Ben Ginsburg Hix

It’s not “unexpected”!

Accurate predictions on small data with a tabular foundation model - Nature Tabular Prior-data Fitted Network, a tabular foundation model, provides accurate predictions on small data and outperforms all previous methods on datasets with up to 10,000 samples by a wide margin.

Just came across this paper in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Somehow missed it, but I think it’s genuinely important for social scientists - especially for anyone doing imputation or working with small, messy tabular data: a🧵

"Safeguarding data quality is no longer a single checkpoint but an end-to-end pipeline - one that reallocates substantial resources from sampling to continuous fraud monitoring"

Read our new POAL Methods Brief by @laurenleek.eu on dealing with AI bots in surveys!

Link: www.poal.co.uk/briefai.pdf

new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

"While testing one dimension at a time can yield simple results, those effects may not generalise to richer, real-world contexts."

Read our new POAL Methods Briefs on Conjoint Experiments from Thomas Robinson!

Link: www.poal.co.uk/research/met...

📊 now in English @fesonline.bsky.social:
Gender gap in voting behavior in Germany📊

It's about the “big picture” since 1953 & current trends 2021-2025.

The gender gap keeps growing, especially among the young.

-> Longer trends are continuing & partly accelerating.

library.fes.de/pdf-files/a-...

🧵/ Our major new study on young men, masculinity, and misogyny questions the extent to which Gen Z men are really more likely to hold misogynist views than older generations of men

How common are “survey professionals” - people who take dozens of online surveys for pay - across online panels, and do they harm data quality?

Our paper, FirstView at @politicalanalysis.bsky.social, tackles this question using browsing data from three U.S. samples (Facebook, YouGov, and Lucid):

Radical right accommodation really does not work.

New paper out with this exceptionally talented team
@katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk

doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Chart showing the percentage of men and women of different ages who agree with all three statements: 1. Most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them 2. Women seek to gain power by getting control over men 3. Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist The chart shows that around 5% of both men and women aged 18 agree with all three statements. Among men, this rises to around 15% among men in their 20s and 22% among 35-45 year olds, before falling back to around 12% among 55-65 year olds. Overall 16% of men and 5% of women agree with all three statements

Good news from the British Election Study: there's no sign of the reported uptick in sexism among young British men

Bad news: what's going on with middle aged men?

NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany:

Gender divide continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung sharply left.

www.ft.com/content/29fd...

New Working Paper: Teenage boys and girls in Norway are more ideologically polarized than ever. Using data for 130,000 high-schoolers over 34 years, I find that a surge in anti-feminism among boys is driving much of the recent trend.📈

Read: osf.io/preprints/os...
Findings 🧵👇

Food for thought: local restaurant diversity meets migration Food is crucial for cultural identity. Yet, do migrants bring cultural identity with them? i.e., does migration go hand-in-hand with cuisine diversity? And does food diversity perhaps bring downsides?

New blog! Food for thought: local restaurant diversity meets migration. open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

To rule or not to rule? An experimental study of the electoral ramifications of claims to (not) rule with radical right populist parties - Laura Jacobs, Jean-Benoit Pilet, 2024 In a between-subjects experiment (n = 3270) conducted in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium), we examine the electoral ramifications of claims by a ri...

Super important experimental study by @lcjacobs89.bsky.social and @jbpilet.bsky.social showing that mainstream parties signaling willingness to govern with radical right legitimize these parties with higher propensity to vote for radical right as a result
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

New Gender Update out in @ejpgjournal.bsky.social. With data from the new wave of the EES, I show a strong increase in support for the far right among young voters. Especially the share of young men who consider voting for the far right has exploded.
bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journal...