A Change of Heart? Why Individual-Level Public Opinion Shifted Against Trump’s “Muslim Ban” - Political Behavior Public opinion research suggests that rapid and significant individual-level fluctuations in opinions toward various policies is fairly unexpected absent methodological artifacts. While this may gener...

Many “savvy” folks argue protests can’t work. Evidence suggests otherwise.

“Muslim ban set off a fury of protests across US, garnering tremendous media attention and discussion… Portraying ‘Ban’ at odds with inclusive elements of American identity prompted some citizens to shift their attitudes…”

Violent and non-violent death tolls for the Gaza conflict: new primary evidence from a population-representative field survey This first independent population survey of mortality in the Gaza Strip shows that violent deaths have substantially exceeded official figures whereas the demographic composition of casualties aligns ...

New evidence estimates that the Israeli military directly killed 75200 Gazans between Oct '23 and Jan '25. 22800 children were killed. Children, women, and the elderly were 56% of the killed. Non-violent deaths were also far higher than pre-"war". www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

A vacancy for a professorship in economic sociology at the @eui-eu.bsky.social’s School of Transnational Governance. www.eui.eu/Documents/Se...

Glaciers to reach peak rate of extinction in the Alps in eight years Climate crisis forecast to wipe out thousands of glaciers a year globally, threatening water supplies and cultural heritage

On en est là.

Les glaciers des Alpes devraient atteindre leur pic d'extinction dans seulement huit ans, selon une récente étude scientifique.

Plus d'une centaine d'entre eux devrait disparaître définitivement d'ici 2033.

Voilà.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Apply now to our next Summer School! 🤝

We are glad to host the Toulouse Summer School in Quantitative Social Sciences from 26 May to 19 June 2026 — a great opportunity for PhD students in economics, political science, and other social sciences.

Application: www.tse-fr.eu/toulouse-sum...

🚨 Applications Now Open for the EUI PhD Programmes 2026-2027!

📊 Economics |⚖️ Law |📘 History | 🏛 Political and Social Sciences

Join the EUI's 50th PhD cohort!

Apply by 15 January 2026 (14:00 CET) for the academic journey of a lifetime! 👉: eui.eu/phd

#EUIPhD #PhDOpportunity

It's hiring season at @iast.fr!

- 2y research postdoc contract
- Full autonomy, you are your own PI
- Awesome multidisciplinary environment
- All social and behavioral sciences welcome
- Seed funding for projects and workshops
- Gorgeous city in the south of France

www.iast.fr/research-fel...

The development of body mass index from adolescence to adulthood: A genotype-family socioeconomic status interaction study Body weight in adolescence and adulthood may result from the interplay between individuals’ genetic characteristics and the social context in which th…

First single-author pub out in SSM!

It shows a mechanism underlying the intergenerational transmission of health inequality: high-SES families buffer genetic propensity for obesity & overweight, while low-SES environments trigger it 🌍🧬⚖️

OA:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1/5

Radical-right parties are often linked to the “left-behind”. But supporting them when stigma is strong is costly. So who is willing to pay that cost early on, before it’s normalized?

In my new WP, I argue that breaking political norms is socially stratified. 🧵👇

Screenshot of the title and abstract of the article. the title is Streaming Platforms, Filter Bubbles, and Cultural Inequalities. How Online Services Increase Consumption Diversity. The abstract reads: Do digital technologies affect diversity in cultural tastes? Digital sociologists have warned of “filter bubbles,” whereas sociologists of culture have shown that diversity in consumption is valued as a marker of upper-middle-class status. We estimate the effect of using streaming platforms on the diversity of cultural consumption using a matching technique applied to 2018 survey data from France. We find a statistically significant positive effect of using streaming platforms on the diversity of cultural consumption as well as on cosmopolitanism, on three domains, music, movies, and TV shows. The magnitude of this effect is much higher for TV shows. The study brings new evidence against the filter bubble thesis; it shows that platforms do reinforce cultural inequalities by increasing the social gap in consumption diversity. It further suggests that the effect of technology on cultural consumption might mainly operate through its impact on cultural markets rather than changes in cultural experience.

Main figure of the article. Difference in number of genres consumed, liked, and disliked between streaming users and non-users. Streaming users consume more genres than non-users after controlling for confounders. The difference is small for music (0.1 sd), moderate for movies (0.2 sd), and high for TV shows (0.46 sd). However, differences in number of genres liked or disliked are small or not significant. SMD before (light) and after (dark) adjustment through matching, with error bars indicating 95 percent confidence interva

Do streaming platforms trap us in cultural filter bubbles? We like to think so but the evidence says otherwise. In a new paper @abelaussant.bsky.social and I find the use of streaming platform to be associated with an increase in consumption diversity. sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

American Journal of Sociology | Vol 131, No 1

The July 2025 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is now available online: www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ajs/2025...

It's a Bird, it's a Plane, it's Superman! Using Mass Media to Fight Intolerance

This paper investigates the role of mass media in shaping racial tolerance and advancing civil rights in the post-WWII United States. We study the first attempt in the history of mass media to use a radio broadcast targeted at children to promote an inclusive American society. In 1946, amid persistent racial divisions, the popular radio series The Adventures of Superman launched Operation Intolerance, a sequence of new episodes promoting equality, rejecting racial discrimination, and exposing the KKK's bigotry. Using digitized historical data on U.S. radio stations and state-of-the-art radio propagation models, we compute geographic exposure to the broadcasts. Exploiting exogenous exposure to the broadcasts, we employ a cohort study design to analyze individual-level data from 1964 to 1980–a crucial period for civil rights activism and legislation in the United States. We find lasting impacts on those exposed as children, including increased support for civil rights, improved interraci

Figure 1 reveals that the proportion of words related to intolerance increased by 3.2 times in the 12 months following the start of Operation Intolerance, compared to the pre-intervention period.

Panel A of Figure 5 plots the average of the index for different cohorts. We first observe that younger cohorts in 1946 are more supportive of civil rights compared to those born before 1946. This is in line with American society becoming more progressive over time. We find a difference of 0.29 standard deviations between the respondents in the age cohort -10 (i.e., those born in the years 1954–1958) and those in the age cohort 50

“In 1946 amid persistent racial divisions, popular radio series Adventures of Superman launched Operation Intolerance, a sequence of new episodes promoting equality, rejecting racial discrimination and exposing the KKK’s bigotry. We find lasting impacts…” dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Congratulations to our 2025 Best Student Paper winner, Juliette Saetre!

Contrairement aux affirmations du ministre des Armées, la France livre « un flux ininterrompu » d'armes à Israël. Dans un rapport, rendu public ce 10 juin, une dizaine d’ONG dénoncent ces livraisons d’armes. Que contient ce rapport ? On fait le point.

➡️ l.humanite.fr/8c2

Mon collègue Yanis Mhamdi a été arrêté par l’armée israélienne alors qu’il était à bord de la mission humanitaire @freedomflotilla.bsky.social. Cette arrestation est illégale. Nous demandons sa libération et la restitution de son matériel de tournage. Le droit à l’information doit être respecté.

🚨We’re hiring postdocs in Computational Social Science!
📍The Swedish Excellence Centre for Computational Social Science (SweCSS)
📅 Apply by June 3
🔗 liu.se/en/work-at-l...

🚨 working paper (w. @morganlcj.bsky.social @markuswagner.bsky.social): Protesters are not judged equally - even if tactics of groups are similar.

We ran an experiment in 🇩🇪 testing how people react to farmers vs. climate activists blocking roads.

What we find is disturbing:

osf.io/preprints/os...

How do local expressions of dissent become global? 🌍🪧
In her first PhD paper, @juliettes.bsky.social reveals how historical emigration patterns create latent global infrastructures for diffusion.

Now published in the American Journal of Sociology!

🔗 tinyurl.com/44s2wkvp

Fun read for sociologists: Apparently Granovetter's "The Strength of Weak Ties," the most cited paper in sociology, was initially rejected from the American Sociological Review. The reviews are a wild slice of disciplinary history. If you're ever dealing w nasty reviews, this could be reassuring...

How do local protests become global? A new AJS article by @juliettes.bsky.social shows how historical emigration patterns can inadvertently create latent network infrastructures that enable movements to spread across borders. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability - Nature A transparent and reproducible scientific framework is introduced to formalize how trillions in economic losses are attributable to the extreme heat caused by emissions from fossil fuel companies, whi...

NEW: Fossil fuel firms like Chevron and Exxon owe the world trillions of dollars. Today in @nature.com, @jsmankin.bsky.social and I show economic losses from rising heat waves directly traceable to these firms, providing scientific support for climate accountability.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Photographer Fatima Hassona killed ahead of Cannes documentary debut The Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassona, killed along with ten family members in an Israeli air strike on her home in northern Gaza, is the star of a documentary due to be screened at the Cannes film festival next month.

"In an earlier post, she wrote: "As for the inevitable death, if I die, I want a loud death, I don't want me in a breaking news story, nor in a number with a group, I want a death that is heard by the world, a trace that lasts forever, and immortal images that neither time nor place can bury."

Interesting. Study finds that people make errors when estimating politically-relevant percentages (eg about minority racial and ethnic group size), but this is due to the format of the question not underlying misinformation about what they are estimating.

Media, Spillovers, and Social Norms: The Electoral Impact of Anti-Far Right Protests in the 2002 French Election* Short title: Anti-Far Right Protests By Nicolas Lagios†, Pierre-Guillaume Méon‡, Ilan Tojerow§ We study the electoral impact of protesting against the far right by investigating the demonstrations held during the 2002 French presidential elections against far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. Instrumenting rally attendance with rainfall while factoring in that some municipalities never host protests, we find that larger protests reduced the number of votes for Le Pen and abstention, while increasing the number of votes for the incumbent president, Jacques Chirac. We find that the effect spread out beyond the municipalities that hosted protests and worked through media exposure. Using survey data, we show that protests reduced support for the policies advocated by Le Pen. Moreover, the positive effect on voting for Chirac resulted from right-wing voters switching from Le Pen to Chirac and left-wing voters not casting a blank ballot, implying that some voters voted expressively. Finally, we show that protests reduced the social desirability of voting for Le Pen.

The figure reports the location and the size of the protests held on May 1, 2002, against Jean-Marie Le Pen. The figure shows a map of France with scattered dots across the country that vary in size in proportion to the size of the protest events.

Table 2 shows the Baseline Results for The Impact of Protests on Voting Outcomes. Each column is devoted to a different electoral outcome: Specifically, the vote share of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the vote share of Jacques Chirac, and the share of abstentions and blank and invalid ballots. larger protests reduced the far-right candidate’s vote share. More precisely, a 0.1 percentage point increase in the share of the population protesting in a municipality decreased by 2.2 percentage points the vote share of Jean-Marie Le Pen in that municipality. In Column (2), the dependent variable is the vote share for Jacques Chirac. Here, the number of participants exhibits a positive coefficient that is statistically significant at the five- percent level in all specifications. Accordingly, a larger number of participants in the May 1 protests increased the share and the number of voters who cast a ballot for the right of centre candidate. The magnitude of the effect is again substantial without being implausibly large: A 0.1 percentage point increase in the share of the population protesting in a municipality resulted in a 4.5 percentage points increase in Jacques Chirac’s vote share. This means that in the absence of protests, Jacques Chirac would have lost 2.3 points in the second round. Finally, Column (3) suggests that protests also affected the share of abstentions and blank and invalid ballots. The number of participants exhibits a negative coefficient statistically significant at the five-percent level, implying that a 0.1 percentage point increase in the share of the population protesting reduced the share of abstentions and blank and invalid ballots by 2.3 percentage points. In the absence of protests, the share of abstentions and blank and invalid ballots would have therefore been 0.8 point higher.

Figure 4 reports the estimated marginal effect of the number of participants on the agreement of respondents with the policies sponsored by Jean-Marie Le Pen: immigration, security, traditional values, criticism of the political class, the abolition of the income tax, and an exit of France from the EU. The marginal effect is always negative and statistically significant at standard levels. We also looked at two more specific measures of the position of respondents on immigration, which was the theme on which Jean-Marie Le Pen was the most salient. Specifically, respondents were asked their level of agreement with the following two statements: “there are too many immigrants” and “immigrants enrich a culture”. Here, Jean-Marie Le Pen was not explicitly mentioned. We observe that respondents in municipalities that experienced larger protests were less likely to agree with the statement that there are too many immigrants and more likely to agree with the statement that immigrants enrich a culture. This series of findings is consistent with the models of Lohmann (1994) and Battaglini (2017) that argue that protests can raise public awareness around the issues at stake. Larger protests against Jean-Marie Le Pen might have reduced voters’ support for his policies by signalling the negative issues associated with those policies, thereby decreasing the incentive to vote for the far-right candidate. Again, we cannot rule out that protests triggered a social desirability bias on specific policies even if an exit from the EU or a critique of the political class were sponsored by other candidates unrelated to and less stigmatized than Jean-Marie Le Pen. In any case, we return to social desirability in Section 7.3.

New study looks at protests against far right in 2002 French elections. Finds “larger protests reduced number of votes for Le Pen and abstention, while increasing number of votes for the incumbent president, Chirac.” Also finds “effect worked
through media exposure.” nicolas-lagios.com/files/fn.pdf

Thank you so much! 😊

New pub (w/ @fabriberna.bsky.social) highlighting how family socioeconomic background plays a key role in shaping genetic associations: advantaged families both compensate for and amplify their children’s genetic propensities for education

doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2025.103174

👇🧵

I promise (hope) I am not as bad at research as I am at football

Thanks a lot for sharing Lorenzo! And all the credit goes to Gianluca and the fantastic team at the communications service 💫

#MyEUIResearch with Juliette Saetre | Turning the tide: migrants as vectors of influence YouTube video by EUI TV

Powerful explanation of the excellent research by @juliettes.bsky.social at @eui-sps.bsky.social on how political behaviours and ideas spread transnationally through the networks of migrants.

#MyEUIResearch

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKzk...

Check out this fascinating new research by the brilliant @juliettes.bsky.social ! And highly relevant in this political context!