Hanna Bäck

▶️ Political Representation

👉🏽 Section chairs: @hannaeback.bsky.social
& @sopro.bsky.social

📢 Our section welcomes work that addresses representation, legislative politics, or electoral institutions, esp. research advancing our theoretical understanding + offers new empirical evidence. >>>

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Grattis! 🎊

Let’s make next year’s EPSS Political Representation section a space for rigorous scholarship, vibrant exchange, and new collaborations!

📅 EPSS 2026 submission deadline: November 7, 2025
📎 Submit here: epssnet.org/belfast-2026...

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📢 EPSS 2026 Call for Papers! @hannaeback.bsky.social and I are excited to invite submissions for the Political Representation section at EPSS 2026 in Belfast. EPSS has some exciting new panel formats this year - read on! 🧵

Do consider joining the new EPSS conference in Belfast next year! I will be chairing the section on Political Representation with Sven-Oliver Proksch @sopro.bsky.social

Please share this thread. It is important that political scientists, in Europe and across the world, understand why EPSS exists and why we are encouraging people to attend our inaugural conference, in Belfast next June.

ConflLlama: Domain-specific adaptation of large language models for conflict event classification - Shreyas Meher, Patrick T. Brandt, 2025 We present ConflLlama, demonstrating how efficient fine-tuning of large language models can advance automated classification tasks in political science research...

Shreyas Meher and Patrick T. Brandt demonstrate how state-of-the-art language models can be efficiently adapted for political event classification, achieving up to 1400% improvement in accuracy while remaining computationally accessible.

Read more here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Looking forward to present new research (with @hannaeback.bsky.social and @michaelimre.bsky.social) on the relationship between ideological polarization, coalition governance and the number of party members in the German states at the Sogang Conference on Party Activism and Democracy next week 😊

Government ideology and labour policy reform in good times and bad Which governments implement interventionist or liberalising labour policy reforms, and does the economic context matter? Drawing on the previous literature on government ideology and public policy,...

⚙️ Matthew Bergman, Wolfgang C. Mueller and @hannaeback.bsky.social on how ideology and contextual factors shape labour market reform

My ESS course 'Ideal Point Estimation, IRT, and Scaling Methods for Surveys and Behavior' returns this summer -- online and in-person, 21 July - 1 August. essexsummerschool.com/summer-schoo...

Do interpersonal relations affect coalition bargaining? @hannaeback.bsky.social, @michaelimre.bsky.social and I argue that when the Prime Minister is replaced, the incumbency advantage of a coalition will be weakened because of reduced familiarity and trust journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... 1/2

SWEPSA 2025 Welcome to SWEPSA 2025 conference, hosted by the Department of Political Science at Linnaeus University

Join us for the Annual Meeting of the Swedish Political Science Association (SWEPSA), October 1-3 in Växjö! See the call for papers here (deadline June 13):

lnu.se/en/meet-linn...

Front cover of thesis by Esther ML Calvo with an abstract figure conveying spatial movement among entities on a black background.

Today in #Lund is an academic celebration & I have the privilege to be part of examining committee for this timely PhD thesis defence by Esether ML Calvo of her work on ”rhetorical responses of mainstream parties towards a radical right party”; generous opponent is @fghjorth.bsky.social.

The supervisory team to be commended for their careful support & critique guiding Esther on her intellectual journey consisted of @hannaeback.bsky.social and Jonathan Polk

Alexander Tripp compares GenAI models (ChatGPT & Claude) with undergraduates in classifying Spanish immigration media frames. While undergraduates outperform AI by a small margin, the results show how researchers can effectively apply these tools and illustrate their pros and cons.

Read more here:

What do Germans of Russian and Turkish migration background think about sanctions against Russia? - Marc Debus, Julius Diener, Noam Himmelrath, Christian Stecker, 2025 The Russian invasion of Ukraine has significant implications not only for foreign, defence, economic and energy policies of European democracies, but also for t...

What do Germans of Russian & Turkish migration background think about sanctions against Russia? @marcdebus.bsky.social, @himmelrath.bsky.social , @dienerjulius.bsky.social & @pluggedchris.bsky.social find that respondents with a Russian or Turkish ethnic background are less in favour of sanctions.

A major challenge in performing text analyses on open-ended responses is potential measurement error in the form of misspellings. This paper provides evidence that large language models (LLMs) offer a solution to correcting misspellings in open-ended responses.

Read more: doi.org/10.1177/2053...

CHES estimates of party positions in Europe for 2024 are now available!

Big thanks to all respondents that have helped us build 25 years of CHES data on party positioning in Europe!

Are unexperienced politicians more likely to become polarizers?

MPs with less parliamentary experience, and with less prior political experience are more likely to express negativity toward outparties in their legislative speeches, by
@hannaeback.bsky.social

Elements in Gender & Politics Welcome to Cambridge Core

Finally posting to promote some excellent short monographs from the @cambridgeup.bsky.social Elements in Gender & Politics Series! My co-editor @tiffanydbarnes.bsky.social and I are proud of these books, which are FREE TO DOWNLOAD until Jan 22. Get your copy today! www.cambridge.org/core/publica...

What are language models doing when prompted to label documents by sentiment? @mlburnham.bsky.social finds that language models generally understand sentiment in terms of emotional valence rather than opinion. Read more here: doi.org/10.1177/2053...

@janschwalbach.bsky.social asseses which theoretical considerations need to be thought through preceding any (legislative) text analysis & discusses how the nested structure of legislative behavior & the data generating process influence theoretic assumptions about parliamentary behavior. Read more:

R&P editors' collection 2024 (4/4)

Can AI accurately label open-text survey responses? @jonmellon.bsky.social, @jack-bailey.co.uk, @ralphscott.bsky.social, @jamesbreckwoldt.bsky.social, @martamiori.bsky.social & P. Schedemann's results suggest LLMs may allow for greater use of open-ended questions.

R&P editors' collection 2024 (3/4)

Are digital campaigns effective in registering voters? @aslunn.bsky.social, P. John, @florianfoos.bsky.social & V. Cheng-Matsuno find digital campaigns didn't affect under-registered groups’ registrations raising questions about widely-used advertising strategies.

The editorial team of Research & Politics is excited to share the editors' collection of 2024:

Welcome to the Research & Politics Bluesky page! Please spread the word and follow us for updates on the latest articles published in R&P.

LEGISLATURES
@hannaeback.bsky.social & @marcdebus.bsky.social provide a compelling overview of the current research on the role of Ls. Starting from the principal-agent framework, they present key findings on legislative behaviour (e.g. legislative voting, speech) www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/b...

Big shoutout to Jonathan Polk and Alex Ryan, who, as new convenors of our Comparative Politics Group @comppollu.bsky.social at Lund, have organized a fantastic spring 2024 schedule of our CP Seminar Series! @hannaeback.bsky.social @robertklemmensen.bsky.social @agustingoenaga.bsky.social

Klüver, Heike, Hanna Bäck and Svenja Krauss. 2023. Coalition Agreements as Control Devices –...

If you are interested in coalition cabinets and mutual monitoring of governing parties, you should read @heikekluever.bsky.social , @hannaeback.bsky.social , and @svenjakrauss.bsky.social new book "Coalition Agreements as Control Devices".

I wrote a short 📗 review: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The comparative politics group (@comppollu.bsky.social) at Lund (@pollu.bsky.social) is stoked to have @mpovitkina.bsky.social present her fascinating paper on environmental NGOs in emerging democracies today at noon! @robertklemmensen.bsky.social @hannaeback.bsky.social @agustingoenaga.bsky.social