Barbara Piotrowska
@bpiotrowska.bsky.social
Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Public Policy @ KCL DPE 🏢Bureaucracy, ideology, authoritarianism 🧠Pedagogy + uses of #genAI to foster thinking BarbaraPiotrowska.com
*PSA Prize Winners* 🎉Congratulations to Dr Barbara Piotrowska @bpiotrowska.bsky.social, this year’s academic prize winner of Sir Bernard Crick Prize for outstanding contributions to teaching & learning by an early career scholar ➡️ buff.ly/dvOF0Sa
Barbara Piotrowska - King's College London | LinkedIn
Experience: King's College London · Location: London · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Barbara Piotrowska’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.
buff.ly
🚨New genAI teaching material: an Electoral System Explorer built with Claude. It lets students see how votes translate to seats under different electoral systems. Try it here: claude.ai/public/artif.... Feedback, as always, is very much appreciated! #poliski
Electoral System Explorer - Interactive Voting & Gerrymandering Tool
Explore how electoral systems work with this interactive tool. Draw districts, adjust party support, and compare majoritarian vs proportional results.
claude.ai
When talking to @howardhliu.bsky.social about his new project, I remembered this great graphic made by the Stasi showing the social connections of a poet they were spying on projects.propublica.org/graphics/sta...
I will be presenting my first paper using data collected while incorporating genAI into my module on 15/10. If you can join us, I’d love to hear your thoughts 💭
Political Studies Association@polstudiesassoc.bsky.social · 11mo ago*PSA EVENT* How do #students with different academic backgrounds engage with #genAI when given equal access? Join us and @bpiotrowska.bsky.social online for this #Teaching & #Learning Network webinar 📆 15 October, 2.30 - 4.30pm ➡️ Register your free place buff.ly/ydueR72 #AI #Education #HE
Populist policymaking is not only about courts and media crackdowns. It can also hide in technical reforms. In Poland under PiS, changes to academic journal rankings were used to reward allies, promote ideology, and claim responsiveness. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Multi-purpose populist policymaking in practice: the Polish academic evaluation reform
This paper theorizes populist policymaking as multi-purpose governance that can simultaneously deliver responsiveness, ideological consolidation, and institutionalized patronage. We apply this fram...
tandfonline.com
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Competence over Partisanship: Party Affiliation Does Not Affect the Selection of School District Superintendents - Greer Mellon, 2025
In recent decades, affective polarization and partisan animosity have risen sharply in the United States. To what extent have these trends affected hiring decis...
journals.sagepub.com
Next...🧵 Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to compare public administrations across countries? This article tackles the confusion around Administrative Traditions
We've felt it and now we have the evidence: using genAI to write essays yields shallow encoding. Here, the subjects write essays using one of 3 tools (LLM, Search Engine, brain🧠 only) for 3 sessions. In the 4th session, LLM group needs to rely on 🧠 , and 🧠 group gets LLM. Key consequences for me:
Nataliya Kosmyna, Ph.D@nataliyakosmyna.bsky.social · last yr.𝐍𝐨, 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐋𝐋𝐌 𝐨𝐫 𝐝𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐋𝐌 𝐮𝐬𝐞. See our paper for more results: "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task" : www.brainonllm.com
We’re hiring 3 permanent (tenured) lecturers in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. These are ‘education pathway’ posts (in Economics, Research Methods, & Comparative Politics) 1/4 www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/117268-... www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/117209-... www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/117245-...
AEP Lecturer in Politics and Research Methods
kcl.ac.uk
The Anthropic Education Report (www.anthropic.com/news/anthrop...) offers a great insight into how students use Claude. The (relatively) good: half of the conversations are collaborative (dialogue with AI to achieve goals). The bad: students mostly outsource higher-order cognitive functions (see ⬇️)
Yesterday's session during the @aiatkings.bsky.social conference attracted a wonderfully engaged audience. In the slides, you’ll find the GPTs and exercises demonstrating applications of point 2 (below). Key points ⬇️
The state of research on AI and education from controlled studies: Growing evidence that, when used as a tutor with instructor guidance, AI seems to have quite significant positive effects. When used alone to get help with homework, it can act as shortcut that hurts learning. Still early days.
1/6 This is to share with you Misfortune Telling GPT (chatgpt.com/share/680102...) : a guided reflection tool modelled on the Stoic practice of praemeditatio malorum, to help you imagine and/or prepare for real democratic backsliding.
ChatGPT - Scenario Reflection Guidance
Shared via ChatGPT
chatgpt.com
Last week, I joined Rozana Himaz, Ruth Dixon, @drjennings.bsky.social, and Colin Scott to pay tribute to Christopher Hood and his work: youtu.be/NA3vH8w1RUY. It was a real pleasure to hear memories and reflections from so many of his students, friends, and collaborators.
A Tribute to Christopher Hood:
YouTube video by Theories of Regulation & Governance
youtu.be
It's wonderful to see the news that my fantastic Department of Political Economy colleagues @maiaking.bsky.social and @bpiotrowska.bsky.social have been nominated for this esteemed prize. Huge congratulations guys!!!
Political Studies Association@polstudiesassoc.bsky.social · last yr.📚 MacKenzie Book Prize 2025📚 ‘The Way the Money Goes’ by Piotrowska, Hood, King & McLean has been shortlisted for this PSA prize. Winner announced in April. buff.ly/OJo7p9u @bpiotrowska.bsky.social @maiaking.bsky.social @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social #bookprize #politics #economy #books
📢 Out Now! V-Dem Dataset v15 and the V-dem Institute Democracy Report 2025 The Dataset: v-dem.net/data/the-v-d... DR25: "25 Years of Autocratization - Democracy Trumped?": v-dem.net/publications... #DR25 #DemocracyReport2025 #VDemDatasetV15 #polisky #PoliticalScienceData #PoliSciSky 🧵1(3)
What a nice recognition of all the hard work that went into this book. Especially thinking of Christopher, whose dedication and brilliance made this project happen—this is a lovely testament to his vision.
Political Studies Association@polstudiesassoc.bsky.social · last yr.📚 MacKenzie Book Prize 2025📚 ‘The Way the Money Goes’ by Piotrowska, Hood, King & McLean has been shortlisted for this PSA prize. Winner announced in April. buff.ly/OJo7p9u @bpiotrowska.bsky.social @maiaking.bsky.social @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social #bookprize #politics #economy #books
📢 Call for papers! We are organizing the 5th Early Career Workshop in Quantitative Political Economy on 19-21 May 2025 at King’s College London! Keynotes: Sonia Bhalotra (Warwick) and Peter van der Windt (NYU-Abu Dhabi). No fee, travel grants available! Submit at: tinyurl.com/qpeearly
What worries me is not government use of AI per se but the slightly credulous way that the government talk about it, which makes me suspect they will be taken for rubes by the tech companies selling their services. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of AI
Plans to make UK world leader in AI sector include opening access to NHS and other public data
theguardian.com
Fact-checking wasn’t “biased” against conservatives. Conservatives just shared more false content. If there’s a sportsball game and one team fouls four times as much, it’s not “biased” for the ref to call four times as many fouls against that team.
David Rand@dgrand.bsky.social · 2y ago🚨In Nature🚨 Meta is dropping fact-checking to avoid anti-conservative bias- but is there actually evidence of bias? We this test empirically & find that conservatives * ARE suspended more * BUT share more misinfo So suspension isn't necessarily evidence of bias www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Just learned that the great Christopher Hood, a professor of public management at the University of Oxford, has passed. Hard to overstate his influence on the field. At a personal level, both a gentleman and a gentle man. Here is a link to his most-cited work. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
A PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR ALL SEASONS?
This article discusses: the doctrinal content of the group of ideas known as ‘new public management’(NPM); the intellectual provenance of those ideas; explanations for their apparent persuasiveness i...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
tired: fearing that robots will become so smart they take your job wired: fearing that robots will still be dumb but take your job anyway
I (or my family) have definitely done it all 🐟
Notes from Poland @notesfrompoland.bsky.social · 2y agoSome of Poland's Christmas traditions may seem rather unusual to outsiders. We look at seven of the most interesting festive practices - from keeping fish in the bath and talking to animals, to putting hay under the tablecloth and watching Home Alone.
As a result of this event, I found out about Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, which runs, among others,Public attitudes to data and AI tracker survey. Sharing in case useful www.gov.uk/government/o...
Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation
The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) is now called the Responsible Technology Adoption Unit (RTA), part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). Content from RTA ca...
gov.uk
King's Institute for Artificial Intelligence@aiatkings.bsky.social · 2y agoDr Hye-Kyung Lee (@kingsartshums.bsky.social) will be discussing creative precarity in the time of generative AI at 2pm today, Wednesday 11 December. There's still time to register to attend, either in-person (Bush House, @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social) or online ⬇️ www.kcl.ac.uk/events/creat...
“You saw how the [Assad] regime raised them: they call us Sidi [‘my master,’]” he said. “You feel they are broken. [We just want them] to get out of that mindset. You’re a person with self-dignity, I’m not your master or anything. I am an employee, like you.” on.ft.com/4iyR4hJ
Rebel technocrats start to disentangle Syria’s corrupt state
Transitional authorities grapple with bureaucracy filled with phantom jobs, pervasive graft and culture of obedience
on.ft.com
"The purpose of writing isn’t just to demonstrate knowledge in the most expedient way. Writing is to explore knowledge, to connect and synthesise ideas, to create new knowledge, and to share." An interesting analysis of pitfalls of drafting using genAI by @leonfurze.com leonfurze.com/2024/02/21/t...
The Myth of the AI First Draft
I write daily, often for hours at a time. I’m an author of fiction and nonfiction, and even when I’m not writing something for publication I fill notebooks with ideas and frequently ill…
leonfurze.com
An account of the "Time of Heroes" program, which focuses on embedding individuals with combat experience in Ukraine into Russian governance structures through leadership and management training. A selection of quotes ⬇️ on.ft.com/41nZ7re
The stars of Putin’s ‘elite’ management school: soldiers accused of war crimes
‘Time of Heroes’ scheme is training veterans of Russia’s war in Ukraine to govern
on.ft.com
In the US, in an information-poor environment (such as local elections), endorsement by various interest groups acts as a partisan cue. A pretty striking graph from onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... by Jennifer Gaudette.
