theresa gessler

The European Political Science Society is now accepting paper & panel proposals for its annual conference!

📢 Call for Papers: EPSS 2026 – Belfast

🗓️ June 18–20, 2026

📍 ICC Belfast

📬 Deadline: Nov 7, 2025

🧵

My department at Leuphana University offers 6 fully funded PhD scholarships (incl. research funding) for three years.

If you are interested in studying democratic resilience (particularly party competition and elections 🤓) and you have a strong methodolgical background: Apply!

shorturl.at/kcTbG

It's not easy being a female researcher. But this week, I felt the power of brilliant women* coming together: mutual support, inspiring conversations & lots of code!👩‍💻 We tackled it all: Web scraping, LLMs & data viz. Many thanks to @sophiahunger.bsky.social @gessler.bsky.social, Jelena & Sophia #wpm

Classroom full of participants

Fantastic final full day workshop on Friday with @indiiigo.bsky.social on LLMs & social science with hands on tutorials and lots of input on the theoretical & ethical aspects

I had the best time getting ✨multilingual✨ in R and Python at the Summer School for Women* in Political Methodology 🤗

Couldn’t ask for a more supportive group; very important when several hours of live-coding is involved 🙈

Wednesday @fabiennelind.bsky.social talked about text as data, from dictionaries to word embeddings🔤

bsky.app/profile/fabi...

Thanks to everyone who gave such great input, answered questions and shared their experiences 👏

Tuesday afternoon @rebeccakittel.bsky.social sky.social talked about webscraping and automated data collection 👩‍💻
bsky.app/profile/rebe...

Tuesday morning, @melinscribe.bsky.social covered Advanced Data visualization 🎨

bsky.app/profile/meli...

Seminar room

Allison Koh

On Monday @allisonwkoh.bsky.social talked about Functions & Programming in R in the morning, continuing with an Intro to Python after lunch 🐍

Today, we wrapped up the first part of the Summer School for Women* in Political Methodology at @unibremen.bsky.social with a hackathon 👩‍💻
#WomeninPolMeth #PolMeth #wpm

So far, we've had a great week thanks to our fantastic participants and instructors 🧵⏬

What an inspiring first day at the Summer School for Women* in Political Methodology here in Bremen yesterday! We were honored to be welcomed by the president of @unibremen.bsky.social‬, Prof. Jutta Günther, (1)

on my way to Bremen with spezi and the most beautiful booklet I’ve ever seen 🥹

(there is a even list of specialty coffee locations!)

I think this time they're actually not even really renovating, just connecting Tesla to the line better. yet another reason to complain about them.

🇵🇱🇩🇪 During the first day of Polish border checks on the DE-PL border, Polish law enforcement stopped almost 700 vehicles, controlled nearly 4400 people, and denied entry to 1 (one) person. That's some ROI there.

after taking the Berlin-FFO rail replacement bus today I'd say: wise choice!

Attitudes toward Political Authoritarianism in Economically Advanced Democracies Cambridge Core - Politics: General Interest - Attitudes toward Political Authoritarianism in Economically Advanced Democracies

Our Element is out! 🎉

Why do authoritarian-leaning leaders target women’s and LGBTQ+ rights? Is there a systematic pattern that reaches beyond individual country cases, and how is this reflected in people’s attitudes and societal norms?

www.cambridge.org/core/element...

#showyourstripes Hamburg, Germany

Human caused climate change is noticeable everywhere:
showyourstripes.info

🇵🇱⚖️🗳️ The rule of law repair process in Poland just got incredibly more difficult. I expect President Nawrocki to be even less cooperative than Duda, as Nawrocki will work hard for a PiS parliamentary election victory. Tough times ahead. 1/

& Definition Jugendliche? (Wir reden ja über Wahlberechtigte?)

🚨 New WP! 📄 "Publish or Procreate: The Effect of Motherhood on Research Performance" (w/ @valentinatartari.bsky.social
👩‍🔬👨‍🔬 We investigate how parenthood affects scientific productivity and impact — and find that the impact is far from equal for mothers and fathers.

Congratulations to you both :)

Congratulations, this is very cool!🎉

Abstract Social group appeals are a crucial but often overlooked aspect of party competition. Challenger parties differ from dominant parties not only in their issue entrepreneurship and anti-establishment rhetoric, but also in how they approach social groups. Whereas dominant parties can and must use their policy record when appealing to groups rhetorically, challenger parties compensate for their lack of policy influence and long-lasting group ties by using more symbolic groupbased appeals, creating affective affiliations with voters while avoiding accountability or dividing their potential base. Similarly, they are more inclined to use negative group-based appeals. Using a most-similar-systems design and a new dataset of 15,460 tweets from German subnational parties, our main finding is that dominant parties, particularly those having held the prime minister’s office, favour policy-based group appeals, while challengers rely more on symbolic appeals. However, differences in appeal strategies diminish during campaign times. Our findings underline the importance of groupbased appeals for mainstream-challenger competition.

Thrilled to see my 1st PhD paper out in #PartyPolitics! Based on ~15000 posts by 86 German subnat. parties (2015-2019), Simon Franzmann & I show that dominant & challenger parties differ in the use of policy-based vs symbolic & positive vs negative appeals.

🔓:
doi.org/10.1177/1354...

The Hungarian government 🇭🇺 further cracks down on its civil sector. The bill proposes forcing those leading civil orgs to disclose their private assets and defunding orgs that 'harm sovereignty' e.g. by criticizing the gov as undemocratic or advocating LGBTQ rights

summary: telex.hu/english/2025...

"Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants.

Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant."

Die ARD lässt die afd live aus dem Bundestag kommentieren, wie es nach der gescheiterten Merz-Wahl weitergeht. Ganz normal.

🚨Last days to apply!🎉
summerschoolwpm.org

We're organizing another round of the Summer School for Women* in Political Methodology 🎉
summerschoolwpm.org

Our super-cool speakers include msands.bsky.social @allisonwkoh.bsky.social @melinscribe.bsky.social @rebeccakittel.bsky.social @fabiennelind.bsky.social & @indiiigo.bsky.social

📆01/05

Such an important call by @katalincseh.bsky.social to respond to Orban’s hideous Pride ban👇

Please share it widely & write your representatives. Also: no one from the @ec.europa.eu has offered more than deep concerns so far

#SeeYouAtBudapestPride 🏳️‍🌈

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

🗳️🇭🇺With every credible poll showing Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz far behind Péter Magyar’s TISZA party, talk in Hungary is shifting to whether Orbán might try to jail or ban his rival—à la Turkey. The real question now: will Hungary have free and fair elections in 2026? And would Orbán give up power?