could already be estimated by common variant GWAS run on the same samples. Strikingly, classical twin estimates for these traits were ~2x higher!

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

An important rule of politics is that all formal institutions—all laws, all procedural rules, all constitutions—are just informal institutions in disguise. The minute they are not actually backed by behavior of some kind, they cease to exist. Formalization only sets a higher bar for ignoring them.

🚨 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.

New research explores why openness/intellect stands apart from other personality traits. It turns out this trait may be less universal across cultures and rarely targeted for change. Read more in #PSPR: ow.ly/UGlJ50XqLqS

Our @apsrjournal.bsky.social article is now in print! We develop a theory to explain why the public doesn't become more prosocial toward LGBTQ+ people after illegitimate anti-LGBTQ+ violence and provide causal, externally valid, evidence for the theory across 4 studies doi.org/10.1017/S000...

Three preregistered experiments with prolific participants (N = 2,254) found no evidence for experimenter demand effects osf.io/preprints/ps...

Share widely with your students in Switzerland 🇨🇭thinking about a PhD @eui-eu.bsky.social 𝗢𝗻𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗘𝗨𝗜 𝗣𝗵𝗗 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗽 𝗧𝗮𝗹𝗸 🇨🇭 21 Nov 2025 | 2:30pm CET @alissasiara.bsky.social introduces the program & life at EUI, I share my experience, and we answer your questions. 👉 Register: www.eui.eu/events?id=58...

How common do you think something is? When asked to judge proportions, people's estimates can be drawn towards their prior expectations of what the 'typical' value is. The result can be an overestimate of low proportions, and an underestimate of high ones... link.springer.com/article/10.3...