Ben Ginsburg Hix
@benghix.bsky.social
LSE PhD student. Political Data Scientist.
Very excited to announce a new Political Methodology Seminar Series co-hosted by the @lsegovernment.bsky.social, @lsemethodology.bsky.social and European Institute. This bi-weekly series is designed to support ECRs applying state-of-the-art methodological tools to political science research.
📢 CALL FOR PAPERS! We invite submissions for the Political Methodology Seminar Series on frontiers in empirical political science and CSS. We welcome research examining political behaviour, public opinion, comparative politics, and CSS. Research on adjacent topics are also highly encouraged.
📢 CALL FOR PAPERS! We invite submissions for the Political Methodology Seminar Series on frontiers in empirical political science and CSS. We welcome research examining political behaviour, public opinion, comparative politics, and CSS. Research on adjacent topics are also highly encouraged.
Saxony-Anhalt went to the polls, with the AfD falling just short of a majority. Here are some takeaways based on the preliminary results across all 218 municipalities and local socioeconomic characteristics. A thread 🧵(1 /n) Full analysis + write-up: juliuskoelzer.de/saxony-anhal...
Die Linke pulled off a surprise win in Germany’s most recent federal election and has suddenly become one of the most closely watched parties in Europe’s progressive politics. Behind the success lies a continuing structural transformation of its geographic support base. A short thread🧵
Lots of rich and very interesting data from @persuasionuk.bsky.social. Shows (again) that Labour has only lost few voters to Reform and that Reform has benefitted from differential turnout. Among Labour defectors perceptions of Labour as "Tory-lite" dwarf concerns about immigration.
I'll go nation by nation now. In England, why did people not vote Labour? Interesting split here where non-Labour voters overall cite competence/cost of living/migration BUT Labour 2024 defectors talk about values - Lab as 'Tory lite', uncertainty over what they stand for. (sorry for small graph)
Just came across this paper in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Somehow missed it, but I think it’s genuinely important for social scientists - especially for anyone doing imputation or working with small, messy tabular data: a🧵
Accurate predictions on small data with a tabular foundation model - Nature
Tabular Prior-data Fitted Network, a tabular foundation model, provides accurate predictions on small data and outperforms all previous methods on datasets with up to 10,000 samples by a wide margin.
nature.com
"Safeguarding data quality is no longer a single checkpoint but an end-to-end pipeline - one that reallocates substantial resources from sampling to continuous fraud monitoring" Read our new POAL Methods Brief by @laurenleek.eu on dealing with AI bots in surveys! Link: www.poal.co.uk/briefai.pdf
poal.co.uk
new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research
"While testing one dimension at a time can yield simple results, those effects may not generalise to richer, real-world contexts." Read our new POAL Methods Briefs on Conjoint Experiments from Thomas Robinson! Link: www.poal.co.uk/research/met...
Public Opinion Analytics Lab
The website of the Public Opinion Analytics Lab
poal.co.uk
📊 now in English @fesonline.bsky.social: Gender gap in voting behavior in Germany📊 It's about the “big picture” since 1953 & current trends 2021-2025. The gender gap keeps growing, especially among the young. -> Longer trends are continuing & partly accelerating. library.fes.de/pdf-files/a-...
🧵/ Our major new study on young men, masculinity, and misogyny questions the extent to which Gen Z men are really more likely to hold misogynist views than older generations of men
How common are “survey professionals” - people who take dozens of online surveys for pay - across online panels, and do they harm data quality? Our paper, FirstView at @politicalanalysis.bsky.social, tackles this question using browsing data from three U.S. samples (Facebook, YouGov, and Lucid):
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...
Good news from the British Election Study: there's no sign of the reported uptick in sexism among young British men Bad news: what's going on with middle aged men?
NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany: Gender divide continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung sharply left. www.ft.com/content/29fd...
New Working Paper: Teenage boys and girls in Norway are more ideologically polarized than ever. Using data for 130,000 high-schoolers over 34 years, I find that a surge in anti-feminism among boys is driving much of the recent trend.📈 Read: osf.io/preprints/os... Findings 🧵👇
New blog! Food for thought: local restaurant diversity meets migration. open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...
Food for thought: local restaurant diversity meets migration
Food is crucial for cultural identity. Yet, do migrants bring cultural identity with them? i.e., does migration go hand-in-hand with cuisine diversity? And does food diversity perhaps bring downsides?
open.substack.com
Super important experimental study by @lcjacobs89.bsky.social and @jbpilet.bsky.social showing that mainstream parties signaling willingness to govern with radical right legitimize these parties with higher propensity to vote for radical right as a result journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
To rule or not to rule? An experimental study of the electoral ramifications of claims to (not) rule with radical right populist parties - Laura Jacobs, Jean-Benoit Pilet, 2024
In a between-subjects experiment (n = 3270) conducted in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium), we examine the electoral ramifications of claims by a ri...
journals.sagepub.com
New Gender Update out in @ejpgjournal.bsky.social. With data from the new wave of the EES, I show a strong increase in support for the far right among young voters. Especially the share of young men who consider voting for the far right has exploded. bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journal...