@tboeggild.bsky.social
Political scientist | Associate Professor, @AarhusUni | DFF Research leader | Political behavior, distrust, polarization, social media
Title page of article "Electoral Hope" in journal Political Studies.
I have a new article out at @polstudies.bsky.social. In "Electoral Hope", I make the case that supposedly irrational "wishful thinking" is actually a crucial part of how voters make rational sense of their role in democracies.
OA link: doi.org/10.1177/0032...
We built the simplest possible social media platform. No algorithms. No ads. Just LLM agents posting and following.
It still became a polarization machine.
Then we tried six interventions to fix social media.
The results were… not what we expected.
arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385
Just out at @polbehavior.bsky.social w/Carey Stapleton:
Voting by mail has the upside of boosting correct voting.
When people vote by mail rather than in-person, they are more likely to choose the presidential candidate best aligned with their preferences.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Jennifer Gaudette: "Polarization in police union politics"
"a new dataset of police union endorsements in every mayoral election in US cities w/ pop >180k, 2011-2022...endorsements have sig negative fx on incumbent vote share in liberal cities"
Open Access! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Sectors that are more exposed to LLMs experienced significant increases in wages and employment following ChatGPT’s release.
06.08.2025 16:45 — 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 2 📌 0🌐 International Organizations increasingly use social media.
📡 We used Twitter/X data to show when how their problem framings about #climate linkages spread. We show how technical and emotional framings affect how climate-development and climate-disaster linkages travel. #polisky #Academicsky
"Autocracies overstate yearly GDP growth by approximately 35%."
05.08.2025 13:38 — 👍 464 🔁 148 💬 13 📌 7
🚨 New working paper! 🚨
After the 2024 election, it seemed like Republicans' views of the economy improved more than Dems' dropped. I began to wonder... as an extension of issue ownership, do voters see Republican-led economies as better?
osf.io/preprints/os...
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
And Published!!!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
The Moral Dilution effect. Including non-diagnostic (irrelevant) information leads to less extreme evaluations of moral character.
Abstract of the article "The political life cycle and electoral mobilisation among immigrant-origin and native citizens during the 2021 German election" by Achim Goerres, Jonas Elis and Sabrina Jasmin Mayer. Published online first in West European Politics.
Table 1, displaying the political life cycle with three phases.
Figure 1, displaying the coefficient plot for three dependent variables: political interest (left panel), propensity to vote (middle panel), ease of voting (right panel).
Table 4, displaying the overview for hypotheses and results.
Immigrant-origin voters & native behave the same, but have different experiences across the political life cycle.
New research @wepsocial.bsky.social by @emppolitikwiss.bsky.social Jonas Elis & @sabrinajmayer.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1080/0140...
🔎Check out this recent article in @cpsjournal.bsky.social:“War-Time Military Service Can Affect Partisan Preferences” by Anna Getmansky and Chagai M. Weiss: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
#polisky
August is National Immunization Awareness Month 💉 in the US!
In POQ, Joan Barceló and coauthors show expert endorsements, not politicians' pleas, prompt people to get their shots.
Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...
title: Informal (De-)Regulation in the Marketplace of Ideas abstract: Democratic societies face tradeoffs regarding the production, acquisition, and exchange of information and ideas. On the one hand, they benefit from institutions that reduce the transaction costs citizens must pay to acquire reliable information they can use to pursue their goals; on the other hand, those institutions impose conformity costs on citizens’ belief systems. This has traditionally placed civil institutions such as the media, the scientific community, and political parties in the role of informal regulators, which set norms regarding the (combinations of) beliefs citizens should or should not express in lieu of the government setting rules regarding the beliefs citizens can or cannot express. I argue that the interaction of heightened political sectarianism with changes in the structure of the public sphere have weakened these institutions and altered the informal regulations that govern the proverbial “marketplace of ideas.” This framework illuminates recent phenomena of scholarly concern – namely, the health of the political information environment and the evolution of contemporary political ideologies.
new working paper: osf.io/7v4zj
tl;dr: taking the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor seriously requires taking the nuances of actually-existing markets seriously, which means thinking about tradeoffs between transaction costs and conformity costs. applied to misinfo and ideological belief systems.
🚨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
James Tilley & Sara Hobolt's newest publication finds that narcissistic personalities fuel affective polarization in the UK. Narcissism predicts both loyalty to in-groups and hostility to out-groups, deepening political divides.
#AffectivePolarization
Read more:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🚨📝 New publication: Svenja Schäfer w/ Lea Gorski and PolCom members @hannahgreber.bsky.social + @solecheler.bsky.social explored whether solutions are effective in sustainability communication and examined the attribution of responsibility through an experiment. 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/1751...
29.07.2025 09:58 — 👍 2 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
We have a JOP article about how swifties ~randomly denied tickets to the eras tour due to website allocation errors changed their views on related policies
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
"Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution"
Our new article is out in @science.org today
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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:
Wow.
Research findings with p-values marginally less than 0.05 attract 60 to 110% higher Altmetric scores than those with p-values marginally above 0.05.
p-hacking means more popular attention!
p-hacking FTW!
New research by Andrew Janusz, Patrick Silva and Andrea Junqueira finds that electing women or Afro-Brazilian mayors doesn’t boost similar candidacies for local office. Representation isn’t enough, systemic barriers still hold aspiring leaders back.
Read more:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Super excited (and relieved!) to see this paper finally published.
Both men and women politicians experience incivility and, overall, the more famous they are, the more abuse they receive. BUT women in Europe receive uncivil tweets even when they're not well known
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
1/
What does the social fabric of an entire country look like?
We built a nation-scale social network of Denmark — 7.2 million people, 1.4 billion ties, 14 years of data.
Here’s what we found 👇
📄 doi.org/10.1038/s415...
#NetworkScience #Sociology
Our recent paper on partisan cheerleading / faultfinding in public opinion surveys:
29.07.2025 19:12 — 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Our information diet is shaped by a tiny sliver of humanity whose job, identity, or obsession is to post constantly
Consuming too much of this diet can distort our perceptions, manipulate our emotions, and fuel intergroup conflict
www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/how-social...
Screenshot of study abstract titled “Does threat increase conservatism?” summarizing three large U.S. experiments (Ns = 1000, 889, 843) testing threat effects on ideology. Despite successful threat manipulations, no effects are found on conservatism or personality × threat interactions. Concludes field should move beyond threat-based explanations.
Bar plots from three studies testing effects of threat on ideology. Each plot shows coefficient estimates for two threat conditions vs. control across ideological outcomes. Study 1 shows null effects on global ideology, healthcare, and economic policy. Study 2 adds measures like Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), also showing no threat effects. Study 3 adds race threat and race policy; again, no consistent significant effects.
Two panels of coefficient plots from Studies 2 and 3 showing threat effects on specific policy attitudes (e.g., abortion, immigration, guns). Each dot represents a treatment effect estimate vs. control. Across dozens of items, no consistent ideological shifts emerge in response to unemployment, healthcare, or race threats.
Interaction plots from all three studies testing if personality (openness, conscientiousness) moderates threat effects on ideology. Across economic, global, and healthcare ideology—as well as RWA and SDO—no consistent threat × personality interactions emerge. One weak effect in Study 2 flagged for negative bias, but generally null.
Experimental manipulation of threat exposure has a null effect on ideological conservatism, finds @abbycassario.bsky.social
et al. osf.io/preprints/ps...
Even in times of sociocultural conflict, a progressive left electorate is more averse to sociocultural *and* socioeconomic inequalities than (far) right voters.
New paper with @siljahausermann.bsky.social Palmtag @tabouchadi.bsky.social @stefwalter.bsky.social Berkinshaw
tinyurl.com/d42wyb79
1/n
New paper
Terrorism threat predicts conservative reactions, via anger (not fear)
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
I wonder, is this the "new conservatism"?
That is, in the past, might rightward shifts been more fear-based, but are now more anger-based?
@johnjost.bsky.social, any thoughts?
😃That feeling when your first PhD student gets her first solo-authored peer-reviewed publication.😃
In "Moral Hazard or State Capacity? U.S. Military Assistance and Political Violence in Pakistan", @shahbanoijaz.bsky.social shows how US military aid to Pakistan reduces but also displaces violence.
