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...

If you know anyone considering doing a PhD in political science or sociology, encourage them to apply to the EUI PhD program and join the institute's landmark 50th cohort of PhD researchers in the SPS Department! Applications from Central and Eastern Europe are particularly welcome!

New article on “The Relational Dynamics of Violence Escalation and Inhibition During Far-Right Protest Waves” by Joel Busher, Julia Ebner, Zsófia Hacsek, Gareth Harris and myself in the latest issue of “American Behavioral Scientist”:

Twitter/X is a story on its own: 🔴 While users have become more Republican 💥 POSTING has completely transformed: it has moved nearly ❗50 percentage points❗ from Democrat-dominated to slightly Republican-leaning.

Most young men in Britain, despite popular commentary, are *not* flocking to Reform UK. Just under 1/3 women would vote for Reform Just over 1/3 would vote for Reform. We *cannot* reject the null of gender gap homogeneity across cohorts.

Posting is correlated with affective polarization: 😡 The most partisan users — those who love their party and despise the other — are more likely to post about politics 🥊 The result? A loud angry minority dominates online politics, which itself can drive polarization (see doi.org/10.1073/pnas...)

🚨 🆕 analysis w/ @turnbulldugarte.com: most British young men reject the far right @ukandeu.bsky.social Despite media claims, 71% of young men & 75% of young women say they’d never vote Reform UK. The gender gap exists, but it’s steady across ages—not youth-driven. 🔗 ukandeu.ac.uk/most-british...

New chapter on affective polarization and support for political violence (open access): www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap-o...

Main takeaways: (1) Affective polarization predicts higher support for political violence at extreme levels; (2) its main effect may be expanding opportunity structures for a small subset willing to act violently. US & Brazil show highest risk.

"The Conservatives propose to deport about 5 per cent of the UK’s legal population" "the Conservative party increasingly holds positions that are further from mainstream British public opinion than Reform"

Now out in Party Politics 🎉 Our study (@jbpilet.bsky.social)suggests that when a mainstream right-wing party signals willingness to rule with the radical right, support for the radical right rises — while the mainstream gains nothing. 👉 A legitimisation effect. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Ezra Klein's suggestion that Dems can win in red states with pro-life candidates is entirely consistent with his theory of the case as to why Democrats are underperforming. But, as @jessicavalenti.bsky.social lays out so clearly here, this is an obvious, objectively nonsensical suggestion. Quick 🧵.

Sadly, there's a lot to be said for Marina Hyde's analysis here. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Social media users adopt the toxic behaviors of ingroup members An analysis of 7 million tweets from over 700,000 accounts finds that exposures to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity online academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...

📢 New publication! 📢 Why do ordinary citizens participate in election violence in democracies? Kathleen Klaus and @meganturnbull.bsky.social argue that such violence is often jointly produced by elites and citizens, enabled by threat-based narratives and social networks that legitimize violence.

So many echoes from this article for US politics....

🚨New preprint🚨 osf.io/preprints/ps... In a sample of ~2 billion comments, social media discourse becomes more negative over time Archival and experimental findings suggest this is a byproduct of people trying to differentiate themselves Led by @hongkai1.bsky.social in his 1st year (!) of his PhD

Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again

✨Very happy to see my paper "Attitudinal ambivalence toward multiculturalism" out on @jeppjournal.bsky.social ! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/8 🧵

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Shot, chaser Young men more likely to vote Green than Reform. Young men second most progressive group of any demographic. Combined right-wing vote barely bigger than Green vote alone for young men

Radical right accommodation really does not work. New paper out with this exceptionally talented team @katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Weimar "illustrates the dangerous logic of abdication: the belief that, faced with a rising threat to democracy, surrender is strategy, cooperating with an autocrat is survival, and sparing oneself or one’s party from immediate punishment is worth opening the door to long-term authoritarian rule"

Sketch - this guy is loosely inspired by packet of crumpled McDonalds fries someone had tossed away in the woods ;)

New chapter on affective polarization and support for political violence (open access): www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap-o...

Just looking at surveys of Germans in Berlin during the Nuremberg trials on their attitudes about the Nazi party, no reason First column American Zone, second column Berlin

A huge, quiet success: violence has fallen 75% in a generation:

Last week we celebrated the achievements and (soon to be) 10th anniversary of @crexuio.bsky.social in beautiful Rome. I'm happy and proud to have been part of such a cool and inspiring research community from the very beginning. Fingers crossed for a bright future!

"Another officer, frustrated, says, 'They don’t need a warrant.' Finally, one of them tells the truth. Due process is not a matter they’re concerned with. The deportation must proceed. Trying to stop it is the unlawful thing"—@billshaner.bsky.social in Worcester www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

This story explains a LOT of things: ChatGPT appears to be rooting on sociopathic mental illness by validating every delusion of grandeur. It also explains, in part, the hype cycle around AI: rich people, addicted to praise, invented a Compliment Machine. www.garbageday.email/p/this-is-wh...

I know it's a rough time to be talking science, but in case anyone wants some distraction, I wrote about the Tan et al (2024) analysis of heritability and polygenic indices for complex human behavior. Title: Is Tan et al The End of Social Science Genomics?

When I was in grad school in the 90's the rule of thumb from twin studies was that the heritability of everything was ~50%. It turns out that twin studies are highly confounded, & after unconfounding w/ new genome-based methods (Family-GWAS), the median heritability of behavioral phenotypes is ~5% 🧪

Excited to share a new paper on children's third-party punishment across societies. This was a big collaborative effort and I'm so grateful to my wonderful co-authors for their contributions to this project. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s44... Blog: communities.springernature.com/posts/childr...

Level of partisan hostility varies substantially between democracies. Showcase: How many think that threatening outparty supporters online is acceptable? 🇧🇷Brazil & 🇺🇸USA top the list at ~26%. 🇸🇪Sweden is lowest at ~6%. Source: CONAP dataset (2022). Polisky