Agent-Based Modeling: Worlds Within Worlds, a new interactive story from the Santa Fe Institute, chronicles the rise of ABMs in the social sciences, with a focus on SFI contributions. It draws on nearly 20 researchers, from economists to archaeologists, and has four models you can run yourself.

Agent-Based Modeling: Worlds Within Worlds

An interactive story from the Santa Fe Institute, Agent-Based Modeling: Worlds Within Worlds, traces the early development of ABMs, and how this approach to modeling grew from a fringe idea into a pow...

santafe.edu

Does church decline spread through social ties? ⛪️ In a new paper with Peter Hedström, out in @sfjournal.bsky.social, we try to answer this question 👇 doi.org/10.1093/sf/s...

Leaving together: social influence and church decline

Abstract. Church membership has declined across much of the Western world in recent decades. Existing research has identified individual characteristics th

doi.org

✨ We’re excited to announce the Fall 2026 IAS Seminar Series, featuring a stellar lineup of speakers and thought-provoking talks. Seminars take place every Thursday and are open to all! #AcademicSky #CSS #socsky #sociology

Our new @poeticsjournal.bsky.social paper disentangles the role of within-individual and compositional changes in shifting political meaning-making on social media following focus events like terrorist attacks: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Together with @mhbodell.bsky.social

How does the latte-drinking-liberals idea play out in the Swedish multi-party context? Find out in our article recently published in Journal of CSS: link.springer.com/article/10.1... Created together with brilliant @felixlennert.bsky.social, Elida Izani Ibrahim & @mhbodell.bsky.social!

Partisan tastes or ideological divides? Everyday interests and political identities in a multi-party system - Journal of Computational Social Science

Everyday interests expressed in leisure, media consumption, or cultural practices, increasingly intersect with political orientations, making them strong signals of individuals’ political identities. ...

link.springer.com

*Upcoming lecture series and PhD course at IAS* 📚 In Fall 2026, IAS will host an online lecture series featuring many of the scholars whose work has been instrumental in the development of analytical sociology.

💰⚠️ Sedan förmögenhetsskatten avskaffades 2007 har vi inte kunnat mäta förmögenhetsojämlikheten i Sverige. Vi har ägnat det senaste decenniet åt att bygga upp ett nytt förmögenhetsregister. Nu vet vi hur det ser ut! Läs om våra resultat på DN Debatt 📈📉 - www.dn.se/debatt/allt-...

DN Debatt. ”Allt fler miljardärer – men klyftorna har ändå inte vuxit”

DN Debatt. Ny databas visar att Sverige och svenskar har blivit rikare och samtidigt mer jämlikt vad gäller förmögenheter, skriver fyra nationalekonomer.

dn.se

New paper out in Annual Review of Sociology with @arnoutvanderijt.bsky.social #W.Foley and @l-sage.bsky.social "Luck and Predictability in the Life Course" We take stock of what we know about luck and its role in shaping life-courses and inequality www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Luck and Predictability in the Life Course

There is an emerging recognition among sociological theorists that luck may play a substantial role in life course achievement. There is also a nascent empirical literature that finds life outcomes to...

annualreviews.org

New paper out in Network Science🧵Why are conservative online news a niche phenomenon? Historical study of pre-Musk Twitter with @martinarvidsson.bsky.social @pablobellode.bsky.social 👇 doi.org/10.1017/nws....

Out now in @jssreligion.bsky.social: Using Swedish full-population data, I show that exposure to religious pluralism through social ties is associated with a lower likelihood that parents baptize their child in the Church of Sweden 👇 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Religious Pluralism and Social Networks: How Exposure to Religious Pluralism Through Social Ties Influences Baptism Decisions

A longstanding debate in the sociology of religion has focused on how religious pluralism affects religious participation. Existing research shows mixed findings, often relying on macro-level measure...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

A special issue of Social Networks on Agent-based modelling for social network research www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu... The deadline to submit an 800-word extended abstract is approaching (1 April) forms.gle/BqTts4hEQjEB... Edited by me, Andreas Flache, @squazzoni.bsky.social, Károly Takács

How can computational text analysis be used for building and testing social theory? @marckeuschnigg.bsky.social, @anamacanovic.bsky.social, @anmen.bsky.social & I write about how CTA is commonly used & how it might be used by sociologists in the future Out now: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Computational Text Analysis for Building and Testing Social Theory - KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie

Digitization and advances in natural language processing have transformed how sociologists can measure, model, and interpret social life through text. We provide an overview of computational text anal...

link.springer.com

CfP: Rethinking the Explanatory Foundations of Sociological Theory: Mechanisms, Emergence, and Model-Based Reasoning [Special Issue in Theory and Society] Key Dates: Abstracts: June 1, 2026 Full papers: December 31, 2026 More info: link.springer.com/collections/...

Out now in @jssreligion.bsky.social with @ruudluijkx.bsky.social Using topic modeling on 1600+ academic articles, we provide a systematization of secularization literature and test whether researchers tend to study their own communities 👇 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The Contemporary Debate on Secularization and Its Cross‐National Variation: A Systematization Through Topic Modeling

Secularization is a key concept in the social scientific study of religion, yet its meaning remains ambiguous due to varied definitions produced in the literature. This article aims to provide a data...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

🧵 New WP! w/ @selcanmutgan.bsky.social Most segregation research examines neighborhoods, schools, or workplaces separately. But do individuals' exposure align across domains and persist over the life course? We fill this gap using 27 years of 🇸🇪 data. Pre-print: osf.io/eunwc_v1 (1/5)

⏰ Reminder: The EUSN 2026 abstract deadline is March 1, 2026 — just around the corner. Submit your abstract now!

EUSN Conference 2026@eusnconference.bsky.social · 9mo ago

We are pleased to announce that the call for papers for the 8th European Social Networks Conference (EUSN 2026) is now open! 📣 📍 EUSN 2026 will take place 11–15 August 2026 in Norrköping, Sweden. 📝 Please submit your abstract here: wcc.ep.liu.se/index.php/eu... ⏰ Deadline: 1 March 2026

Why does a worse candidate win? Or an inferior song dominate? New article with @alexgelas.bsky.social, @pantelispa.bsky.social & Gaël Le Mens. We show that often once A becomes even slightly more popular than B, people choose A much more often. www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

My first paper is out in #SociologicalScience! With Jörg Stolz and Ruud Luijkx, we found robust evidence of ideological #bias in #secularization research: researchers' own religiosity is correlated with their probability of finding evidence of religious decline in their publications. Read more: 👇

Sociological Science@sociologicalsci.bsky.social · 9mo ago

NEW: Valeria Rainero, Jörg Stolz, Ruud Luijkx, The Faith Factor. How Scholars’ Religiosity Biases Research Findings on Secularization sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

Recent publications arguing against the use of genAI in reflexive qual research inspired us (Elida Ibrahim and @andreavoyer.bsky.social) to write our own perspective. Not to convince anyone to use genAI but for those who might be interested and are looking for guidance. osf.io/preprints/so...

NEW: Matthew Conrad, Conrad Hackett: "How Measurement Changes Can Exaggerate the Growth of Religious “Nones” " sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

sociologicalscience.com

Happy to have finished my PhD! 🎓 If you’re interested, the dissertation can be found here: urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=... Looking ahead to the next steps!

The Institute for Analytical Sociology@iasliu.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Huge congratulations to @eliscl.bsky.social, who successfully defended his PhD thesis "Contagious Secularization: Social Influence and Membership Dynamics in Religious Organizations”! Excellent work, Dr. Carlberg Larsson 🥂

We are pleased to announce that the call for papers for the 8th European Social Networks Conference (EUSN 2026) is now open! 📣 📍 EUSN 2026 will take place 11–15 August 2026 in Norrköping, Sweden. 📝 Please submit your abstract here: wcc.ep.liu.se/index.php/eu... ⏰ Deadline: 1 March 2026

✨ We’re excited to announce the Spring 2026 IAS Seminar Series, featuring a stellar lineup of speakers and thought-provoking talks. Open to all! #AcademicSky

New paper out with @kchihaya.bsky.social and @eduardotapia.bsky.social. We show how a tendency to move near kin can preserve patterns of segregation, using a combination of discrete choice models and micro-simulations applied to the case of immigrants and their descendants living in Stockholm.

Demography - the flagship journal of PAA@readdemography.bsky.social · 11mo ago

“Kin Propinquity, Residential Mobility & Segregation”: @benjarvis.bsky.social, @kchihaya.bsky.social & @eduardotapia.bsky.social examine ancestry & segregation; they find ancestry sorting effects are 3X greater than kin propinquity effects. @iasliu.bsky.social read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

🎓 My PhD thesis is now submitted and published! I study how social influence shapes membership dynamics in religious organizations. 🔗 doi.org/10.3384/9789...

We're thrilled to open registration for our 1st 2026 Replication Games. The event will be at the University of Zurich on January 19th. Psych, public health, pol sci and econ studies will be reproduced! Register here: www.surveymonkey.ca/r/Replicatio...

The 8th European Conference on Social Networks (EUSN 2026) will take place on 11-15 August 2026 in Norrköping, Sweden, hosted by @iasliu.bsky.social ⌛ Deadline for workshop and session proposals: 1 December 2025 More information: liu.se/en/event/eus...

The 8th European Conference on Social Networks (EUSN 2026)

The 8th European Conference on Social Networks (EUSN 2026) will take place on 11–15 August 2026 in Norrköping, Sweden, hosted by the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS), Linköping University. The conference brings together scholars and ...

liu.se

New paper with @jordantkemp.bsky.social and Luis Bettencourt is now on arXiv: “Spatial Selection and the Multiscale Dynamics of Urban Change”. We use the Price equation and Chicago data to show how fine-scale spatial sorting shapes macro growth trends. Read it here: arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06165

Jordan Kemp@jordantkemp.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Cities are dynamos of demographic change, however our data practices can often hide this fact. In this paper, we explore growth in Chicago, a city purportedly burdened by a stagnating population. Using methods from population ecology, we show that not only is Chicago undergoing rapid, spatially...