First page of the article "Measuring issue salience for political parties using LLMs" by Kenneth Benoit and Michael Laver, published online first in West European Politics. Shows the title, authors, and abstract.

Box plots showing the distribution of 'budgeted' issue salience scores across six policy dimensions (economic, social, environment, EU, decentralization, immigration), comparing expert surveys, Manifesto Project codings, and LLM-based estimates.

🎉 Online first:

LLMs estimate party positions well. How about issue salience?

@kenbenoit.bsky.social and Michael Laver show its harder: salience is inherently relative and more implicit. LLM's salience estimates are usable but track experts less closely than positions.

🔗 doi.org/10.1080/0140...

It has been a very intense and rewarding experience! I was really happy to see new developments in research on ambiguity. Thanks @fabianhabersack.bsky.social for organizing it! #ecprjs26

All good things must come to an end... 😊

Today, we wrapped up our workshop at the ECPR Joint Sessions 2026 in Innsbruck on “Blurring or Accident? Voluntary and Involuntary Sources of Ambiguous Party Positions and Their Consequences for Democracy.”

#ecprjs26

It wraps the SPARQL endpoints of both the Camera dei Deputati and the Senato della Repubblica, so you can query deputies, senators, bills, votes, speeches, committee memberships, and much more — all from R, with no SPARQL knowledge required.

GitHub - paride92/italyParlR: An R package to access Italian Parliament open data via SPARQL, covering both the Camera dei Deputati and the Senato della Repubblica. An R package to access Italian Parliament open data via SPARQL, covering both the Camera dei Deputati and the Senato della Repubblica. - paride92/italyParlR

🎉 Excited to share italyParlR — an open-source R package I built (with the help of Claude Code) to make Italian parliamentary data accessible to researchers, journalists, and data enthusiasts directly in R.
github.com/paride92/ita...

#OpenData #Italy #Parliament #DataScience #PoliticalScience

February 2026 Top 40 New CRAN Packages – R Works An attempt to capture the depth and breadth of what’s new on CRAN.

Discover @revojoe.bsky.social's picks for top #RStats CRAN pkgs released in February, including

✅ quallmer v0.3.0: Tools for AI-assisted qualitative data coding
🏥 nhanesdata v4.1.0: Access to NHANES data
📏 ggInterval v0.2.4: Visualize intervals w/ ggplot2

Read the post: rworks.dev/posts/Feb-20...

Our new paper is out in Party Politics 🚨

🚨 New WP w/ @leonardocarella.bsky.social on OSF

doi.org/10.31235/osf...

We usually think that social identities precede preferences

We show the reverse is also true: people update their social identities to match their immigration preferences

Focus: class identity in 🇬🇧 + Christian identity in 🇮🇹

Currently in FirstView: In “Political DEBATE: Efficient Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Classifiers for Political Text,” Michael Burnham, Kayla Kahn, Ryan Yang Wang, and Rachel Peng introduce DEBATE, a new open source foundation model for classifying political documents.

🚨 3-Year Postdoc in Political Science at Aarhus University 🚨

I’m seeking to recruit a postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu research project 𝑬𝑸𝑼𝑰𝑳𝑰𝑩𝑹𝑰𝑼𝑴 on state-citizen interactions.

Link and more information in second post.

Position Start: Fall 2026
Application Deadline: ‼️ February 5, 2026, 23:59 CET ‼️

⏰ I’m happy to share that a major paper from my dissertation was published today (🔗 doi.org/10.1017/pan....) in Political Analysis. In the paper, Clemens Lechner and I conduct an extensive validation study on how to measure politicians’ public personality traits using computational text analysis!

BJPolS abstract from a research paper discussing a machine learning approach to analyze political discourses on climate change among OECD, European, and South American countries.

NEW -

Policlim: A Dataset of Climate Change Discourse in the Political Manifestos of Forty-Five Countries from 1990 to 2022 - https://cup.org/43zzLHc

- @marysanford.bsky.social, Silvia Pianta, @nicolasschmid.bsky.social & Giorgio Musto

#OpenAccess

Excited to share that as of October 6, I’ve joined the ERC-funded project “Welcoming Immigrants in Central and Eastern Europe: Lessons from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine” (WICE) as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Latvia! #postdoc #polisci

Topical Negative Campaigning Under Spatial Pressure: Party-Level Strategies for Attacks Across Multiple Issues This paper investigates how spatial party competition shapes topical negative campaigning during Germany's 2021 federal election. We define topical negative campaigning as attacks on opponents that...

📢 New Publication Alert!

Thrilled to share our latest article with @jasminriedl.bsky.social & Johannes Steup
👉 Topical Negative Campaigning Under Spatial Pressure: Party-Level Strategies for Attacks Across Multiple Issues
🔗 doi.org/10.1080/0964...

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but as campaigns unfold, you can fool fewer of the people.

New paper w/ Derek Beach and Jannik Fenger on framing effects out in @ejprjournal.bsky.social

Open Access: doi.org/10.1017/S147...

📣 MORAL APPEALS IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 📣
New version of @twidmann.bsky.social and my working paper answering:
* Have moral appeals increased over time?
* Is the tendency to moralize ideologically patterned?
* Are some topics consistently more moralized than others?
osf.io/preprints/os...

We present our new preprint titled "Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation". We quantify LLM hacking risk through systematic replication of 37 diverse computational social science annotation tasks. For these tasks, we use a combined set of 2,361 realistic hypotheses that researchers might test using these annotations. Then, we collect 13 million LLM annotations across plausible LLM configurations. These annotations feed into 1.4 million regressions testing the hypotheses. For a hypothesis with no true effect (ground truth $p > 0.05$), different LLM configurations yield conflicting conclusions. Checkmarks indicate correct statistical conclusions matching ground truth; crosses indicate LLM hacking -- incorrect conclusions due to annotation errors. Across all experiments, LLM hacking occurs in 31-50\% of cases even with highly capable models. Since minor configuration changes can flip scientific conclusions, from correct to incorrect, LLM hacking can be exploited to present anything as statistically significant.

🚨 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

This is a great example of how the use of innovative data can bring us a step further with old research questions

The politics of seeking and avoiding discourse in parliament ELIAS KOCH, ANDREAS KÜPFER

📘 64.4

Using a 🇩🇪 dataset of attempted and successful exchanges in the German Bundestag 🏛️ (1990–2020), @eliaskoch.bsky.social & @ankuepfer.bsky.social finds MPs with opposing views seek debate more often, but there is rarely action😱

#Politics #Parliament

Read more:

Check out this new blog post @danielcaseycbr.bsky.social and I wrote about using e-newsletters from Australian and UK Members of Parliament as data. #polisky

Excited that my first PhD paper is published in Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties!🎉

🧵 @wurthmann.bsky.social & I examine: Do They Know What They Represent? Parliamentary Candidates’ Perceptions of Their Own Party’s Positions

🔗 doi.org/10.1080/1745...

This Friday (12.09), we kick off the academic year at the #HotPoliticsLab with our very own (and recently appointed!) professor Gijs Schumacher!

He will present his work on emotions and political behavior. Join us in the Common Room (REC-B9.22) or online via teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/...

The @crestumr.bsky.social AI & Social Sciences seminar resumes.

Wednesday 17th at 5pm (CET), we will receive Pr. @emilymbender.bsky.social . She will talk about her latest book, *The AI Con*, co-authored with Dr. @alexhanna.bsky.social.

Join us for what will certainly be a lively conversation.

Had an amazing time at the #SISP in Naples! Presenting my work and exchanging ideas was truly stimulating.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

New POPPA article out in Party Politics by Andrej Zaslove, @robert-a-huber.bsky.social, @mauritsmeijers.bsky.social:

“The State of Populism: Introducing the 2023 Wave of the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey."

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... 1/2

📢 Talk Announcement

"ActiveTigger: A Collaborative Text Annotation Research Tool for Computational Social Sciences", by @emilienschultz.bsky.social , Etienne Ollion and Paul Girard.

📜 pretalx.com/pydata-paris-2025/talk/ZHNCF7
📅 pydata.org/paris2025/schedule
🎟 pydata.org/paris2025/tickets

New publication, out in Political Analysis:

There is an increasing array of tools to measure facets of morality in political language. But while they ostensibly measure the same concept, do they actually?

I and @fhopp.bsky.social set out to see what happens.

Why do parties do what they do? Excited to share my 2nd dissertation paper, just published in @jeppjournal.bsky.social
In the paper, I argue that parties seek internal unity and try to keep the team together: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

1/11 🧵

Social scientists have skills and knowledge that are in demand across a range of sectors leading to a variety of interesting and rewarding careers. Explore our interviews with social scientists to see where a career in social science could take you➡️ acss.org.uk/category/im-...