iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 07/09/2026

Das ist die wichtigste Analyse heute:

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Heike Klüver @heikekluever.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Nach der Landtagswahl in #Sachsen-Anhalt stellt sich die Frage mit neuer Dringlichkeit: Würde Regierungsverantwortung die AfD „entzaubern“? 📊 Unsere Analyse von 1.307 Regierungen in 57 Demokratien zeigt: Die radikale Rechte wird dadurch nicht schwächer, im Schnitt gewinnt sie rund 6 Prozentpunkte.

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Katrin Paula @kpaula.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

🚨 Job Alert - PostDoc🚨 Come work with us and join our team as a postdoctoral fellow (100% position for two years, with the possibility of an extension up to one year) in beautiful Munich at @tum.de and @hfp.tum.de ☀️ Deadline: September 30, 2026 Find out more: hfp.heyrecruit.de?page=job&id=...

hfp.heyrecruit.de

Postdoctoral researcher (m/f/x) bei Hochschule für Politik München

Munich School of Politics and Public Policy The Munich School of Politics and Public Policy (HfP) combines excellence in political science with a commitment to dialogue between politics, society, busi...

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Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Are preferences for authoritarian rule individual predispositions—or can they spread socially? Using field + survey experiments in the Norwegian Armed Forces, we show that openness to strongman rule can spread socially. American Journal of Political Science: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

American Journal of Political Science | MPSA Journal | Wiley Online Library

The increasing popularity of strongman rule in democratic societies underscores the need to explore how authoritarian regime preferences might spread socially. We assess the role of social influence ...

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 19/06/2026

Overall, our study shows that people evaluate police violence conditional on the identity of the targets. While it is unsurprising that ideology influences approval of the police, it is concerning if public opinion about police force is conditional on the identity of "who" is being targeted. (7/8)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 19/06/2026

Hence, our study identified a substantial degree of information-resistance of the radical right in evaluations of police misconduct, which cannot be corrected through objective information from video footage. (6/8)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 19/06/2026

What happens when people receive new information about a contentious policing event? We find that while most individuals update their beliefs about the appropriateness of police use of force, far-right respondents are less responsive to new factual information about police misconduct. (5/8)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 19/06/2026

These results exceeded our expectations insofar as they were not restricted to extremists: all but centrist respondents were initially more approving of police violence when it was directed against their political opponents. (4/8)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 19/06/2026

Rightist citizens consider police violence as lower in protests in favor of immigration, whereas leftists respondents consider police violence as lower in protests against immigration. However, the treatment effect is larger for rightist respondents compared to leftist respondents. (3/8)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 19/06/2026

We exposed people to the same descriptions of police misconduct and varied whether the incidents occurred in a pro- or anti-immigration protest. On average, German citizens are less likely to consider the incidents as police violence when the targets are protesters in favor of immigration. (2/8)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 19/06/2026

The German population evaluates cases of police misconduct as less severe when they occur in protests against immigration compared to protests in favor of immigration. This is a key finding of our new study forthcoming in the Journal of Politics. (1/8)

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Werner Krause @krausewe.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

New paper out in the @thejop.bsky.social (w/ @christinagahn.bsky.social) Do opinion polls shape election results? Using both cross-national data and a survey experiment, the answer we find is yes - though it depends on how we communicate polling results. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Image showing the abstract of the paper "Self-Fulfilling Prophecies at the Voting Booth" by Werner Krause and Christina Gahn, published in the Journal of Politics. The abstract describes a quasi-experimental study across 25 countries finding that parties polling just below electoral thresholds are approximately 45 percentage points less likely to clear them, and that this effect diminishes when voters are informed about polling uncertainty.

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Sander Tordoir @sandertordoir.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Germany is the epicentre of the China Shock 2.0 reverberating in global markets In a new joint paper, CFR's Brad Setser and I show the shock is a key driver of Germany’s economic malaise. And it's accelerating Berlin needs to stop admiring the problem, and join efforts to fight back 1/many

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Anita Gohdes @argohdes.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

We're hiring a Post-Doc (3 years) at the @hertieschool.bsky.social for a @scripts-berlin.eu project on authoritarian influence in the video games industry (I am soooo excited about this project)! More details here (deadline 31 May): hertie-school.dvinci-easy.com/en/p/en/jobs...

hertie-school.dvinci-easy.com

Postdoctoral Researcher - Narrative, Power, and Control (gn) full-time (40 hours/week)

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Philipp Lutscher @plutscher.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Delighted to share a short blog post on the dark logic of visual "strongman" propaganda — drawing on survey experiments in Venezuela, Türkiye and the US!

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Amnesty International @amnesty.org · 21/04/2026

What is the State of the World’s Human Rights today? Our report examines 144 countries and paints a picture of States playing with a fire that threatens to scorch the future for generations to come. Read more: amn.st/63321B6A1y7

amn.st

State of the World's Human Rights 2026

Amnesty International State of the World's Human Rights.

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Peace Research Center Prague @prcp.cuni.cz · 09/04/2026

🔵 Do politicians trade human rights for the benefits of arms deals? Not more than citizens do. Those are findings from @tobiasrisse.bsky.social & @chrisvsteinert.bsky.social's survey experiments conducted on public and elite samples in 🇬🇧 & 🇩🇪. Just published in JCR: doi.org/10.1177/0022...

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Tobias Risse @tobiasrisse.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Check out our (w/ @chrisvsteinert.bsky.social) new article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution on how citizens and politicians weigh moral and instrumental concerns when forming attitudes toward arms exports. For more information, see abstract below or the full article: doi.org/10.1177/0022...

Trading Arms, Trading Values? Experimental Evidence on Attitudes Toward Arms Exports Among Citizens and Political Elites

Tobias Risse and Christoph Valentin Steinert

Foreign policy making involves balancing ethical values and instrumental concerns. Do politicians and citizens differ in how they weigh these factors when directly confronted with this trade-off? Focusing on attitudes toward arms exports, we argue that citizens, but not politicians, tend to prioritize human rights concerns over the political and economic benefits for their own states. We tested these arguments in four survey experiments among citizens and parliamentarians in the United Kingdom and Germany. We presented participants with fictitious arms deals and varied the human rights records of recipient regimes as well as the benefits of arms deals to assess how these factors influence attitudes toward arms exports. While we find substantial effects of both human rights violations and benefits on support for arms exports, their interaction remains insignificant across all samples. Hence, our findings yield no evidence for an elite-public gap in weighing ethical and instrumental concerns in foreign policy attitudes.

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 26/03/2026

Our findings raise serious concerns for accountability. On average, the German public is less likely to acknowledge police misconduct against immigrant victims, even when it is confirmed by an official government investigation, which can hinder efforts to hold perpetrators accountable. (3/3)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 26/03/2026

Our findings show that participants judge the same instance of police violence more leniently when the victim is named Mohamed Ahmed instead of Thomas Schneider. We further demonstrate that the bias is highly information resistant and persists despite increasing exposure to evidence (2/3)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 26/03/2026

The German public is more approving of police violence when victims are immigrants, and this bias is highly resistant to new information. This shows our new study published in Science Advances. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (1/3)

science.org

Public opinion on police misconduct: Discrimination and information resistance

The German public is more approving of police violence when victims are immigrants, and this bias is resistant to new information.

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Julian Walterskirchen @jwalterskirchen.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Happy to share that my new paper is out in @conflictmanagement.bsky.social I compare several NLP approaches for conflict prediction: • conflict dictionaries • sentiment dictionaries • word scaling • dynamic topic models • specialized transformer models

Text features and baseline models' predictive performance line charts over 6 time horizons (BBC data, left; CrisisWatch data, right).

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Adam Schwarz @adamjschwarz.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Spanish PM Sánchez responds to Trump: "Spain is against this disaster... Govts are here to improve people's lives... It is absolutely unacceptable that those leaders who are unable to fulfill that mission use the smoke of war to hide their failure, and in the process, fill the pockets of a few."

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Adam Scharpf @ascharpf.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Just arrived: MAKING A CAREER IN DICTATORSHIP. Featuring original visualizations throughout, the book reconstructs an entire military organization using career data from 15k officers. A deep dive into how the security apparatus in autocracies really works. Excited to finally hold it in my hands.

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Adam Scharpf @ascharpf.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ... Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups? Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com: tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf

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Marcel Fratzscher @mfratzscher.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

Meine Einschätzung zur #Abschiebeoffensive der CSU: Die geplante Abschiebeoffensive der CSU wäre ein schwerer Fehler mit enormen wirtschaftlichen Kosten für Deutschland und wäre zudem ein Bruch mit dem deutschen Asylrecht. Thread 1/n

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Political Science Research and Methods @psrm.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

🪙Do economic sanctions negatively affect democracy and human rights in targeted countries? ➡️ @antonpeez.bsky.social re-examines the effects of Western sanctions to improve democracy and human rights from 1990-2021 and finds that negative effects persist www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView

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Geneva Graduate Institute @gvagrad.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

The Geneva Academy has launched War WATCH, a new online portal combining conflict classification (RULAC) and analysis of civilian harm and IHL compliance. ‬ warwatch.ch

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The Pitch Inspection @thepitchinspection.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

As Trump and Infantino work the red carpet, bragging about setting records for ticket prices. (video below) Lets break down what “record prices" really mean for football fans and host countries. An important thread. 1/10

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Jason "Red5" Lyall @jaylyall.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

"About 243,000 more children under 5 years have died or will die this year than in 2024" due mostly to DOGE's illegal dismantling of USAID

wsj.com

For First Time in Decades, Child Deaths Will Rise This Year

Almost a quarter of a million more children around the world are projected to die in 2025 than in 2024.

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Journal of Peace Research @jpeaceresearch.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

📢 New publication alert! 📢 How do countries around the world pursue justice after human rights violations? This special data feature introduces the Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools (TJET) database, which includes 400+ indicators on transitional justice mechanisms worldwide from 1970 to 2020.

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Reto Mitteregger @indubioproreto.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

New Publication with @lhaffert.bsky.social in @ejprjournal.bsky.social! We study the role of generations in the urban-rural divide, which is increasingly shaping the politics of many democracies. Studying Switzerland, we show: The urban-rural divide is stronger among younger generations. (1/10) 🧵👇

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Sabine Carey @sabinecarey.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

📣 out now, with @argohdes.bsky.social and Mark Gibney - and in honour of the wonderful Steve Poe, who motivated the 1st edition with @universitypress.cambridge.org tinyurl.com/2s4kh6z3. If you enjoy reading this even a fraction as much as I enjoyed creating it, you’re in for a ride 🤩

cambridge.org

The Politics of Human Rights | Cambridge Aspire website

Discover The Politics of Human Rights, 2nd Edition, Sabine C. Carey, HB ISBN: 9781009537919 on Cambridge Aspire website

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 02/11/2025

Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...

In the first week of class, I had you read an article about how ChatGPT is philosophical “bullshit”, as well as this other post about AI and LLMs in this class.

I’ve seen a surprising increase in the amount of ChatGPT-based weekly check-ins and graph interpretations in the exercises. (In the past, I’ve even had students tell me they PDFs of the slides into ChatGPT to generate interesting and confusing things.) Don’t do this! LLMs cannot find three things that you personally found interesting from the readings. LLMs are not you.

It’s a huge waste of time for all of us to for me to spend time evaluating and grading output from ChatGPT. I want to read what you think and do, not what a computer invents.

NoteMy personal stance on AI and LLMs
Many of you have asked about how I think about and use LLMs in my own work (and in the class materials). Please check this short little page where I explain what I do with text, images, code, research, and learning.

In short, I do not use LLMs to create any of the materials for this class, and I do not use them to grade or evaluate any of your work.

I’ve even had several students submit completely made up stuff for mini projects and final projects. In your final project, your job is to take a dataset, make three different plots with it, and combine the plots into one graphic that tells some sort of story. I’ve (really truly) received projects like this:

(a ChatGPT-generated plot of completely made up data from gapminder)

At a very quick glance, that looks like a plausible image. But holy crap it falls apart fast, both comically and tragically. Comically because, like, look at the y-axis in the scatterplot; or the x-axis ticks in the population grown chart that are sometimes spaced every 20 years, sometimes every 10 years, and has 1980 there twice; or the weird blobs in the map.

Tragically—and most importantly—literally nothing in this image is real and none of the annotations make sense and none of the colors make sense and everything here is completely meaningless and devoid of any information. It’s pure philosophical bullshit—an image “produced without concern for its truth.”

That’s what I mean when I say that it’s a forgetful and unreliable resource. Lots of that code is helpful as an illustration of what’s going on. Lots of the explanation is good and fine. But it subtly changed its mind halfway through and didn’t realize it (because it can’t realize it! it’s just a chain of statistically likely text!)

Hopefully you can see where this is dangerous for learning. It can often “teach” you wrong, and you can only recognize that if you know stuff already.

It’s extra dangerous if you then take that example output, paste it into your exercise, and submit it.

I’m not even concerned about the plagiarism aspect of that—code is code and there are only a few ways to write {dplyr} code that will do this, and it’s easy to adapt from real human-based examples online, so I’m less worried about stealing other people’s work here.

I’m concerned that it’s not real data.

It made up values of 1, 2, 3, and 4 for some countries to illustrate grouping and summarizing. That’s good and normal.

None of that is real. Don’t treat it as real.

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Thomas Kurer @thmskrr.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

In a new paper, we show that "opportunity moves" foster political integration and shift political preferences to the left. Please have a look at @valentinaconsiglio.bsky.social's excellent summary for some more details. 👉 tinyurl.com/46utjj65

tinyurl.com

Seeking Opportunity in the Knowledge Economy: Moving Places, Moving Politics? | British Journal of Political Science | Cambridge Core

Seeking Opportunity in the Knowledge Economy: Moving Places, Moving Politics? - Volume 55

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 06/11/2025

The course aims to advance these skills with an emphasis on producing publication-ready figures, including high-resolution plots that use color-blind-friendly palettes, to ensure that data-driven evidence is communicated as clearly and inclusively as possible. (7/n)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 06/11/2025

We might ask whether we still need data visualization training when we have powerful LLMs to help us. Certainly, LLMs can help to optimize our code. But without a profound understanding of the produced code, we run the risk of creating figures that may look nice but that misrepresent our data. (6/n)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 06/11/2025

In order to create effectively communicate data, we need to understand the inherent biases and dynamics of human visual perceptions. These insights on the fundamentals of data visualization are broadly applicable beyond the field of (social) science. (5/n)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 06/11/2025

As put by Kieran Healy: "Data visualization is not simply a matter of competing standards of good taste. Some approaches work better for reasons that have less to do with one’s sense of what looks good and more to do with how human visual perception works." (4/n)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 06/11/2025

Apart from providing code for various figures including cleveland plots, ridgeline plots, or dynamic plots, the class seeks to provide a theoretical foundation. Effective data visualization requires a profound understanding of the dynamics of human visual perception. (3/n)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 06/11/2025

The course will introduce a variety of data visualization techniques including model-based visualizations, focusing on the effective presentation of empirical results through coefficient plots, simulated expected value plots, and event study plots. (2/n)

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Christoph Valentin Steinert @handle.invalid · 06/11/2025

I'm very excited to teach this Data Visualization course next week at the German Institute for Global Area Studies (GIGA): lnkd.in/eWBX2EQN (1/n)

lnkd.in

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

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Alex Dukalskis @alexdukalskis.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

This is a remarkable case of Chinese authorities threatening a UK university into halting research on human rights violations, and the university acquiescing.

bbc.com

China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show

Sheffield Hallam University apologises to Professor Laura Murphy for restricting her academic freedom.

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Sara Hobolt @sarahobolt.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

🚨 EPSS Belfast 2026 Call for Papers - One week to go! 🚨 Don't forget to submit your paper or panel proposal to the European Political Science Society @epssnet.bsky.social 2026 conference - just one week to go before the deadline: epssnet.org/belfast-2026...

epssnet.org

Call for Papers | EPSS Belfast 2026 Conference

Submit your abstract or full paper for EPSS Belfast 2026. Share cutting‑edge political science research, network with peers & contribute to academic impact.

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Valentin Lang @valentinlang.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Happy to share that our paper on the ideological biases of international organizations is now out in the current issue of the AJPS (@ajpseditor.bsky.social): dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajps... @the-peio.bsky.social @mzesunimannheim.bsky.social @akentikelenis.bsky.social

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British Journal of Political Science @bjpols.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

NEW - Seeking Opportunity in the Knowledge Economy: Moving Places, Moving Politics? - cup.org/3LgxVos "moving to opportunity results in... more left-leaning self-identification, and lower support for far-right parties" - @valentinaconsiglio.bsky.social & @thmskrr.bsky.social #OpenAccess

BJPolS abstract discussing the dynamic between knowledge economy migration and political shifts in Germany, specifically addressing urban versus rural opportunities and its implications on political perspectives and migration trends.

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Nils Weidmann @nilsweidmann.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Thanks to the great help by @rstrauch.bsky.social, Gabriele Spilker and the Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality" @excinequality.bsky.social, version 5.0 of the "Mass Mobilization in Autocracies Database" (coverage until 2022) is now available at mmadatabase.org!

mmadatabase.org

Mass Mobilization in Autocracies Database

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