Political ideology is the strongest predictor of Messi-Ronaldo preference. Authoritarians who like short-form video are more likely to think Ronaldo is the GOAT.

Announcing #RStats package ggcube, now on CRAN -- make 3D #ggplot2 figures using `coord_3d()` matthewkling.github.io/ggcube/

A few years ago, as parlgov.org discontinued its dynamic website, I created my own minimalistic Parlgov Lookup to quickly show which cabinet governed when. Since parlgov itself is now kinda-discontinued, I wanted to move my web-app to rely on www.repdem.org. How? ChatGPT Codex to the rescue!

a man with a mustache is saying attention ladies and gentlemen can i please have your attention ?

ALT: a man with a mustache is saying attention ladies and gentlemen can i please have your attention ?

media.tenor.com

Perhaps you received a mysterious noreply email asking you to evaluate some publications 'for novelty'. Looked kinda dubious? Yup, that's the one. So what's up with this 'metascience novelty indicators challenge'? 🧵

partycoloR is now on CRAN! Started as a simple idea 6 years ago, now it's a full-featured package. Extract party colors and logos from Wikipedia with one line of code. It's already powering ParlGov Dashboard. install.packages("partycoloR")

Words like "patriotism" and "racism" are often associated with the right, while "solidarity" and "socialism" are associated with the left. But who uses these associations, and how do political positions matter? 📊 App: lukas-warode.shinyapps.io/lr-words-map/ 📄 Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"When Conservatives See Red but Liberals Feel Blue: Labeler Characteristics and Variation in Content Annotation" by Nora Webb Williams, Andreu Casas, Kevin Aslett, and John Wilkerson. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

The Call for Papers and Panels for #COMPTEXT2026 in Birmingham (23-25 April) is out; feel free to circulate: shorturl.at/gRg0p! Deadline: January 16!

“You see, the endless renovation of the Stuttgart train station is a symbol of our late-capitalist condition: the project is always ‘in progress,’ yet nothing ever progresses. The construction site itself becomes the true destination.”

Job Alert! We are hiring two post-docs (full time, 4+ years) in our project SCEPTIC - Social, Computational and Ethical Premises of Trust and Informational Cohesion with @annanosthoff.bsky.social @guzoch.bsky.social and Prof. Andreas Peters (uol.de/informatik/s...)

📣 New Preprint! Have you ever wondered what the political content in LLM's training data is? What are the political opinions expressed? What is the proportion of left- vs right-leaning documents in the pre- and post-training data? Do they correlate with the political biases reflected in models?

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

arxiv.org

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

My 2nd dissertation paper is out in @nature.com Humanities and Social Sciences Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I study and explore how associations with 'left' and 'right' vary systematically by semantic and political position.

📢 New Publication Alert! Our (@msaeltzer.bsky.social) latest article, "Issue congruence between candidates' Twitter communication and constituencies in an MMES: Migration as an exemplary case", has just been published in Parliamentary Affairs. academic.oup.com/pa/advance-a...

Now out in Social Networks Network analysis aspires to be “anticategorical,” yet its basic units—relationships—are usually readily categorized ('friendship,' 'love'). Thus, a nontrivial cultural typification is asserted in the very building blocks of most network analyses. doi.org/10.1016/j.so...

Calling all parliaments experts! Say there's a debate in parliament, and a related vote. How frequently would these be on different days? different weeks? I don't mean different readings of bills, because these will also have different debates. @sgparliaments.bsky.social #polisky #parlisky

a cartoon character from south park says " i m gonna need your help "

ALT: a cartoon character from south park says " i m gonna need your help "

media.tenor.com

Can banning political ideologies protect democracy? 🛡️🆚🗣️ Our (w. @valentimvicente.bsky.social) paper finds: punishing individuals might backfire. We study a West German policy banning "extreme left" individuals from working for the state. #Democracy #PoliticalScience 🧵 url: osf.io/usqdb_v2

Happy to share my first published article based on my PhD in Party Politics with @journals.sagepub.com in open access! doi.org/10.1177/1354...

Local reactions to wolf attacks in Germany are not powerful enough to influence the election decisions of many voters www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The East in wolf’s clothing. Wolf attacks correlate with but do not cause far-right voting

The resurgence of wolves in Germany has sparked intense debate, particularly in rural areas where wolf attacks on livestock are frequent. Prior resear…

sciencedirect.com

Quite a strong final statement: "Descriptive research is important and it is a pity that the general obsession with causal estimates disincentivizes researchers from attempting to publish careful and detailed description."

Toni Rodon@tonirodon.bsky.social · last yr.

Local reactions to wolf attacks in Germany are not powerful enough to influence the election decisions of many voters www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1/2 Another year, another @epsanet.bsky.social This year I had two papers accepted, but no visual proof that I presented joint work with Thomas Bräuninger on (the problems of) dynamic scale usage. I hope some nice people will capture 📸 me again next year in the Post-EPSA era @epssnet.bsky.social

So is it pronounced EPSS or EPSS? #epsa2025

In 1/2 an hour at #epsa2025, I’ll explain @lwarode.bsky.social and my approach to measuring divergence in gov-opp relations measurement based on parliamentary votes and speeches. The panel’s hidden at -1.A.05, so I hope you’ll find your way there (as will I)

A large-scale study of academics’ tweets shows disparities in who shapes academic discourse and how it reaches the public. @prashantgarg.bsky.social @trfetzer.com @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social @uni-of-warwick.bsky.social #AcademicTwitter #ClimateAction www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Political expression of academics on Twitter - Nature Human Behaviour

An analysis of nearly 100,000 academics on Twitter reveals strong progressive stances on climate and social issues, driven by a small, vocal subset. The study highlights potential gaps between academi...

nature.com

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

How do elites view ideology? Analysing candidates’ associations of left and right

Political ideology is a fundamental aspect of politics and a well-researched area of political science, but difficult to measure. By examining the sentiment of political elites’ associations with ‘...

tandfonline.com

🚨New publication @The_JOP on human biases in data annotation (w. Nora Webb Williams, @kevinaslett.bsky.social, John Wilkerson). Extremely important given the increasing societal reliance on AI tools often trained on human coders www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

A Tinder Test of Democratic Norms💋 New paper in @thejop.bsky.social with @bertous.bsky.social We rely on a visual conjoint experiment, cross-sectional data, & panel data to show that affective polarization drives the normalisation of the far right among the centre-right 🇬🇧🇪🇸 doi.org/10.1086/736698

📣 New article alert 📣 Great insights shared by CDSS doctoral candidate Lukas Warode on elite attitudes towards political ideology. Check out the thread and his article for a deeper dive into the research area. Congrats @lwarode.bsky.social!👏

Lukas Warode@lwarode.bsky.social · last yr.

The first paper of my dissertation has been published in West European Politics! @wepsocial.bsky.social See the thread below:

Analysing the associations of 🇩🇪 candidates toward ideology, @lwarode.bsky.social shows that left-leaning elites view 'left' positively & 'right' negatively. This pattern is not mirrored by right-leaning elites, who on average have less positive attitudes towards 'right'. doi.org/10.1080/0140...