Paul Meiners

(1/9) Can the EU be seen as more legitimate through procedural reforms? The lead candidate system for president of the European Commission was one such attempt. In a new article, @acgoldberg.bsky.social, @pieterdewilde.bsky.social and I have sobering results: doi.org/10.1017/S147... #polisky #EUsky

Have you ever wondered about what we know about the broad patterns, the causes, and the consequences of contestation of IOs? We – @jonastallberg.bsky.social, Michael Zürn and I – did and therefore set out to take stock of the state of the art. Our review is out now in @iojournal.bsky.social.

Es gibt soviel Forschung und dabei noch mehr Halbwissen -- ein studienbasierter Überblick mit möglichen Stellschrauben gegen die Erfolge radikal-rechter Parteien.

This is an incomplete understanding of academic freedom, and partly confuses academic freedom with freedom of speech. (🧵 adapting some things from this paper, esp. §5: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28499/. Highly recommend the papers by Dea and Kronfeldner that I cite there!)

The arms race of deferring agency and the dark acquiescence to robotic bureaucracy.

In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵

📄 New working paper out: osf.io/preprints/so... We (@thiloalbers.bsky.social @felixkersting.bsky.social and Fabian Kosse) try to understand why some citizens who are objectively well off still feel left behind, and why this matters for populist attitudes.

Frankly, I don’t think frontier models should be used for research at all. Must be an “archivable” model (open weight or open source) that will be available indefinitely for reanalysis.

This by @jamesrdennison.bsky.social and @andrewpgeddes.bsky.social looks brilliant - and very timely! global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Surveys like this always alarm people Fortunately, recent research from cognitive psychology shows that the reason people are so wildly wrong when estimating the size of minority groups is largely NOT because of prejudice — but rather how humans think about unknown proportions of any kind

Boy this was a long road, but glad it's finally out! @dgrand.bsky.social @robbwiller.bsky.social @arechar.bsky.social (along with Michael N. Stagnaro, James N. Druckman, not tagable)

New publication! Unelected representation may influence how satisfied people are with democracy, opening up important discussions on the role activists play in shaping the legitimacy of liberal representative democracies. You can find out more below 👇

🛑 Chatbots are not fit for giving voting advice 🗳️ Latest study from @liberties.eu on the Hungarian election shows lack of transparency and reliability in the advice. Our research shows that 10-15% by now use chatbots for advice, for young voters up to one quarter. www.liberties.eu/en/stories/h...

mariozechner.at/posts/2026-0...

New blog just dropped! This one is all about estimators—we cover James-Stein, classical test theory, empirical Bayes, penalized regression, and hierarchical models, showing how they all can be used to do a better job than sample stats alone 🤓 haines-lab.com/post/how-to-...

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

Strictly speaking, a postdoc is just a doc who posts

I'm not gonna lie: Macron and his generals singing the Marseillaise to a nuclear weapon is a bit chilling.

I think the main issue is that many people, quite reasonably tbf, don't like the default base data.frame print method... But this is easy to override! gist.github.com/grantmcdermo...

🎉 New paper out in Political Behavior (with @gijsschumacher.bsky.social & @mrooduijn.bsky.social) Why do some people feel stronger emotions about politics than others? 💡Not political knowledge, but interest and confidence-in-knowledge drive emotional engagement. link.springer.com/article/10.1... 🧵

A blog post giving a more thorough take on survey experiments and the credibility revolution: cyrussamii.com?p=4168

The billions of research funds channeled into the pockets of Elsevier and other commercial publisher in return for very little actual value is one of academia's big inefficiencies that will eventually be replaced by more attractive Community-run alternatives

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

After a huge post-election flip in economic perceptions, I thought Democrats and Republicans might be lying to pollsters to send a partisan message — but I was wrong! New in the Journal of Experimental Political Science (open access): doi.org/10.1017/XPS....

Super happy to see this out in @jeppjournal.bsky.social 🎉🎉

the disastrous refusal of the self-styled silicon valley technokings to keep anyone in their lives capable of questioning their increasingly incomprehensible politics has lead to a crisis of thinking so severe that a fifty-eight year old man believes something is important because he knows about it

Unless the article is fully generated (not likely) this is a symptom of a much older problem, which is that people aren’t reading many of the sources they cite — just gesturing at them.

Every time this worry comes up (www.ft.com/content/d419...) I post some Landy et al. (2018). People just answer questions about proportions (of anything) in a rather particular way. So I think it's unlikely that what they are being asked about is as important as you might expect it should be.

Any comparable data for Europe out there?

First they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out (because the message test performed at a low percentile rank compared to other messages in our testing bank for non college men who opt into online surveys through various consumer reward programs)

I wrote a thing about substituting LLMs for survey respondents notstatschat.rbind.io/2025/08/15/i...

If the articles from my PhD were my children this article now published in @bjpols.bsky.social is my favorite. Written together with truly amazing supervisors and mentors, Pieter de Wilde, Oliver Treib, and Lene Aarøe, I had the support I needed in bringing this baby into the world. Summary below 👇

Now in an issue @psrm.bsky.social: I show that the 🇩🇰 Social Democrats could have won policy support for a pro-immigrant platform if their messaging were framed in moral terms. Findings provide a central corrective to the popular notion that the Social Democrats were destined to go anti-immigrant 👇🏻

Dangerous things are happening in Germany. We know that a lack of trust is a significant factor in RR voting. Has anyone also looked at whether RR politicians trust the state? These people always seem to radiate intense hatred for democratic institutions. But maybe that's just for show.