This semester I taught Spatial Data Science with #rstats Students analyzed areal, geostatistical & point pattern data, creating fantastic projects on disease mapping 🗺️ air pollution 🏭 crime 🚨 & species modeling 🐾
Book freely available:
👉 paulamoraga.com/book-spatial/
Interested in the theory and empirics of multi-party governments? Thomas Bräuninger and I edited a Handbook on Coalition Politics with Edward Elgar Publishing: lnkd.in/eis8Yc2y /1
🚨 New publication out @jeppjournal.bsky.social w/ Katrin Praprotnik @luanarusso.bsky.social @markuswagner.bsky.social
We show that coalition signals from the mainstream right to the radical right shift, rather than reduce, existing political divisions.
Open-access article: doi.org/10.1080/1350...
Mark your calendars: the next Politicologenetmaal will take place on 11-12 June 2026 at Ghent University! 👇
🚨📢 We’re hiring a Postdoc in Computational Political Science at the University of Antwerp!
💻 Focus: NLP + ML + political text analysis
🗳️ Project: ERC DEMO-LIES (disinformation in democracies)
🌍 Location: Antwerp, 🇧🇪
📅 Deadline: 16 Oct 2025
www.uantwerpen.be/en/jobs/vaca...
This study advances our understanding of voter behavior in the digital era and underscores the importance of online search as a critical channel for political learning.
✅ However, this informational gap narrows when the two major parties form a grand coalition.
Together, these results suggest voters act as “cognitive misers,” strategically focusing their attention on parties with the greatest informational deficits.
✅ Programmatic change (e.g., ideological rebranding) further increases information-seeking, especially for major, established opposition parties.
✅ Voters also seek more information about established opposition parties the longer those parties have been out of power.
🔍 Key findings:
✅ Voters search significantly more for political information in proximity to national election campaigns. But their behavior is more nuanced than just timing:
✅ Opposition parties attract more search interest than governing parties.
Using two decades of Google search data from major parties across 11 democracies, I investigate how voters actively seek out political information, and how a party’s incumbency status and programmatic shifts shape this behavior.
🎯 New Paper Alert! 🎯
I’m thrilled to announce that my latest article, “How do voters seek political information during real-world election campaigns?”, has been published in Party Politics.
Access the full paper here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
👇👇
Ever asked yourself how to detect and extract social groups from texts with computational social science? @haukelicht.bsky.social and me have a solution for you out at @bjpols.bsky.social. You can also find the pre-trained models on huggingface!
📣 OA Publication alert! 📣
"Says who? The role of party cues in explaning the positive and negative consequences of political moral appeals in Europe"
In Party Politics
#thread
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
no better way to depart from #ecprgc25 than 👀 my paper just published in @eupthejournal.bsky.social! I find localism in an unlikely place & show that people feel more represented when they live in incumbent MEPs' hometowns, using survey data from 🇷🇴🇭🇺🇮🇹🇧🇪 doi.org/10.1177/1465... #Polisky
My Substack on writing, Respect the Marble is back! 🎉
I’ll be launching several new things this autumn, outlined here: catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/a-new-seas...
A quick preview 👇
🧵
(5/5)
This work contributes to ongoing debates about gender, voter behavior, and political representation.
(4/n)
💡 Our findings highlight yet another barrier for women in politics: while flexibility is often necessary in volatile electoral environments, women are held to stricter standards of consistency than men.
(3/n)
✅ Men face limited penalty for similar position changes—and may even be rewarded in some cases.
✅ Interestingly, liberal respondents punish women more than conservatives do, suggesting gendered double standards cut across ideology.
(2/n)
✅ Women candidates face greater backlash than men for repositioning.
✅ The penalties are strongest when women shift in anti-women directions (e.g., on abortion or childcare).
(1/n) 🔑 Our central question: Are women punished more than men when they change their policy positions?
Using a conjoint survey experiment in the U.S., we find that:
🚨 New Working Paper 🚨
I’m excited to share a new working paper, co-authored with
@bethsimas.bsky.social and @zeynsom.bsky.social :
“Candidate Gender and Position Switching”
Full paper here 👉 www.researchgate.net/publication/...
🧵
✨Very happy to see my paper "Attitudinal ambivalence toward multiculturalism" out on @jeppjournal.bsky.social !
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
1/8 🧵
Yay! Super enthusiastic about this project, and can't wait to work with @pavlosvas1.bsky.social, @annasanders.bsky.social and all contributors to put together this Introduction to Voting Behaviour!
(7/7) This is still work in progress. Feedback is more than welcome!
(6/n) This reveals a strategic recalibration: tempering moral appeals to govern effectively, while maintaining loyalty from their base through stronger issue focus.
The broader implication: parties can moderate how they speak without abandoning what they stand for.
(4/n) Findings:
✅ Green parties are systematic “moralizers” of the environment in their manifestos, especially compared to right-wing parties.
✅ After joining government in 2021, the German Greens significantly reduced moral rhetoric on environmental issues.
They rely on moral appeals to mobilize, but once in government, such language risks alienating coalition partners.
In my new paper, I examine this tension by combining: Manifesto data from 21 Western democracies and a novel dataset of German party press releases (2010–2024) (3/n)
Moral rhetoric is a powerful tool for mobilization — but its uncompromising tone can hinder coalition politics.
This creates a unique challenge for entrepreneurial parties like the Greens. (2/n)
🚨 New Working Paper 🚨
The Prophet in the Minister's Office: Do Green Parties Tone Down Moral Rhetoric When They Govern? (1/n) 🧵
👇
Full preprint here: www.researchgate.net/publication/...
The CHES EU team has published a new research note in @electoralstudies.bsky.social describing some trends across the 25 years now covered by our trend file and exploring two new items included in the 2024 wave of the survey: doi.org/10.1016/j.el...
Here’s a summary thread:
1/