Domantas Undzėnas

Welcome to the team! We are happy to have you!

Very glad that our first DEMNORM paper found such a great home at @thejop.bsky.social. If you’re interested in the role of social desirability in online surveys, check out the thread and paper below ⬇️

Rallied by thy neighbor: how minority spatial concentration increases voter turnout | The Journal of Politics: Vol 0, No ja

New paper out in the @thejop.bsky.social with @rafaelahlskog.bsky.social & @grahn.bsky.social

Your neighbours shape your politics — but can living near people like *cause* higher turnout?

We studied 20,000+ queer individuals across the entire Swedish population to find out

doi.org/10.1086/740816

Excited to kick off the @mzes-ssdl.bsky.social Spring series 🙌

I’ll talk about different threats to causal inference in quasi-experimental designs and share hands-on tools to tackle common biases.

Hybrid event, so happy to see non-Mannheim folks joining on Zoom as well!

🗓️ Feb 25th, 1.45pm CET

What’s a multiverse good for anyway? Julia M. Rohrer, Jessica Hullman, and Andrew Gelman Multiverse analysis has become a fairly popular approach, as indicated by the present special issue on the matter. Here, we take one step back and ask why one would conduct a multiverse analysis in the first place. We discuss various ways in which a multiverse may be employed – as a tool for reflection and critique, as a persuasive tool, as a serious inferential tool – as well as potential problems that arise depending on the specific purpose. For example, it fails as a persuasive tool when researchers disagree about which variations should be included in the analysis, and it fails as a serious inferential tool when the included analyses do not target a coherent estimand. Then, we take yet another step back and ask what the multiverse discourse has been good for and whether any broader lessons can be drawn. Ultimately, we conclude that the multiverse does remain a valuable tool; however, we urge against taking it too seriously.

New preprint! So, what's a multiverse analysis good for anyway?>

With @jessicahullman.bsky.social and @statmodeling.bsky.social

juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...

Join us for this year‘s Summer School for Women* in Political Methodology at @mzesunimannheim.bsky.social. Applications are open until March 1.

partycoloR is now on CRAN! Started as a simple idea 6 years ago, now it's a full-featured package. Extract party colors and logos from Wikipedia with one line of code. It's already powering ParlGov Dashboard.

install.packages("partycoloR")

stop using AI to do your research. it hallucinates too often. if you want an answer to something, post something arrogant on the appropriate subreddit. something like: "this item performs 10% better than everything else. only idiots deny this." this will bait nerds into doing your research for you.

📣 Apply Now: Be part of the GESS 📣

🎓 #ApplyNow to our fully funded doctoral programs beginning Fall 2026!

📊 #Business
📊 #Economics
📊 #SocialSciences

Application Deadlines:
📬 Early: 15 Jan 2026
📬 Final: 31 March 2026

🔗 Don’t miss your chance to apply via our Online Application Portal:

Just published in @bjpols.bsky.social: @sergipardos.bsky.social and I show that inter-regional moves in pursuit of employment security reduce individual worries about immigration—a mobility pattern that, in the aggregate, reinforces spatial polarization in anti-immigration sentiment. cup.org/3XiB6yD

🚨 Job Alert! Postdoc in POLITICAL TEXT ANALYSIS in the MULTIREP project

You do quant text analysis? You are interested in political representation? Enjoy working in teams? Would like to live in a great city? Consider joining us in Vienna!

⏱️ Apply by 15/12/2025

wratil.eu/files/MULTIR...

1/4 🧵

GESS expands doctoral programme: New track in social data science to start in 2026 |

📣 New Social Data Science doctoral track launching in 2026 at our Center for Doctoral Studies in Social and Behavioral Sciences (CDSS)!
Applications open mid-November 2025.
ℹ️ www.uni-mannheim.de/gess/apply/admission-requirements/for-cdss/
#PhD #DoctoralStudies #DataScience #SocialStudies

abstract

Happy to share that our paper on the ideological biases of international organizations is now out in the current issue of the AJPS (@ajpseditor.bsky.social):

dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajps...

@the-peio.bsky.social @mzesunimannheim.bsky.social @akentikelenis.bsky.social

Highlighted quotation: “As an economist, Low searched for a more precise term to describe how she and other working moms often find themselves stretched for time and energy. She came up with “the squeeze”, and it’s backed by data that shows how women often get burnt out trying to manage competing demands at home and work, especially when they are parenting young children.”

BREAKING: economist discovers “second shift,” a concept coined by sociologists almost 50 years ago; gives it new, stupider, and less explicitly labor-oriented name

Immigrants’ attitudes towards immigration: convergence towards majority views or ethnoracial polarization? After decades of research on attitudes towards immigration among the ethnic majority, scholarly interest has recently shifted to investigate these attitudes among immigrants themselves. Drawing on ...

New publication on immigrant attitudes toward immigration in 🇫🇷

We find that European origin immigrants attitudes converge with natives over time, while African and other non-European minorities -who are more discriminated against- stay pro-immigration.

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

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

Migrant Electoral Rights Dataset (1960-2020)

📊 Link to dataset: hdl.handle.net/1814/93661

📕 Link to codebook: cadmus.eui.eu/server/api/c...

💼 Link to 400 page documentation: cadmus.eui.eu/server/api/c...

For postdocs around, I can't recommend this enough! In just four weeks in Mannheim, I connected to lots of amazing young scholars, presented my research, finished writing up my dissertation and applied for my current job at LSE. MZES organized my stay so smoothly that I couldn't wish for more.

🚨 New working paper alert! 🚨

I analyse how the UK Supreme Court declaring the Rwanda Scheme unconstitutional changed individuals' political values. I find that Britons become more supportive of racial and ethnic hierarchies after the ruling.

doi.org/10.31235/osf...

A 🧵:

As this is a working paper, comments and any feedback are always welcome.

Wishing to maintain hierarchies through law as well as violently is significantly increased by the ruling. Additionally, anti-immigrant parties (Conservatives UKIP and Reform) indirectly receive an increase of voting intentions by around 6 percentage points.

I find that Britons surveyed after the ruling become significantly more socially dominant compared to the ones surveyed before the ruling. The effect is primarily driven by White Britons.

It is the Supreme Court decision on the Rwanda scheme that I use as my quasi-experimental treatment. I use an unexpected event during survey design to test how the ruling influenced people's hierarchical values measured as social dominance orientation (SDO).

I argue in the paper that the Supreme Court ruling should threaten the British public due to the Supreme Court defending the rights of a group that is perceived to be threatening.

The Rwanda Scheme was the controversial treaty between Rwanda and the UK that allowed Britain to send its asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their asylum request processed there. The UK Supreme Court decided on November 15, 2023 that this scheme is unconstitutional due to human rights concerns.

🚨 New working paper alert! 🚨

I analyse how the UK Supreme Court declaring the Rwanda Scheme unconstitutional changed individuals' political values. I find that Britons become more supportive of racial and ethnic hierarchies after the ruling.

doi.org/10.31235/osf...

A 🧵:

Dark personalities in the digital arena: how psychopathy and narcissism shape online political participation - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - Dark personalities in the digital arena: how psychopathy and narcissism shape online political participation

New research finds that people “with both high psychopathy and low cognitive ability are the most actively involved in online political engagement”

This is something I’ve observed in many political arguments online and it’s why I try to avoid online debates.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New article out in World Politcs. We analyze how different groups react to varying programs of social democratic parties. We find less trade-offs than often assumed. Generally, more left-progressive programs increase support among social democratic potentials
muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

The main takeaway from our article is: a rally 'round the European flag occured after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is best explained by Europeans seeing the security benefits of a united Europe rather than emotional attachment to the European project.

As with many UESD applications, the effect is short-lived, lasting for around 3 weeks after the start of the full-scale invasion. However, we find that the support for a united EU jumps up again after the Ukrainian victory in the battle of Kyiv, reflecting EU reliability as an ally to Ukraine.