Den typischen Grünen-Stadtteil hat Harald Schmidt schon 2022 in einem Interview mit der Stuttgarter Zeitung geschildert. Für CDU- und AfD-Hochburgen haben wir weniger scharfe Bilder im Kopf.

Bodenständige gegen Weltoffene? In unserer neuen Studie prüfen wir, wie stark die Lebensführung mit politischen Einstellungen zusammenhängt. Befund: systematische Zusammenhänge, aber wenig Hinweise auf tiefe Spaltung. Unterschiede vor allem bei Klima und Migration.🧵
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Job Vacancies - Universität Bremen Offene Stellen

I am looking for a postdoc to join my team at the University of Bremen. 5-year-contract, top-up to 100% possible for most of the contract period.

Apply by 04 May 2026.

If you have questions about the position, send me an email!

www.uni-bremen.de/en/universit...

Thank you so much & see you soon!

Meet Ansgar Hudde one of our visiting scholars from Universität zu Köln. Join him for a seminar on “Political Attitudes in Romantic Relationships.”

🗓️4/8 @ 3:30pm
ces.fas.harvard.edu/events/2026/04/politics-...

🚨 Just shipped a major update to GERDA, the German Election Database.

- State elections update: new years + mail-in
- 3 new election types: Mayoral, County, European
- Municipal elections: 1984-2025
- Meinungsbild public opinion
- New website & features

german-elections.com

Wie die AfD von der Geschichte des Bergbaus profitiert Im nördlichen Ruhrgebiet legte die AfD bei der letzten Bundestagswahl deutlich zu. Der Süden liegt weiterhin fest in der Hand der SPD. Wie beeinflusst die Industrialisierung das Wahlverhalten?

Für @katapultmagazin.bsky.social haben @nilsblossey.bsky.social und ich aufgeschrieben, wie die Tiefe der Kohle und die Wahlergebnisse der AfD im Ruhrgebiet zusammenhängen. Und die Katapult-Redaktion hat ein paar sehr schöne Karten erstellt: katapult-magazin.de/de/artikel/w...

I had a few inspiring days on the road*:

meet with Delia Baldassarri at NYU, catch up with @philipncohen.com & give a talk at U of Maryland, and a workshop by @teele.bsky.social at Johns Hopkins.

*Well, rather "on the tracks" – the train between Boston & Baltimore is actually quite all right 🚂

Thank you so much for having me, I really enjoyed it!

Cohen & Hudde with Testudo

Got to visit with Ansgar @hudde.bsky.social today, as he gave a fabulous talk at @socyumd.bsky.social. Look for his work, with Shannon Taflinger, on cross-partisan dating in the US, using a survey experiment with open-ended responses, and a rigorous test of LLM-assisted qualitative coding.

The age of virtue signaling: Moral grandstanding as competitive display among young men Moral grandstanding—the use of moral discourse to enhance one's status—has become a central feature of contemporary political expression. Drawing on representative survey data from Germany, France, G...

New paper in Political Psychology:
The age of virtue signaling: Moral grandstanding as competitive display among young men
This study examines moral grandstanding (i.e., using moral discourse to enhance status) across 4 European countries (N=8,420). 🧵
doi.org/10.1111/pops...

@ansgarw.bsky.social u ich sind bekannt für unsere Serviceorientierung. Daher haben wir - um die Zeit bis 18 Uhr (deutscher Zeit!) zu überbrücken - diese nigelnagelneue Grafik für Euch gebaut. Zu sehen sind die Übereinstimmungen zwischen Parteien, die sich aus dem RLP-Wahl-O-Mat ergeben. Enjoy!

Amazing #map by @lemonde.fr showing the results of local elections on the entire country !
See online: shorturl.at/ByQZy
#cartography #election #france #mapping #gischat

Texting daily with a random human peer is more effective at reducing loneliness than texting with a highly supportive chatbot.

Next time you feel lonely reach out to a human, any human.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Meet @manesweisskircher.bsky.social, one of our visiting scholars from TU Dresden. Join him next week for a seminar on “Electromobility and the Politics of Climate Change: Far-Right Climate Obstruction and Its Impact on Mainstream Parties.”

🗓️ 3/12 @ 1pm

🔗 ces.fas.harvard.edu/events/2026/...

Experte für die #AfD Hood #Stuttgart Giebel bin ich bekanntlich (so wie @kesseltv.bsky.social). Nur: in Freiberg ist es schlimmer. War 1992 mit den "Republikanern" schon. Zwei Generationen rechtsextrem? @hudde.bsky.social und @juliusk.bsky.social finden es nach ungefähr jeder Wahl genau so raus.

Two more days to apply!

📢 Study out in Research & Politics!

We (@lukasbirkenmai1.bsky.social @wurthmann.bsky.social @msaeltzer.bsky.social) find that directly elected MPs talk more about local & deprived places than list MPs on social media.

🔍 doi.org/10.1177/2053...

Some Highlights [1/3]

Meet @tevoelker.bsky.social, one of our Visiting Scholars from
@wzb.bsky.social. Join her TODAY for a seminar on “Democratic Resilience: How Parties, Civil Society, and the Media Resist Far-Right Politics.”

🗓️ Feb 25 @ 2:00 - 3:15pm

🔗 ces.fas.harvard.edu/events/2026/...

As we write our final editorial for European Societies, we return to the spirit of our first editorial (Präg, Ersanilli and Gugushvili, 2022) and to the question that guided our tenure: did we deliver on what we promised? At the outset, we set out a twofold vision. We wanted to keep European Societies a genuinely general sociology journal with a focus on Europe and European sociology, open to all substantive areas and to authors worldwide. At the same time, we wanted to modernize the journal by lowering barriers to participation, moving toward open access and open science, and by running peer review as fairly, comprehensively, and efficiently as possible. Looking back, we believe the direction of travel has been consistent with that agenda, even if some constraints have become more pronounced as submissions have grown. The most tangible step toward barrier reduction has been the shift in the journal's publishing model. The move to MIT Press and the adoption of a noncommercial, diamond open-access model have made the journal free to read and free to publish in. This has mattered not only as an institutional achievement by ESA, but also as a signal of what a flagship journal of the European Sociological Association can be: a truly public scholarly resource rather than a gated space shaped by the ability to pay. In parallel, we worked to reduce friction in submission and production by making procedures more predictable and less resource-intensive for authors, and by strengthening the journal's commitment to transparency, including the routine expectation of replication materials for quantitative work published in the journal (Präg, Ersanilli and Gugushvili, 2025). We have thought of these changes as working on “access” and “voice” simultaneously. By “access,” we mean making it easier for people to read the journal and to submit their work. By “voice,” we mean that a broader range of scholars, institutions, and regions appears on our pages and shapes the debates. Bot…

European societies in motion, and a commitment to voice A general sociology journal should reflect the major currents shaping European societies, not by chasing headlines, but by publishing sociological work that helps explain how Europe is changing. Over the past years, the journal has continued to engage research on inequalities and social stratification, climate change and ecological transition, migration and shifting borders, transformations in work and welfare, population aging and health inequalities, and the reconfiguration of social trust and political contestation. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further underlined how quickly the horizon of “normal” European development can rupture, and how urgent it becomes to understand societies that have too often been treated as peripheral in general sociological publishing. The Special Issue on understanding Ukrainian society before and after the invasion (Martsenyuk et al., 2024) was therefore an attempt to contribute to that understanding while also practicing what we had argued for from the start: that underrepresented parts of Europe should not appear only through external observation, but should be visible through scholarship that is locally grounded, rigorously theoretical, and fully integrated into European sociology. Throughout our tenure, we also sought to ensure that the journal provided space for the plurality of sociological traditions across Europe. European sociology remains multi-paradigmatic and unevenly structured by regional and institutional inequalities. We therefore aimed to combine a high threshold for publication with broad openness to different intellectual styles, methods, and substantive agendas, and to keep ourselves accountable by paying attention to patterns in submissions and editorial outcomes across regions and approaches. This is unfinished work, but it is work that cannot be postponed if we want a journal that represents European sociology as it exists, rather th…

the structural reality remains that a general journal with finite capacity cannot publish all of the strong sociology it receives, even when that sociology deserves a wide readership. This pressure is intertwined with another growing challenge: the difficulty of securing peer reviewers. Reviewing is the central infrastructure of scholarly publishing, but it rests on time and goodwill that are increasingly stretched. Across our term, it has become harder to find the right expertise quickly, particularly for more specialized topics or for underrepresented contexts where the pool of suitable reviewers is smaller. We therefore want to thank reviewers once more, not as a ritual, but as recognition that the journal's quality and fairness depend directly on their labor. We also hope that our community continues to treat reviewing as part of academic reciprocity, because without a sustainable reviewing culture, no editorial team can reliably balance speed, rigor, and equity. Thanks, acknowledgments, and handover We owe special thanks to Patrick Präg, who left his editorial role slightly earlier but contributed enormously to the journal's direction and to the everyday work that makes a journal function. His intellectual judgment, practical ambition, and commitment to fairness and transparency shaped many of the changes implemented during our tenure, and the journal is stronger because of his contributions. We also thank our associate editors, without whom our work would have been impossible: Plamen Akaliyski (Lingnan University), Çetin Çelik (Koç University), Roxanne Connelly (University of Edinburgh), Ivana Dobrotić (University of Zagreb), Marta Dominguez Folgueras (Sciences Po), Magne P. Flemmen (University of Oslo), Pablo Gracia (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Mobarak Hossain (London School of Economics and Political Science), Mathieu Ichou (INED), Katya Ivanova (Tilburg University), Cyril Jayet (Sorbonne University), Agnieszka Kubal (University of Oxford), Anna K…

An era has come to an end

Last week I started as Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Center for European Studies, and I'm super excited to be here!

Thanks to @dziblatt.bsky.social & everyone at the Center for hosting me and the warm welcome.

I'm here til early May -> let me know if you're in the Boston area and want to catch up!

Herzlichen Glückwunsch!!🎉🎉

Postdoctoral Position at the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” Deadline: 20 February 2026, 12:00 pm CET

🚨 Postdoctoral Position at the University of Konstanz 🚨

We’re hiring a post-doc for our @excinequality.bsky.social project on political elites and decision-making.

4-year position | Deadline: Feb. 20 | Start: Sept 2026

Please share widely 🙏

The ad is here stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/f...

In just over eight months, Berlin will hold its 20th state election since 1946. While its well known East West divide in voting behaviour is often attributed to the city’s former split into capitalist and socialist halves, these differences existed even before the city’s division. A thread. 🧵

Promotional graphic from Cologne Graduate School showing a person holding a doctoral certificate folder. Text reads: “Interested in a doctoral programme? Apply now. Doctoral Scholarship Business Administration.”

🎓 Advance your academic career!
The Cologne Graduate School (Univ. of Cologne) offers a 3-year PhD scholarship in Business Administration starting Oct 1, 2026. 🌐
Focus: analytics, AI & digital transformation.

Apply by Mar 15, 2026 👉 uni.koeln/JQGW2

#DoctoralScholarship #PhDOpportunity #wisocgn

Markets and Mobility: How Employers Structure Economic Opportunity

Intergenerational mobility, measuring the ability to achieve economic success regardless of family background, is a critical reflection of a society’s commitment to equality of opportunity. Rising income inequality has raised concerns about the potential erosion of upward mobility. While education has traditionally been viewed as the path to mobility, its transformative power is facing challenges in a rapidly evolving job market. This project reorients the focus of intergenerational mobility research by highlighting the labor market as an arena for the reproduction of advantage. It employs a comparative approach, using administrative data from four countries: Sweden, Austria, England, and the United States. It also incorporates evidence from a broader set of nations through cross-national surveys, longitudinal household surveys, labor force surveys, secondary data, and digital trace data. The project employs cutting-edge empirical methods, including quasi- experimental designs, event studies, within-family comparisons, decomposition analyses, counterfactual simulations, and diagnostic checks to rigorously assess the extent of inequalities in the labor market. The research investigates how family background influences the sorting of individuals to employers and workplaces, accounting for education and occupation, and explores variations in career progression within and between employers. It comprehensively catalogues and assesses mechanisms shaping workplace inequality, contributing to the development of social closure theory. Additionally, the project evaluates intervention strategies, encompassing both employer practices and government actions, to promote fair opportunity in the labor market.

JOB! I'm hiring a postdoc for 2 years on my ERC MaMo project.

Looking for someone with strong quant methods, ongoing work close to the project's aims, and a desire to publish in sociology. Start flexible in the next 12 months.

Formal call out shortly, but contact me first.

Happy to share this new paper @jeppjournal.bsky.social with my great colleagues @dweisstanner.bsky.social & Carsten Jensen.

In "Winning with equality", we show "how left-wing parties attract votes but [in doing so] amplify electoral cleavages"

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Key points in 📈👇

Soziologe Steffen Mau: "Wissenschaftler müssen Ergebnisse aushalten, die ihnen nicht gefallen" Soziologe Steffen Mau ist ein "Skeptiker gegenüber einer Wissenschaft, die eine stark politisierte oder normative Agenda hat". Er sieht dafür viele Anzeichen.

Interview mit @kathrinkuehn.bsky.social für die Sendung Systemfragen im Deutschlandfunk zum Thema der Politisierung und Beeinflussung der Wissenschaft. www.deutschlandfunk.de/bonusmateria...

That looks great. I’ll see you there in a few weeks!

"Walk like a penguin." 🐧❄️
Good advice for snowy days in French media.