📢 Call for Papers: first Annual Digital Publics Conference
📅 21–23 October 2026 | Digital Society Initiative, University of Zurich
👉 To submit: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/BxVnAMyxNh
❗Deadline for abstract submissions is 31 May 2026❗Acceptance notifications will be sent by early july.
Popular attitudes are often seen as a safeguard against democratic backsliding: if citizens don’t oppose lib democracy, politicians have little incentive to erode it.
In @cpsjournal.bsky.social I argue that, while intuitive, this reasoning conflates two states of the world:
doi.org/10.1177/0010...
Congrats Luis! Can’t wait to celebrate together :)
🎓 I am very happy to share that I have successfully defended my PhD dissertation, "Competition Between Equals: Mainstream Party Decline, Far-Right Evolution, and the Transformation of Party Competition in Western Europe", on Monday!
This image shows the Iterative Human-AI Natural Language Processing methodology as a four-step workflow with seventeen sub-steps. The process moves from document collection, translation, parsing, and preprocessing to computational extraction and filtering, then to classification, human validation, qualitative coding, and visualization. The figure shows that motive identification relied on repeated interaction between automated methods and structured human review.
This image shows how motive types vary across countries and world regions. The country-level panel indicates substantial cross-national variation, while the regional panel highlights broader commonalities. Attraction-based motives, especially governance- and value-driven forms, appear widely across regions. Coercion linked to funding and competition linked to economic concerns also appear in many regions. Some motives are more regionally concentrated, showing that open government policies combine globally shared and region-specific motivational patterns.
🎉 New @policy-politics.bsky.social!
Why do governments pursue #OpenGovernment amid #DemocraticBacksliding?
💡Our human-AI iterative analysis of @opengovpartnership.org member policies finds layered motivations spanning values, strategy, external pressure, and policy emulation.
Title + abstract of the preprint
Excited to present a new preprint with @nkgarg.bsky.social: presenting usage statistics and observational findings from Paper Skygest in the first six months of deployment! 🎉📜
arxiv.org/abs/2601.04253
⁉️ Are anti-immigration people really "sexually modern"?
No
⁉️ Are people more supportive of anti-immigration platforms when these also include progressive positions on gender and sexuality?
Also no
I explore these questions w/ 🇬🇧🇩🇪 original survey data (+ a conjoint in 🇩🇪)
👉 osf.io/preprints/so...
I'm hiring a postdoc! @goetheuni.bsky.social
Focus: CSS, political behavior, political communication & transforming information environments.
📍 Frankfurt | ⏳ 3 years | 📅 Deadline: 14 April 2026
Full job ad here: www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794987/Zen... (search for “political behavior” to find it)
Very happy to see our recent APSR article on "symbolic policies" selected by Nature Climate Change as part of their research highlights of the last months 🙏
➡️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@natclimate.nature.com
@apsrjournal.bsky.social
EPSS Travel Grants for 2026 Belfast conference:
PhD students & junior scholars @ institutions in European countries that are often underrepresented, can apply for full fee waiver & £500 stipend
Apply: lnkd.in/ehXjhCgf
Deadline: March 8, 11:59pm GMT.
More details: lnkd.in/eZTP5sWR
📣📣 New paper with #JoergFriedrichs, @florianschaffner.bsky.social, @niklasstoehr.bsky.social , “Populism and governmentalism as thin-centered ideologies: Emotions and frames on social media” is out at @ejprjournal.bsky.social
Read more: doi.org/10.1017/S147...
🚨 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 🇮🇹
Now in print (and open access):
What happens when voters learn their party disagrees with them?
I ran a pre-registered experiment with a representative sample of ~3,000 German voters to find out.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🧵
🚨📄 New paper (conditional accepted at @thejop.bsky.social):
We test whether social desirability bias actually distorts answers in online surveys.
Short version:
It mostly doesn’t.
w. @timallinger.bsky.social @kristianvsf.bsky.social @morganlcj.bsky.social
URL: osf.io/preprints/os...
Very glad that our first DEMNORM paper found such a great home at @thejop.bsky.social. If you’re interested in the role of social desirability in online surveys, check out the thread and paper below ⬇️
🚨New WP "@Grok is this true?"
We analyze 1.6M factcheck requests on X (grok & Perplexity)
📌Usage is polarized, Grok users more likely to be Reps
📌BUT Rep posts rated as false more often—even by Grok
📌Bot agreement with factchecks is OK but not great; APIs match fact-checkers
osf.io/preprints/ps...
New CIS Position Openings including a Senior Research Coordinator, Postdoc Position with Karsten Donnay in Digital Democracy, and a Postdoc Position in the Political Economy of Low-Carbon Technologies: cis.ethz.ch/news-and-eve...
🚨Job alert 🚨
I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026.
If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026.
📤 Please share widely!
www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...
Demographic cues (eg, names, dialect) are widely used to study how LLM behavior may change depending on user demographics. Such cues are often assumed interchangeable.
🚨 We show they are not: different cues yield different model behavior for the same group and different conclusions on LLM bias. 🧵👇
🚨Happy to finally see this out in the @ejprjournal.bsky.social (with @leonardocarella.bsky.social)
⁉️ Does growing up when immigration is salient make people vote for parties they agree with on immigration *for the rest of their lives*?
doi.org/10.1017/S147...
📢 JOB ALERT! Postdoc opportunity in Political Behaviour & Political Economy (UKRI‑funded) - Please do share with anyone who might be a great fit. If you’re interested or would like to know more, please feel free to get in touch!! jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...
Publication Alert 🚨
Our paper on the effect of Symbolic Policies on Climate Policy Support has been published in the APSR! @apsrjournal.bsky.social Below is a summary of the results
Extremely grateful to have written this with the wonderful @malojan.bsky.social and @theodoretallent.bsky.social 🥳
New publication 🥳
Really happy to see our work on symbolic climate policies with @theodoretallent.bsky.social and @luissattelmayer.bsky.social published today in the APSR @apsrjournal.bsky.social !
We learned so much while writing this paper. Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible!
🎉 NEW PUBLICATION🎉
Our paper on "the effect of symbolic policies on climate policy support" has just been published in the APSR ! @apsrjournal.bsky.social (open access)
The end of a long and rewarding journey with the best co-authors @malojan.bsky.social @luissattelmayer.bsky.social
(1/6)
Title page of syllabus: https://muellerstefan.net/teaching/2026-spring-qta.pdf
My updated syllabus for Quantitative Text Analysis is available online. As I previous years, I made quite a few changes and added recent literature. Part 1 (still) covers classic text-as-data approaches; Part 2 focuses on transformers and LLMs.
📄 muellerstefan.net/teaching/202... (PDF)
🦟📄 New preprint! Our first large-scale phylodynamic study of Jamestown Canyon virus (JCV) reveals how mosquito ecology shapes the evolution, persistence, and spread of this understudied arbovirus in North America.
Read it here! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
On my way to Florence, where I will be presenting at the EUI's PBC @behaviour-eui.bsky.social a project co-authored w/ @leonardocarella.bsky.social
We show that (anti-immigration) 🇬🇧🇮🇹 people 'update' their social identity when primed with narratives pitting immigrants against other social groups
🚨 Virtual Workshop in HPE this Thursday 🚨
Clair Yang (UW-Seattle) tackles a BIG question: "Why do some societies succeed in breaking away from historical traditions while others remain trapped?". @stasavage.bsky.social will discuss!
A formal model paper for those who have missed them!
@giulianoformisano.bsky.social introduced his work with @spyroskosmidis.bsky.social and Stephen Whitefield at @ox.ac.uk studying the role of emotional rhetoric in party communication.
✖️Who produces most online hate speech and how effective is counterspeech?
➡️ @gloriagennaro.bsky.social et al. find that hate speech is concentrated among a few users and that counterspeech on X mostly fails to curb prolific offenders www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView