journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

shallow support for austerity: citizens receptive to counter narratives

Very timely & important publication: "Why do political debates escalate? Trigger Points and the Moral Dynamics of 'Hot Politics'" @bjsociology.bsky.social by @lwestheuser.bsky.social, @thomaslux.bsky.social & our Director @steffenmau.bsky.social. Open Access. Details below.

New QJE paper measures spending flows between 1000s of small groups of consumers and producers, government, rest of the world. Most consumer spending stays domestic, esp in rural, older, less-educated areas->higher fiscal multipliers; targeting "left-behind" groups boosts economy

excellent

exactly!!

Whether more social housing weakens the far right depends on whether housing is politicized as a (natives vs migrants) group conflict. This is similar in areas like climate policy: How objective distributive effects are perceived is mediated by politically induced group scripts. Politically,...

In an effort to promote open data, I just uploaded my media-based data collection on political DDoS attacks from 2008-2016 with manual coding of attacker types, targets, and attribution certainty. Feel free to explore the early days of Anonymous and Russian hacktivists: osf.io/preprints/so...

Digital Surveillance and Self-Censorship in Autocracies: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Kazakhstan - Political Behavior Digital surveillance technologies are increasingly employed, especially in authoritarian regimes seeking to monitor and shape online communication. Yet we have little empirical evidence about how such...

I have always been fascinated by the question of what people think when they know they are being surveilled. How do they change their behavior? Why?

My paper on this is out today in Political Behavior. A survey experiment with 5,025 people in Kazakhstan. 🧵

but can it review papers

puh I almost thought I missed an important event

study

just woke up from a coma what is a DiD

I’d especially like to encourage women to apply. We’re a fantastic department with excellent scholars, in beautiful Vienna. Data shows that women are less likely to apply for positions than equally qualified men (Muriel Niederle & Lise Vesterlund 2011), so if you’re considering it, please go for it!

‘A full-on embrace’: how the EU’s largest news publisher fell in love with the US Mathias Döpfner, ‘guru-like’ CEO of Axel Springer, wants to expand – but critics say his stated values sometimes don’t line up with what appears in his titles

Like most self-styled “libertarians”, Döpfner is fascinated by authoritarian politicians and fascist tech bros.

One could write a whole PhD on his success and how it reflects the conservatism, parochialism and sexism of German business society.

Job vacancy announcement for a postdoctoral position at the University of Vienna Department of Government, starting August/September 2026. Research focus includes political representation, party competition, political institutions, political economy, political behavior, or related fields. Application deadline: 29 April 2026. Full details are also available through the shared link.

🚨 Job Alert 🚨

We have an opening for a 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗱𝗼𝗰 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 @stawi-univie.bsky.social starting Aug/Sep 2026!

Focus: political representation, party competition, political institutions, political economy, political behavior, or related fields

📅Apply by 29 April 2026

jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi...

NEUES BUCH ZU KI & DEMOKRATIE!
KI verändert alles, aber nicht automatisch alles zum Besseren. Vielmehr kann KI ungesteuert Freiheit, Selbstbestimmung und Demokratie beseitigen. Deshalb darf die wehrhafte Demokratie der Allianz von BigTech & Rechtsextremen nicht die Zukunft überlassen. #OffeneZukunft

One of my favorites paper got published 🤓 It covers a lot of ground and it’s the best summary of my views on misinformation and what to do about it. Give it a read :)

🔓 osf.io/preprints/ps...
👉 doi.org/10.1177/1461...

German real wages saw the sharpest decline since WWII in the 2022 energy crisis & still haven’t recovered. The new energy shock will make things worse. But the German government is once more calling on people to tighten their belts. This is paving the way for the far right.

New working paper: Rethinking Misinformation Interventions. The field has spent years searching for the one intervention that will solve misinformation. This search is the wrong approach — and our disappointment says more about our expectations than our tools. (1/5)
osf.io/preprints/so...

congratulations, Paul! Welcome to TUM!

no absolutely not. intention-behavior gap is something else, you're right

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

in this study, they validate AMCEs with eye tracking

This is the *fifth* study to undermine the idea that the muted political response to inequality is due to growing meritocracy beliefs, esp. among the poor.

- Inequality erodes meritocracy beliefs
- Poor meritocrats still want redistribution
- What matters is the politicization of inequality

Links:

The paradox of inequality that isn’t: rising economic inequality depresses and polarizes citizens’ belief in meritocracy Abstract. This study examines how rising income inequality has been impacting individuals’ belief in merit-based success, using three decades of survey dat

🔍 How does economic inequality impact beliefs in meritocracy?

Using comprehensive survey data from 39 advanced capitalist democracies over more than three decades, Markus Gangl & I examine how rising economic inequality has been shaping citizens' belief in meritocracy.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwag016

A 🧵on how the @vdeminstitute.bsky.social accountability indices help us understand how democratic backsliding is occurring in the United States.

tl;dr: in principle, vertical constraints on the president remain strong; in practice, horizontal and diagonal constraints have been greatly weakened.

Digital Surveillance and Self-Censorship in Autocracies: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Kazakhstan - Political Behavior Digital surveillance technologies are increasingly employed, especially in authoritarian regimes seeking to monitor and shape online communication. Yet we have little empirical evidence about how such...

The paper is open access:
doi.org/10.1007/s111...

Blog post with more details and a summary:
dkarpa.github.io/blog/2026/su...

Surveillance doesn't just gather intelligence. It signals repressive capacity. That signal selectively silences the citizens best positioned to challenge the official narrative.

It chills political discussion, undermines opposition coordination, and biases opinion polls toward the regime.

Interflex binning plot showing the marginal effect of the surveillance treatment on self-censorship, moderated by international media consumption. At 0 (no international media), the effect is 0.9 percentage points with confidence intervals crossing zero. At 1 (consumes international media), the effect is 6.1 percentage points.

But who self-censors? Not everyone equally. The entire effect is driven by people who consume international media.

Among those who don't: +0.9pp.
Among those who do: +6.1pp.

The people who are most willing to speak up go quiet when surveillance becomes salient.

Telling people their answers are encrypted doesn't help. The privacy treatment has zero measurable effect (0.3pp, n.s.).

The fear of surveillance hits harder than the promise of privacy reassures. Privacy tech alone is no antidote to expanding surveillance capabilities.

Bar chart showing response distributions (justified, not justified, prefer not to answer) across control, surveillance, and privacy groups for four questions. The share of 'prefer not to answer' increases in the surveillance group for all three sensitive political questions but not for the placebo question on working hours.

Surveillance increases self-censorship by 3.3 percentage points across questions on protests, sanctions, and the war in Ukraine (p<0.01).

A placebo question on working hours? No effect. This isn't survey anxiety. Surveillance specifically chills political speech.