Felix Lehmann

🚨 @haukelicht.bsky.social and I are hiring! Join the GAPED project! 👇
Postdoc (Computational Text Analysis)
🔗 www.uibk.ac.at/de/politikwi...
Predoc (Survey Experiments)
🔗 www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/en/news/deta...
🗓 Deadline: Aug 22, 2025
Please share widely! #PoliSky

EPSA have announced that they will hold a conference in July 2026.

😵‍💫 We understand that there might be some confusion about EPSS and EPSA.

👉🏽 So we thought we would clarify some things.

A short 🧵

Young men, gendered labour market competition, and opposition to gender equality policy across 27 EU countries Recent studies have shown an increasing divide in political values between young men and women, particularly regarding gender equality attitudes. In this study it is argued that this is due in part...

New publication in @wepsocial.bsky.social!

Are young men becoming more conservative?

This debate requires a) more nuance and b) theoretical explanations for often descriptive results. With Amy Alexander and Nicholas Charron, we try addressing both.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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 👇🏻

To Oppose or Not to Oppose? Strategies of Opposition Parties’ Parliamentary Support for Government Legislation | Government and Opposition | Cambridge Core To Oppose or Not to Oppose? Strategies of Opposition Parties’ Parliamentary Support for Government Legislation

🧵 New article out in @govandopp.bsky.social ! Why do opposition parties sometimes support government legislation? Should they not be, well... opposing? I analysed 75 years of parliamentary votes in 4 parliamentary democracies. Here is what I found👇🔗 cup.org/3JeLkw4

🚨Pre-print alert🚨

Research shows citizens in many Western democracies are increasingly affectively polarized––they feel warm toward their own party but quite cold toward opposing parties.

But how does it feel to “feel warmly”?
@katharinalawall.bsky.social, @mtsakiris.bsky.social & I asked.
🧵1/8

Thank you!

We have a new paper out in @jepsjournal.bsky.social, with @laiabalcells.bsky.social, @sergisme.bsky.social and Ethan vanderWilden.

We test a number of experimental treatments aimed at strengthening social norms against radical-right support, but find mostly null results.

1/3

Who’s a part(y) of this family? Only noneconomic niche parties are still responsive to partisans Foundational manuscripts examined whether niche parties and mainstream parties differed in their party-voter linkages. Specifically, they examine “mean electorate” and “partisan electorate” forms o...

Still using the party family approach to #nicheparty analysis? Don't worry, it is a valid approach when studying party issue responsiveness (but not the commies) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

New paper out @wepsocial.bsky.social!

🥡 Key Take-Away: Opposition parties seek more conflict with the government when performing poorly in the polls – especially when falling below their previous election result.

Read full 🧵 below:

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

🧵

Gràcies, Carles!

I am always positively surprised by the great work @jeppjournal.bsky.social!

I appreciate it, Mike! Your comments from 2 years ago where not in vain :)

Thanks, Jacob!

Thank you, Or!

On the whole, the article highlights the need to better understand how internal dynamics affect party behavior and party competition more broadly.
11/11

In addition, I show in this piece www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... that the combination of divisions and niche party pressures can lead mainstream parties to act out of line with unity-seeking expectation and accommodate successful niche challengers.
10/11

Caveats: Some evidence that at high levels of divisions, parties fail to avoid the issue and blur less. When an issue is highly salient in the party system, divided parties also struggle to avoid it.
9/11

Preference heterogeneity appears to be a strong predictor of salience behavior, while expert-perceived divisions predict all three behaviors. Also interesting: I find little differences between WE and CEE and only some differences between mainstream and niche parties.
8/11

I find that parties tend to behave in line with unity-seeking ambitions. Avoidance seems to be the go-to strategy for divided parties. Preference heterogeneity suffices to lower salience. On most issues, divided parties have blurrier positions. On some issues, they change divisive positions.
7/11

Following @nilssteiner.bsky.social and Matthias Mader, I use CCS data to measure preference heterogeneity. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1....
I then use updated CHES data to measure more public disagreements as perceived by experts.

6/11

I use two measure of divisions taping into different levels of the concept (see recent work by Nicole Bolleyer and @annkristinkolln.bsky.social).

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

5/11

To avoid these, parties generally seek to behave in ways that unite the party. I argue that parties 1) avoid divisive issues and 2) change + 3) blur divisive positions. I test my expectations on 260 parties from all 27 EU members (+ UK) across 8 key issues between 1999 and 2024.
4/

The consequences of appearing divided: An analysis of party evaluations and vote choice Recent advances to the theory of issue ownership suggest that voters change their impressions of parties' competencies in response to parties' experie…

Parties are complex organizations with diverse actors who often disagree over important policy matters. These divisions can have severe negative consequences, like party splits or electoral loss (see work by @zacdgreene.bsky.social and Matthias Haber. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...).
3/11

Most research focuses on how external stimuli, such as public opinion or rival parties, shape party behavior. While important, these accounts assume that parties are unitary actors and thus miss one important goal that they pursue.
2/11

Why do parties do what they do? Excited to share my 2nd dissertation paper, just published in @jeppjournal.bsky.social
In the paper, I argue that parties seek internal unity and try to keep the team together: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

1/11 🧵

I'm hiring another postdoc (research-focused, for almost 5 years) for my @erc.europa.eu project on the educational cleavage!
I'm looking for someone with strong quantitative text-analysis skills (e.g. #NLP, #LLM, etc.) to study the role of political actors in cleavage formation.

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

💣Do terrorist attacks boost support for incumbents?

➡️ A.Falcó @jordimunoz.bsky.social @robpannico.bsky.social show that in Spain, support for incumbents rose ~4pts after attacks, mostly when the incumbent was conservative and when civilians were targeted www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView