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Max Grömping

@maxgroemping.bsky.social

Political Scientist at @griffith.edu.au, Brisbane / Assoc. Editor @democratization.bsky.social/. Interest groups, authoritarian politics, disinformation, electoral integrity, trust.

1,461 Followers  |  1,476 Following  |  38 Posts  |  Joined: 24.09.2023  |  2.1955

Latest posts by maxgroemping.bsky.social on Bluesky

Great work on democratic resilience by my @larslott.bsky.social & Aurel Croissant

01.07.2025 09:07 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Wow, Princeton UP got bamboozled into this like a travel vlogger.

30.06.2025 12:14 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0
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The Misleading Panic over Misinformation People can’t agree on how to define misinformation and its related terms, making regulation nearly impossible. Instead, free expression serves as a better tool for discovering truth.

🧵 THREAD: Why the Cato Institute’s new paper on “misinformation panic” is dangerously wrong, and why it completely misunderstands the real crisis we face.
www.cato.org/policy-analy...

27.06.2025 06:50 — 👍 1728    🔁 770    💬 84    📌 168
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Are tailored ads in political campaigns as persuasive as conventional wisdom holds? 📢

In joint work w/ @heikekluever.bsky.social we present evidence from a field experiment with the German Greens ahead of the 2024 European Elections calling this into question 🤔
#epsa2025

⏰: Friday, 16:50
📍: 0A.10

26.06.2025 08:00 — 👍 25    🔁 8    💬 0    📌 1
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🚨In PNAS🚨
The right often accuses fact-checkers of political bias
But we analyzed Community Notes on Musk's X and found posts flagged as "misleading" are 2.3x more likely to be written by Reps than Dems!
The issue is Reps sharing misinformation, not fact-checker bias...
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

17.06.2025 12:51 — 👍 349    🔁 133    💬 7    📌 12

Huge! Massive congratulations Sofia.

18.06.2025 03:37 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Check out this great work by @griffith.edu.au colleague @ammassarisofia.bsky.social on women's party engagement on the radical right.

18.06.2025 03:36 — 👍 7    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

Friends in Germany interested in #deliberative #democracy, this is THE event for you. "Can citizen councils strengthen representative democracy?".
I wish I could make it to Berlin for this one.

14.06.2025 10:30 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Re-upping this as I continue to find it helpful for normalizing rejection: I need to remember it’s the modal outcome! Plus didn’t @mirya.bsky.social have a thing about rewarding X number of rejections, as a way of marking how much you’re putting your work out there?

12.06.2025 11:28 — 👍 9    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0
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Comment Elon Musk utilise son réseau X pour faire monter l'extrême droite en Europe - RTBF Actus Voici un extrait du compte X (anciennement Twitter) de Dries Van Langenhove, ex-député Vlaams Belang condamné en 2024 à...

Here's me saying it like it is regarding Elon Musk and X as a propaganda tool that is increasingly biased towards the far right.

The article is in French - in this thread are some auto-translated excerpts from my comments. Shout out to @markandrejevic.bsky.social

www.rtbf.be/article/comm...

13.05.2025 04:32 — 👍 29    🔁 11    💬 1    📌 6
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Fake news and the election campaign - how worried should voters be? New research reveals a growing number of Australians are encountering political misinformation and disinformation in the election campaign and are worried about it.

Two in three Australians say they have encountered misinformation in the lead up to the election. How concerned should we be? Read about the results of our recent survey w @acarson.bsky.social theconversation.com/fake-news-an...

02.05.2025 09:19 — 👍 4    🔁 5    💬 0    📌 0

Congrats, Roman!

01.05.2025 09:53 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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🚨 New book alert!

Policy Preparation Inside the European Commission is out with OUP @oxfordacademic.bsky.social

It’s about the behind-the-scenes stage of EU policymaking that shapes everything—yet rarely gets the spotlight: how the Commission prepares its proposals.

Link: doi.org/10.1093/9780...

01.05.2025 08:39 — 👍 54    🔁 20    💬 3    📌 1

What a well-argued thread about the benefits of semi parliamentarism.

24.04.2025 18:50 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

It's exactly like the real time diaries of people witnessing the Nazi takeover in '33... as he says in the first post.
Trying make sense of the madness as ot unfolds.

23.04.2025 09:11 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

I highly recommend following @adamprz.bsky.social's substack.

23.04.2025 09:08 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0
PAIR Methods Summer School 2025 PAIR Methods Summer School 2025

My department at Southampton is offering a 2 day summer school June 23-24 on “Declining democratic health: Methods for diagnosis, treatment and recovery.” Not only is this free to attend, but travel support may be available. Spots are limited.

www.southampton.ac.uk/politics/new...

20.04.2025 08:33 — 👍 44    🔁 21    💬 1    📌 0

Congrats, @breznaunate.bsky.social @emrinke.bsky.social @kunkakom.bsky.social and team. Taking part in this project was not only eye-opening in terms of #metascience but also great fun. Even with shared data and code, reproducibility is not a given. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

14.04.2025 10:38 — 👍 7    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 0

What a fantastic opportunity to talk with Alex Fischer and Selen Ercan about the role of research for democratic practice. I learned about communicating democracy research for better impact + suggested we listen to scholars of #authoritarianism to address the current moment @deldemucan.bsky.social

06.04.2025 06:38 — 👍 5    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 0
13.03.2025 12:29 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Exhibit #1099: The most dangerous disinformation isn’t spread by anonymous accounts on the internet—it’s the disinformation crafted & amplified by elites through legacy media. When those in power distort facts, they shape public perception & influence policy on a scale no anonymous troll ever could.

12.03.2025 06:27 — 👍 60    🔁 17    💬 0    📌 0
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Real chilling effects A extraordinary pattern of government censorship and threats to speech

New, from me: you were told that the threats to free speech came from wokeness. Some compared it to Maoist China.

Now we are witnessing government power being used to silence dissent and censor ideas. Now we know what real society-wide chilling effects look like. 🧵
open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

09.03.2025 17:39 — 👍 4378    🔁 1733    💬 115    📌 123

!!
"you can’t fact check your way to a win in this kind of frame game. You have create alternative frames, support people in telling stories that resonate with those frames, and make sure those stories are heard"

26.02.2025 03:22 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
I want to paint a picture of what scholarship is like when autocracy has taken hold, based on experiences from the 20th century. Specifically, I want to map the spectrum of choices—ethical, professional, and intellectual—available to scholars under autocracy. First, a disclaimer: I am not a historian, not even a historian of science. I am a cognitive psychologist. But I was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in East Germany, studied Psychology at Moscow State University and then did my PhD and worked at Humboldt University in East Berlin. That makes me one of a vanishing breed of those who remember what academia was like under the 20th-century autocracies behind the Iron Curtain.

I want to paint a picture of what scholarship is like when autocracy has taken hold, based on experiences from the 20th century. Specifically, I want to map the spectrum of choices—ethical, professional, and intellectual—available to scholars under autocracy. First, a disclaimer: I am not a historian, not even a historian of science. I am a cognitive psychologist. But I was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in East Germany, studied Psychology at Moscow State University and then did my PhD and worked at Humboldt University in East Berlin. That makes me one of a vanishing breed of those who remember what academia was like under the 20th-century autocracies behind the Iron Curtain.

When the autocratic past becomes frighteningly relevant: Vera Kempe, one our panelists at today's workshop on Science under Autocracy www.scibeh.org/events/works... has recorded her experiences in USSR and East Germany here: substack.com/home/post/p-.... She offers some recommendations, too.

25.02.2025 08:43 — 👍 50    🔁 25    💬 3    📌 3
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IN NEW ISSUE: What explains interest group prominence in parliamentary speech? D Halpin, @timothyjgraham.bsky.social, @bertfraussen.bsky.social, @maxgroemping.bsky.social & Z Zhou argue it's more aligned with policy agendas than partisanship or ideology: https://buff.ly/3EL7Kmz (OPEN ACCESS)

19.02.2025 15:42 — 👍 2    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 0
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Everyday Authoritarianism is Maddening and Stupid Eight years ago, I wrote a post on this blog entitled “Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable.” A slightly edited version did some numbers when it appeared at Vox as “L…

Everyday authoritarianism is mostly boring and tolerable, but it is always maddening and stupid

16.02.2025 19:25 — 👍 101    🔁 32    💬 3    📌 4
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The Path to American Authoritarianism What comes after democratic breakdown.

"U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration"

Levitsky & Way analyse the capture of the US state in comparative perspective. By far the best read on what's going on.

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

16.02.2025 11:22 — 👍 4    🔁 3    💬 1    📌 0
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As Vance 'lectures' Europe on free speech, it is good to be reminded that the United States ranks 55 (!) on the World Press Freedom Index.

The top 10 countries are ALL in Europe.

#journalism #democracy #freepress

rsf.org/en/index

16.02.2025 08:59 — 👍 1975    🔁 883    💬 46    📌 42
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Curious about targeting strategies in the 2025 German elections? 🗳️
favstats.github.io/de25/targeti...

Updated daily, my dashboard tracks how much € German parties spend on targeted ads. For example 1M on “lookalike” audiences to reach people similar to a pre-defined audience (often supporters). 📊

14.02.2025 07:17 — 👍 75    🔁 29    💬 8    📌 3
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Opinion | How to Fix America’s Two-Party Problem Proportional representation could help restore American democracy.

Worth a read ! How to Fix America’s Two-Party Problem www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

14.01.2025 20:17 — 👍 25    🔁 9    💬 0    📌 2

@maxgroemping is following 20 prominent accounts