🧵 PhD position (75%) in Political Behavior / Political Communication / CSS 📍 LMU Munich | ⏳ 3 years | 🗓 start March–May 2026 We’re hiring for DemocraGPT, a @bidt.bsky.social-funded project developing an AI-based training for difficult conversations in times of growing polarization

Great thread about the demand-side for non-democracy. Jacob unpacks a lot here and provides useful literature. Gather, folks!

"However, executive constraints appear less central to citizens’ preferences, especially when set against the promise of economic prosperity."

Everyday at exactly six AM I get a new email from someone working for the publisher rejecting my already accepted paper for an arbitrary technical reason. This gives me the stability I need to get through the day

Terrific read!

The affordability crisis is an inequality crisis. When prices spike in key sectors, it's not just inflation—it's a massive redistribution shock that hits poor households hardest. In our **new working paper**, we identify the sectors that matter most. A thread 🧵 scholarworks.umass.edu/entities/pub...

I cannot imagine anyone thinking that

New research! Austerity and the labour market in the UK. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... Headline result: austerity reduced wages, increased employment rates, and contributed to weak productivity. 1/n

Print this paper out and have it in your pocket in case of emergency

This is so important to acknowledge. Non-reforms in 2008 were the issue, with a moderation effect by the media. (I think)

Great resource!

Thanks to a natural experiment, we are able to leverage marking discontinuity in order to estima...

Here's what we learned about free speech in 2025. This research helps explain the complicated logic behind censorship. Read the latest: goodauthority.org/news/what-we...

Politicians often overestimate citizen indifference to policies, likely reflecting scepticism about whether opinions are genuine or just survey responses link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The ultimate "I have three short comments on your presentation"

Tech bros don’t actually understand the sci-fi they claim to love. Thank you Al Jazeera English for having me on.

God bless america

Study after study shows campaign ads barely move the needle. So where does money’s real power come from? I ranked the five ways money corrupts politics—from least to most corrosive. What I’ve learned from 15 years of tracking political money:

Imagine everyone treated books like this...

📣 Call for #ecprgc26 Panels and Papers 👁️ The Many Faces of Digital Authoritarianism 🪑 Ahmed Maati & Stefan Wurster ✅ @digitalaut-ecpr.bsky.social endorsed ⌛ Deadline: 5 Jan buff.ly/XSm1QJJ #MixedMethods #Polisky #BigData

Finally got to the "I want to burn it all down" portion of the gen AI-era semester, where I realize they're all using some sort of LLM to "help" organize their thoughts and it's just spitting out raw sewage onto the screen.

Important paper!

"many people would forfeit democratic elections to avoid living in a dangerous society but not to obtain wealth and other goods. Electoral democracy is attractive globally but can be undermined by concerns about crime and safety." Interesting, considering crime is mostly a consequence of low wealth

The @ec.europa.eu 'Democracy Shield' plans have dropped. The focus on free, independent media, fact-checking, literacy, election integrity etc make sense. But: it needs to be acknowledged that many of these challenges are not from outside the EU only. Also from within. ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

A motivated reasoner making the case for motivated reasoning

In capitalism, we cannot expect companies to do anything else than maximise profits. Doing so is not only naive but harmful

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

"As Germany’s population is becoming older, we found that Germany’s top earners are older on average and increasingly so. The age of business owners has been shown to affect economic decisions. For example, older business owners are more likely to retain profits within the firm"

Ah shit, here we go again

Communism 101

Are university still a left-wing thing in Europe? Unsure: HE is a hierarchical institution with egalitarian employees I find that universities increasingly inculcate selfish career concerns for status while leaving universalist concerns for global justice unchanged

Perfect timing for this story to drop on the same day Amazon lays off 30,000 workers due to claims of AI efficiencies. If companies have less work for people to do, they don’t give you Fridays off, they lay off people until everyone has a full workweek.

If you show a chatbot party programs and tell them your socioeconomic status, I am pretty confident the advice will be magnitudes better than anything that goes on in (social) media

Das ganze wird aber trotzdem genutzt um sinnlose Überwachungsforderungen auszubauen: www.zeit.de/politik/deut...

Ewartbar enttäuschende Reaktion. Anstatt sich tatsächlich im Detail mit Fehlern und Verantwortung auseinanderzusetzen, macht an es sich bequem in der Erzählung von der „aufgeheizten Debatte“. Man hat hier nachhaltigen Schaden angerichtet. Für die Demokraite müssen wir uns alle etwas mehr anstrengen.

Public service decline → more far-right support: I summarize evidence from several coauthored studies in a new post for the @kpolanyisociety.bsky.social series on Fascism and Liberalism.

Took these pics in Astana in 2023. Presidential palace next to some golden towers. Let's see if DC can compete

Designing constitutions can be about what is morally desirable. Or about their real economic,social and political consequences.

motivated reasoning is limitless nowadays

"There is still a substantive fraction of voters who are not swayed by even a strong media reaction against right-wing ideology after an attack – and there is evidence that those who do distance themselves from the far right might revert to their old views once social pressure recedes"🤯

🚨 New article out! “Right-Wing Terror, Media Backlash, and Voting Preferences for the Far Right” in @bjpols.bsky.social 👉 doi.org/10.1017/S000... We (Alex De Juan, @juvoss.bsky.social & I) examine how right-wing attacks shape support for the far-right in Germany. Short summary thread below 👇

What if you couldn't be elected into office after a certain age? Let's say 55?

"we show that regions increase their vote share for Le Pen where the quality of government decreases. We also show that this relationship holds at the individual level. Thus, supplying quality, impartial and fair public services seem to stifle demand for [...] authoritarianism[...]"

🚨Deadline for submissions is today!🚨

"We find that reduced government spending predicts a greater endorsement of individualist and fatalist attributions, and labor deregulation predicts a higher endorsement of individualist attributions. Taken together, neoliberal policies potentially perpetuate ideologies that vindicate the system"

Without marginaleffects my career would be over. Probably THE most important resource out there for quantitative social scientiests

Whoa—my book is up for pre-order! 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭 & 𝐌𝐋 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐢𝐧 #Rstats 𝐚𝐧𝐝 #PyData The book presents an ultra-simple and powerful workflow to make sense of ± any model you fit The web version will stay free forever and my proceeds go to charity. tinyurl.com/4fk56fc8

"children exposed to the welfare cut during preschool and school-age obtained lower GPAs, experienced reduced well-being and overall education levels, and suffered lower employment and earnings as adults. Children in their teens at exposure faced large increases in conviction probabilities"