Contrary to common wisdom, open-mindedness predicts *support* for public health measures and *disbelief* in conspiracy theories, research by Pärnamets et al, during the COVID-19 pandemic in 68 countries, suggests:
buff.ly/XqbAbM0
HT @jayvanbavel.bsky.social
It's @professormusgrave.bsky.social o'clock again, alas
From Roger Scruton cafes to paying Matt Goodwin $10k a month, Viktor Orban has built a network of populist right think tanks, journalists and activists
Today Democracy for Sale delves into Orban’s allies on the British right
Well worth a read
democracyforsale.substack.com/p/orbans-brits
Egon Schiele (1907)
What really drives someone to support violent extremism? I am thrilled to share our new article published today in PNAS. Together with an incredible team of collaborators, we conducted a preregistered study across 58 countries with over 18,000 participants. This is what we found.
GB News is platforming an extremist narrative that is central to the socialisation of violence, including to the terrorist rampages in Europe and New Zealand & the USA
www.reuters.com/world/europe...
www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/3/...
🚨 Job alert! 🚨
We are looking for a PhD candidate for my Vidi project on factual belief polarization and its attitudinal consequences.
The position will be at the Department of Political Science of Radboud University (Netherlands). Check out the full job profile below!
www.ru.nl/en/working-a...
Why do some people want to migrate while others don’t—even in similar conditions?🌍
My new #openaccess article in IMR shows how psychology🧠—notably values, risk tolerance, and personality—predict both aspiration and irregularity willingness.🔎🔓
journals.sagepub.com/eprint/XEJZT...
Much research concludes that partisans tolerate anti-democratic behavior, such as electoral subversion, because they rarely punish it at the ballot box. But refusing to vote against your party and actively supporting democratic subversion are not the same thing. My new paper in @bjpols.bsky.social:
Citizens tend to lose faith in meritocracy as inequality rises within their country over time.
#SocialPsyc
Are we underestimating popular discontent with welfare state change, and the damage done to political-institutional trust? New measures of "welfare state emotions" suggest as much. With Tor Syrstad and Atle Haugsgjerd. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Tajfel et al. (1971) is the go to source in political behavior when introducing social identity theory (SIT). One of the main contributions of that text is that mere artificial group categorization results in discrimination. This is mostly ignored in political behavior research using SIT.
Toward the end of his two-volume Treatise on the Venom of the Viper, published in 1781, the Tuscan naturalist Deluxe Fontana declared: "I have made more than 6000 experiments; I have had more than 4000 animals bit; I have employed upwards of 3000 vipers and may have been deceived; some essential circumstance may have escaped me: I may have neglected some other, not thinking it necessary; my consequences may have been too general, my experiments too few in number. In a word, I may very easily have been mistaken, and it would be almost impossible that I should never have been so in a matter so difficult, so obscure, and likewise so new."
Fontana thinking his 6000+ experiments may not have been enough to feel confident in his conclusions in the 18th century while we expect our singular experiments and their standalone replications to do wonders some 250 years later... (excerpt from the intro of Jutta Schickore's About Experiment)
What happens when politicians pivot during a crisis?
I examine Trump’s July 2020 mask pivot. It increased Republican mask use, closing 40% of the partisan gap.
But paradoxically, beliefs about masks' efficacy didn’t change.
doi.org/10.1177/0003... @asanews.bsky.social #Trump #PublicHealth
This is a truly exceptional analysis of British parliamentary speeches on immigration by @theguardian.com showing we are living in a uniquely nativist era.
If you are teaching any kind of statistics, probability or modeling classes, you'll love this website. Contains dozens of interactive simulations of random processes, with sliders, different visualizat options, and full numeric log ouput: www.randomservices.org/random/apps/...
Our article with @honoratam.bsky.social on ✨motivated causal judgements✨ is out in @polpsyispp.bsky.social!
When something bad happens, whose actions produced the outcome and who bears responsibility? It depends much more on the identity of the actors than on the details of the situation.
In the past, Republicans had more trust in scientists than Democrats. This is no longer the case.
In POQ, Schulam et al. identify demographic changes in political parties as a source of polarized trust in the scientific community.
Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...
It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.
I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
This is the core issue
bsky.app/profile/ryan...
“Visible state violence against sympathetic civilians was the beginning of the end for Jim Crow. It may be a turning point now, too.” Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/o...
Yesterday marked 10 years since C‑REX was founded. This thread highlight what the center has done — research, PhDs, datasets, events, policy engagement and international partnerships. THREAD 🧵 www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/
Two new articles in Party Politics
With
@gessler.bsky.social
Measuring party positions and issue salience with mass media and manifesto data"
doi.org/10.1177/1354...
With Hanspeter Kriesi
"Restructuring party systems in Northwestern Europe"
doi.org/10.1177/1354...
Feedback very welcome!
A bar chart displays annual homicide victimisation rates per million people by age group and sex in five-year categories from birth to age 90+. Dark blue bars represent male victims, and light blue bars represent female victims. Male victimisation rates are highest between ages 15–34, peaking at over 30 per million. Female rates remain lower across all ages but rise among those aged 85 and over. The male rate declines steadily after age 34. The data source is the Home Office Homicide Index, based on 99.9% of homicides where victim age and sex were known. A legend distinguishes male and female bars.
Bar chart showing homicide victimisation rates per million people in England and Wales by age group and ethnicity, based on data from the Home Office Homicide Index. The chart is divided into five panels by ethnicity: All victims, Asian, Black, Mixed/Multiple, and White victims. Each panel displays vertical bars for age groups in ten-year intervals from 0 to 80+, with darker bars indicating lower or equal homicide rates compared to the total population of the same age, and red bars indicating higher rates. A stepped line overlays each panel, showing the homicide rate for all ethnicities for reference. The chart highlights significantly higher homicide rates among young Black victims at all ages, peaking at over 100 victims per million at age aged 20–29. Other ethnic groups generally show lower or comparable homicide rates to the overall population, with slight increases among certain age groups. The data is based on the 95.1% of homicides for which both age and ethnicity were known.
Each week, about 12 people are killed in homicides in England and Wales. But who is most likely to be killed?
This thread summarises what we know about who is most likely to be a victim of homicide.
🧵
Our first joint article with the PhD researchers of my research group @rexklima.bsky.social has just been published! 🎉
"Explaining Attitudes Towards #Climate #Action in Germany: AfD vs. the Greens, the East vs. the West, Wind vs. Solar Energy" is now out.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... (1/4)
🧵New preprint: Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why?
To find out, we studied kids, who show the same tendency but *before* political identities take hold. With developmental data, we can see the basic psychological ingredients.
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
1/11
Do Americans judge acts of partisan political violence impartially? No. We show that Democrats and Republicans exhibit clear partisan bias: both see the same violent act as more justified when it targets the other party than when it targets their own side.
osf.io/preprints/so...
#polisky
Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵
Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...
