iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Yet another great paper linking pub service decline to political outcomes: "The findings highlight how service privatization can reshape electoral behavior and contribute to political polarization, with implications for regulation and democratic accountability."

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Wrote about SpaceX' IPO, the Pope, and the power of ideas dkarpa.github.io/blog/2026/po...

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Are you interested in conjoint experiments? Wrote about my new R package *cjdiag* on my website. Feedback welcome! dkarpa.github.io/blog/2026/be...

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

But who self-censors? Not everyone equally. The entire effect is driven by people who consume international media. Among those who don't: +0.9pp. Among those who do: +6.1pp. The people who are most willing to speak up go quiet when surveillance becomes salient.

Interflex binning plot showing the marginal effect of the surveillance treatment on self-censorship, moderated by international media consumption. At 0 (no international media), the effect is 0.9 percentage points with confidence intervals crossing zero. At 1 (consumes international media), the effect is 6.1 percentage points.

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

Surveillance increases self-censorship by 3.3 percentage points across questions on protests, sanctions, and the war in Ukraine (p<0.01). A placebo question on working hours? No effect. This isn't survey anxiety. Surveillance specifically chills political speech.

Bar chart showing response distributions (justified, not justified, prefer not to answer) across control, surveillance, and privacy groups for four questions. The share of 'prefer not to answer' increases in the surveillance group for all three sensitive political questions but not for the placebo question on working hours.

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

In 2022, Michael Rochlitz and I designed a survey experiment about government surveillance tracking protesters. Back then it was hypothetical. ICE is now doing exactly what we described. New post on what our data showed and why privacy is a political question. dkarpa.github.io/blog/2026/su...

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Took these pics in Astana in 2023. Presidential palace next to some golden towers. Let's see if DC can compete

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

"we show that regions increase their vote share for Le Pen where the quality of government decreases. We also show that this relationship holds at the individual level. Thus, supplying quality, impartial and fair public services seem to stifle demand for [...] authoritarianism[...]"

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

Electoral responses to economic crises: "economic crises tend to disproportionately favor the right"

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

Why Inequalities Persist: Parties’ (Non)Responses to Economic Inequality, 1970–2020 new paper in APSR. How do parties react to inqeuality levels and changes to these levels?

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right: "Our findings underscore the role of public service decline as a driver of support for populist parties, especially in areas undergoing demographic change"

Abstract
The rise of populist right parties is well-studied, but little attention has been
given to how public service performance influences voter support. Given that public services are often the primary means through which citizens interact with the
state, we argue that declining public services can create grievances that increase
the appeal of populist right parties. Focusing on England’s National Health Service
(NHS), we combine administrative data on local health facility closures with panel
data on public preferences and voting intentions. Using a staggered difference-indifferences design, we find that closures reduce satisfaction with public services and
increase support for populist right parties. These effects are moderated by migrant
registrations at local health practices, highlighting the interaction between public
service performance and immigration concerns in fueling populist right support.
Our findings underscore the role of public service decline as a driver of support for
populist parties, especially in areas undergoing demographic change.

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Austerity, economic vulnerability, and populism: "The economic origins of populism are thus not purely external; the populist backlash is triggered by internal factors, notably public policies."

Abstract
Governments have repeatedly adjusted fiscal policy in recent decades. We examine the political effects of these adjustments in Europe since the 1990s using both district-level election outcomes and individual-level voting data. We expect austerity to increase populist votes, but only among economically vulnerable voters, who are hit the hardest by austerity. We identify economically vulnerable regions as those with a high share of low-skilled workers, workers in manufacturing and in jobs with a high routine-task intensity. The analysis of district-level elections demonstrates that austerity increases support for populist parties in economically vulnerable regions, but has little effect in less vulnerable regions. The individual-level analysis confirms these findings. Our results suggest that the success of populist parties hinges on the government's failure to protect the losers of structural economic change. The economic origins of populism are thus not purely external; the populist backlash is triggered by internal factors, notably public policies.

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

academic.oup.com/economicpoli... the cost to the oppressors: "Right-wing populism deters the highly skilled immigrants who are critical to fostering economic and social progress from coming [... and] the adverse selection reinforces anti-immigrant narratives"

Abstract
We investigate the bidirectional relationship between immigration and right-wing populism, which we characterize as a self-reinforcing dynamic process where anti-immigrant rhetoric and populist policies lead to a deterioration in the average education and skill level of immigrants. The deterioration in the ratio of high-skill to low-skill immigrants in turn fuels populist support and anti-immigration attitudes, creating what we call “the vicious circle of xenophobia.” We review some historical and contemporary studies that are suggestive of such a vicious circle. In particular, recent cross-country evidence shows that low-skill immigration tends to exacerbate populism, whereas high-skill immigration tends to mitigate it. Conversely, populist policies and xenophobic attitudes have a strong repulsive effect on highly skilled immigrants and result in adverse immigrant selection. We use the empirical results from those studies to inform a theoretical model of joint determination of immigrants’ skill ratio and right-wing populism levels. The model displays multiple equilibria, with the inferior equilibrium—corresponding to our vicious circle—characterized by high levels of right-wing populism and a high proportion of low-skill workers among immigrants. In this framework, structural trends such as Internet penetration, economic erosion of the middle class, demographic pressure from poor countries as well as adverse cyclical shocks make the good, efficient equilibrium less likely and the inferior equilibrium of explosive populism and adverse immigrants’ selection more likely.

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

"illustrates how powerfully the initial framing and publicity surrounding tech developments can influence public policy. As generative AI applications burst onto the scene in 2022–2023, a small community of computer scientists [...] misled the world." opinions? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

"find a strong relationship between mobility and support for the far right across 11 European countries. [...] demonstrate an asymmetry: while downward mobility predicts increased far-right voting, upward mobility has little effect." journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

cup.org/3GTsE3W Inflation narratives: government spending, as emphasized by Republicans, and corporate greed, highlighted by Democrats. "Economic voting behaviour depends not only on objective economic conditions but also on how political parties subjectively frame these conditions."

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl... "Analyzing a database of countries that have gone from being democratic to authoritarian and back again since 1994 reveals that almost all failed to sustain their recoveries"

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

"The image of lower-class voters with crystallized preferences for redistribution that simply wait to be mobilized with the right policy supply is probably inaccurate" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Focus groups show that citizens have "limited knowledge about or interest in tax policy, indifference or hostility towards taxing the rich, susceptibility to business criticism of taxation, and a weak link between support expressed in surveys and in face-to-face conversations"

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Next Tuesday (March 18) I will present a paper titled "Language Affinity, Russian Media and Sanctions Evasion" at @bofitresearch.bsky.social. Tune in if you interested to see which factors influenced the spike in trade with sanctioned goods to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. shorturl.at/cCQPM

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

In Lacian Terms *sniff* the unread paper signifies the Object petite a, precisely where capitalism places its contingencies upon the postmodern subject

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

In other words, information matters! It can limit the extent to which people engage with a new technology, and thus curb its usefulness as a tool of digital opression. If you want to read more, our paper just came out in open access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Using a survey experiment in Russia and four other countries, we find that information about its opressive potential can curb public support for the governance tool substantially, even in countries where people are already aware that the state might be using surveillance technologies against them.

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 28/02/2024

Nawalny memorial in the city centre of Bremen

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David Karpa @dkarpa.bsky.social · 17/10/2023

One of the parties appears to have been knocked out and is currently on the ground.

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