iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Sebastian Block

Carsten Schwemmer @cschwem2er.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

In new joint work with @sebastianjblock.bsky.social, Sandra Jaworeck, Manuel Holz, and Philipp Spielbauer, we examine textual complexity in sociology using a corpus of more than 1,700 full-text articles from major German sociology journals. osf.io/preprints/so...

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Reposted by Sebastian Block

Martin Gross @martingross.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Falls Jemandem am Wochenende langweilig sein sollte. 😊

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Last but not least: this is the first published first-author paper of my wonderful co-author Merle Huber. Long overdue recognition for excellent work. 🎉

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Findings III: Adoption counts overstate real engagement --> small core of very active MPs drives most parliamentary TikTok output. TikTok may lower entry barriers, but its algorithmic logic may also amplify polarisation by rewarding distinctiveness at the edges.

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Findings II: TikTok use is path-dependent. Heavy posters stay heavy; inactive MPs stay inactive. Zero posts in year t–1 drastically raises the odds of zero posts in year t. Platform experience and gender predict activity; age and institutional role do not, once party incentives are controlled.

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Findings I: Party nicheness drives activity. MPs from programmatically distinctive parties post more TikToks. The interest-cluster algorithm rewards issue specificity --> niche parties are structurally well-positioned to exploit that.

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

What we did: We scraped complete posting histories of all MPs in Germany and the UK (2020–2024). ~40k videos, 496 MPs, linked to party- and individual-level characteristics. Annual posting volumes modelled with zero-inflated negative binomial regressions + year FE and MP random intercepts.

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

RQ: Which MPs are active on TikTok — and who sustains it over time? Adoption is widespread. Consistent posting is not. We focus on that gap.

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Finding #2: - Geographic appeals are more frequent when councils are elected via electoral districts (institutional incentives matter)

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Finding #1: - Parties talk more about districts where they’re electorally strong --> this is especially pronounced when their voter base is localized

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Data & Method: - 12 large German cities, one full term (5–6 yrs). - We analyze 10,189 questions (aggregated to parties). - We build 455 district dictionaries from Wikipedia + OpenStreetMap (streets, sights, buildings, etc.), matched to district shapefiles, to detect when/where questions target geo

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Ask: Do neighborhoods actually receive attention & representation in local politics? Did: Computational (geo)text on council questions with geocoded place refs Find: Geographic representation is common; parties focus where they’re strongest with localized electorates & certain electoral rules

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

These dynamics matter not only for understanding local governance in Germany, but also for broader debates about the role of technocrats in democratic systems and how accountability mechanisms adapt to non-partisan actors.

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Why? Independent ministers—while often chosen for expertise—are less predictable. Parties cannot rely on shared ideology or party loyalty, which increases the risk of policy drift. Parliamentary questions help close this informational gap.

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

The findings are clear: ✅ All parties ask significantly more questions to independent portfolios than to partisan ones. ✅ Opposition parties exercise even more oversight than governing parties over independent portfolios

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Using data from 28 German city councils (2011–2020) and over 13,000 parliamentary questions, I examine whether parties control independent portfolio heads more than partisan ones—and whether opposition and governing parties behave differently.

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Despite the increasing presence of independents in both national and subnational governments, research has largely focused on partisan ministers. My article addresses this gap by studying how parties control independent portfolios.

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

In many governments, independent ministers are appointed to key portfolios. Unlike partisan ministers, they aren’t bound by party discipline—raising important questions about oversight: Who monitors them, and how does this shape legislative control dynamics?

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Reposted by Sebastian Block

Amrei Bahr @amreibahr.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

Ergebnisse der KoaV-AG „Bildung, Forschung & Innovation“: Was ist drin für #IchBinHanna? Was unklar? Was fehlt? 1 🧵. Tl,dr: 1. Eindruck erfreulich, aber 🐘 im Raum – konkrete Ausgestaltung der Postdoc-Phase zur Schaffung langfristiger Perspektiven – wird nicht ausreichend adressiert. (1/13)

fragdenstaat.de

Koalitionsverhandlungen CDU/CSU/SPD AG 8 - Bildung, Forschung und Innovation

Schwarzer Text: Einigkeit Blauer Text: nicht geeint, Union-Forderung Roter Text: nicht geeint, SPD-Forderung [Zu den Ergebnissen der anderen Arbeitsgruppen geht es hier.](https://fragdenstaat.de/ar...

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Reposted by Sebastian Block

Ian Magnusson @ianmagnusson.bsky.social · 20/12/2023

LMs are used to process text from many topics, styles, dialects, etc., but how well do they do? 📈 Evaluating perplexity on just one corpus like C4 doesn't tell the whole story 📉 ✨📃✨ We introduce Paloma, a benchmark of 585 domains from NY Times to r/depression on Reddit.

Perplexity macro averaged over any domains within each of the 18 top-level data sources in Paloma, using baselines with pretraining controls including decontamination. Evaluating on one monolithic corpus, such as C4, does not tell the complete story of model fit. Paloma lets us see when trends differ from one distribution of language to another. For instance, the 3 baselines trained on only Common Crawl data (C4, mC4-en, Falcon-RefinedWeb) exhibit high perplexity, sometimes with non-monotonic scaling over tokens seen, on specific evaluation sources such as The Pile, Dolma, and Dolma-100-Programming-Languages.

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Reposted by Sebastian Block

Jack Hessel @jmhessel.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

LLMs generate novel word sequences not contained in their pretraining data. However, compared to humans, models generate significantly fewer novel n-grams. RLHF = 30% *more* copying than base! Awesome work from the awesome Ximing Lu (gloriaximinglu.github.io) et al. 🤩 arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04265

A screenshot from the linked paper's figure 1. The figure is a pretty-complicated three column figure, but --- in essence, it sketches out how the authors compare llm sequences to the pretraining data / human authors to the pretraining data. Humans write more novel n-gram sequences.

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Please add me to the CSS list:) thanks!

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Reposted by Sebastian Block

Martin Gross @martingross.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Very happy (and proud b/c it took a loooong time to finalise this paper) to share new research, together with Alejandro Ecker, on how local politicians in 🇩🇪 allocate portfolios. In short, they behave like their counterparts at the federal & state levels: both quant. & qual. considerations matter!

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

I am delighted to see our new paper "Electoral Campaigns and Parliamentary Practice: Do Parties Pursue the Issues They Campaigned On?" out in Swiss Political Science Review as #OpenAccess! @martingross.bsky.social wrote a very nice thread summarizing our findings!

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Reposted by Sebastian Block

Jan A. Velimsky @jvelimsky.bsky.social · 25/01/2024

I am extremely happy to see our paper on "The impact of occupational background on issue representation" out @wepsocial.bsky.social doi.org/10.1080/0140... The contribution is joint work with my great colleagues @sebastianjblock.bsky.social @martingross.bsky.social & @donyhu.bsky.social

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

Many thanks to the editors and reviewers of EPSR, who provided excellent suggestions for improving the paper! 13/13

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

Intra-coalition control dynamics are affected by the HoE being aligned with one of the coalition parties. In these cases, the other coalition partners address significantly more PQs to the portfolios affiliated with the mayor (H3). 12/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

Findings: As is in parliamentary regimes, also in mixed regimes, ideological policy distance and issue salience drive intra-coalition control (H1 & H2). 11/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

I use PQ data from our DFG project “Representation and inequality in local politics” w/ @martingross.bsky.social @donyhu.bsky.social and Jan Velimsky and combine this data with portfolio data. 10/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

The mayor is the most powerful local actor, and the local equivalent of a minister is a department head. Focusing on local data allows comparing several coalitions influenced by the same political culture, similar institutional settings, and during the same time period. 9/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

Case selection: In the empirical part of the paper, I focus on the mixed regime at the German local level with a directly elected mayor as HoE and a cabinet supported by the city’s council majority. 8/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

H3: If a coalition party is affiliated with the HoE, the other parties address more PQs to all portfolios the aligned party holds. 7/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

H2: The more salient the portfolio’s area of jurisdiction is for a cabinet party not holding the portfolio, the more PQs a party addresses to the portfolio. 6/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

Hypotheses: H1: The greater the ideological policy distance between the cabinet party asking the question and the cabinet party holding the portfolio, the more PQs a party addresses to the portfolio of the respective coalition partner. 5/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

This makes intra-coalition control more complex: 1. Coalition partners have to monitor each other AND the HoE 2. If the HoE belongs to one of the coalition parties, the balance of information and, thus power within the coalition is tipped in favor of this party 4/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

Control in mixed regimes: In mixed regimes, there is a dual executive structure consisting of a directly elected Head of Executive (HoE), such as a president or mayor, and a government supported by the parliament. 3/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

E.g., @dahoehmann.bsky.social @svenjakrauss.bsky.social have shown: Coalition parties use PQs to control coalition partners in parliamentary regimes. Furthermore, they found that issue salience and policy divisiveness are driving factors for intra-coalition control. 2/n

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Sebastian Block @sebastianjblock.bsky.social · 09/11/2023

I'm extremely happy to announce that my first single-author paper is now out and open-access at EPSR doi.org/10.1017/S175... I focus on intra-coalition control in mixed regimes, where the control becomes more complex due to a dual executive structure (as shown by @laderafrutal.bsky.social)

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Reposted by Sebastian Block

John Kastellec @jkastellec.bsky.social · 25/10/2023

I've posted a new short paper called "Practical Advice for Producing Better Graphs" that ... provides practical advice for producing better graphs. 😀 Comments and suggestions welcome. jkastellec.scholar.princeton.edu/document/91

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Reposted by Sebastian Block

Chris Hanretty @chanret.bsky.social · 16/10/2023

I've written a blog-post showing how to fine-tune a language model for the purposes of (three-way) text classification. It's a (partial) replication of Müller, Temporal Focus of Campaign Communication (JOP 2022). Find it at chrishanretty.co.uk/posts/finetu...

chrishanretty.co.uk

chris hanretty - Replicating Mueller, “The temporal focus of Campaign Communication”

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Reposted by Sebastian Block

Fabienne Lind @fabiennelind.bsky.social · 16/10/2023

Dive into the world of multilingual text analysis? @haukelicht.bsky.social and I wrote this paper as a first go-to resource for a comprehensive overview of research design considerations. Big thanks to the editors @marikenvelden.bsky.social, Martijn Schoonvelde, Christian Baden of the special issue!

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