Lars Erik Berntzen

Twitter/X is a story on its own:

🔴 While users have become more Republican
💥 POSTING has completely transformed: it has moved nearly ❗50 percentage points❗ from Democrat-dominated to slightly Republican-leaning.

Most young men in Britain, despite popular commentary, are *not* flocking to Reform UK.

Just under 1/3 women would vote for Reform
Just over 1/3 would vote for Reform.

We *cannot* reject the null of gender gap homogeneity across cohorts.

Posting is correlated with affective polarization:
😡 The most partisan users — those who love their party and despise the other — are more likely to post about politics
🥊 The result? A loud angry minority dominates online politics, which itself can drive polarization (see doi.org/10.1073/pnas...)

Most British young men reject the far right - UK in a changing Europe Emilia Belknap and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte explain their analysis on the demographics of Reform UK voters in the UK. They argue that while the dominant narrative is that young men are the most likely ...

🚨 🆕 analysis w/ @turnbulldugarte.com: most British young men reject the far right @ukandeu.bsky.social Despite media claims, 71% of young men & 75% of young women say they’d never vote Reform UK. The gender gap exists, but it’s steady across ages—not youth-driven.
🔗 ukandeu.ac.uk/most-british...

Predicted values of support for physical partisan violence by levels of affective polarization (95 percent confidence intervals). N = ~18 000.

Predicted values of support for physical partisan violence by levels of affective polarization (95 percent confidence intervals). N = ~18 000

Levels of support for physical violence and threats against outgroup partisans, sorted by country (95 percent confidence intervals)

New chapter on affective polarization and support for political violence (open access): www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap-o...

Main takeaways: (1) Affective polarization predicts higher support for political violence at extreme levels; (2) its main effect may be expanding opportunity structures for a small subset willing to act violently. US & Brazil show highest risk.

"The Conservatives propose to deport about 5 per cent of the UK’s legal population"

"the Conservative party increasingly holds positions that are further from mainstream British public opinion than Reform"

Now out in Party Politics 🎉

Our study (@jbpilet.bsky.social)suggests that when a mainstream right-wing party signals willingness to rule with the radical right, support for the radical right rises — while the mainstream gains nothing.
👉 A legitimisation effect.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Ezra Klein's suggestion that Dems can win in red states with pro-life candidates is entirely consistent with his theory of the case as to why Democrats are underperforming. But, as @jessicavalenti.bsky.social lays out so clearly here, this is an obvious, objectively nonsensical suggestion. Quick 🧵.

Sadly, there's a lot to be said for Marina Hyde's analysis here. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Social media users adopt the toxic behaviors of ingroup members

An analysis of 7 million tweets from over 700,000 accounts finds that exposures to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity online academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...

Some notes on probability judgement – Notes from a data witch For the love of fuck, literally nobody thinks that 20% of the population is transgender. Please stop sharing that ridiculous YouGov statistic

See @djnavarro.net blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

Quirks of cognition explain why we dramatically overestimate the size of minority groups | PNAS Americans dramatically overestimate the size of African American, Latino, Muslim, Asian, Jewish, immigrant, and LGBTQ populations, leading to conce...

Agree this is an important question, and there's something to notion that misperceptions about others can drive extreme behavior incl violence ("preemptive" or otherwise). However, these numbers should be heavily qualified. Big lit on fact that humans bad at proportions: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

📢 New publication! 📢
Why do ordinary citizens participate in election violence in democracies?
Kathleen Klaus and @meganturnbull.bsky.social argue that such violence is often jointly produced by elites and citizens, enabled by threat-based narratives and social networks that legitimize violence.

Some notes on probability judgement – Notes from a data witch For the love of fuck, literally nobody thinks that 20% of the population is transgender. Please stop sharing that ridiculous YouGov statistic

See also this post by @djnavarro.net blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

I believe this kind of research has a direct bearing here, humans are generally bad at estimating shares but good at ranking (this is more common than that). Good reason to be wary of what this kind of data actually tells us: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

So many echoes from this article for US politics....

🚨New preprint🚨

osf.io/preprints/ps...

In a sample of ~2 billion comments, social media discourse becomes more negative over time

Archival and experimental findings suggest this is a byproduct of people trying to differentiate themselves

Led by @hongkai1.bsky.social in his 1st year (!) of his PhD

Some notes on probability judgement – Notes from a data witch For the love of fuck, literally nobody thinks that 20% of the population is transgender. Please stop sharing that ridiculous YouGov statistic

Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again

✨Very happy to see my paper "Attitudinal ambivalence toward multiculturalism" out on @jeppjournal.bsky.social !

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

1/8 🧵

Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Shot, chaser

Young men more likely to vote Green than Reform. Young men second most progressive group of any demographic. Combined right-wing vote barely bigger than Green vote alone for young men

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...

Warnings From Weimar Why bargaining with authoritarians fails.

Weimar "illustrates the dangerous logic of abdication: the belief that, faced with a rising threat to democracy, surrender is strategy, cooperating with an autocrat is survival, and sparing oneself or one’s party from immediate punishment is worth opening the door to long-term authoritarian rule"

Too weird not to be true? :p

Lol

Sketch - this guy is loosely inspired by packet of crumpled McDonalds fries someone had tossed away in the woods ;)

Main takeaways: (1) Affective polarization predicts higher support for political violence at extreme levels; (2) its main effect may be expanding opportunity structures for a small subset willing to act violently. US & Brazil show highest risk.

Predicted values of support for physical partisan violence by levels of affective polarization (95 percent confidence intervals). N = ~18 000.

Predicted values of support for physical partisan violence by levels of affective polarization (95 percent confidence intervals). N = ~18 000

Levels of support for physical violence and threats against outgroup partisans, sorted by country (95 percent confidence intervals)

New chapter on affective polarization and support for political violence (open access): www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap-o...

Survey results showing answers to questions about "basic orientation toward acceptable of guilt and responsibility" and "other attitudes relevant to reconstruction and rehabilitation of Germany. Highlights include (Berlin responses only) 70% saying all Germans were NOT responsible, and 59% saying the Nazi regime bears responsibility for the war, 47% saying guilt lay with the leaders, not the little people, and 35% saying individuals should always obey orders of the state without question. 44% agreed that "National Socialism was a good idea, badly carried out" not a bad idea (full wording not shown on this page, but found in report)

Just looking at surveys of Germans in Berlin during the Nuremberg trials on their attitudes about the Nazi party, no reason

First column American Zone, second column Berlin