Mark Lutter

Poster for the “Sociological Ash Wednesday” event at the University of Cologne on 18 February 2026, 16:00–18:00, in lecture hall A2, with a background photo of the Cologne skyline and cathedral at sunset over the Rhine. Large white text announces the title “SOZIOLOGISCHER ASCHERMITTWOCH”, with green banner slogans reading “Universitäre Diskursräume” and “Zwischen Freiheit und Beschränkung”. The lower left lists a panel discussion with Claudia Diehl (Konstanz), Naika Foroutan (Berlin), Markus Ogorek (Köln), Uwe Schimank (Bremen) and Richard Traunmüller (Mannheim), moderated by Jan‑Martin Wiarda, and organisation credit to Clemens Kroneberg with a website link. The logos of the University of Cologne, the Adenauer School of Government and the WiSo Faculty’s 125‑year anniversary (1901–2026) appear at the top and bottom of the poster.

Cologne sociologist Clemens Kroneberg invites to the Sociological Ash Wednesday on 18 February at the University of Cologne.
This year’s high-calibre panel discussion focuses on how to deal with academic freedom and diversity of perspectives in universities and academic world.
bit.ly/soziologisch...

AI presents a fundamental threat to our ability to use polls to assess public opinion. Bad actors who are able to infiltrate panels can flip close election polls for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Models will also infer and confirm hypotheses in experiments. Current quality checks fail

“These findings provide clear evidence that data collected on MTurk simply cannot be trusted.”

Screenshot of the cevianlabs.io website. Banner says "Accelerating Academic Hiring", followed by The Cevian Advantage, Cevian Labs provides advanced tools to faculty and administrators to make better decisions, faster. Founded by faculty who spent years wishing for a way to automate the tedious parts of faculty hiring (summarizing CVs, tracking publications, synthesizing candidate information) and finally just built the solution we always needed. Our secure platform automates manual error-prone processes to deliver...

Super excited to announce a new venture, with @danlarremore.bsky.social : Cevian Labs cevianlabs.io provides advanced tools to accelerate faculty work in academia. Our first product CVParsa helps faculty search committees process huge piles of CVs, so they can spend more time evaluating candidates

IC2S2 2026 registration is open!
Explore the 2026 conference here ➡️ ic2s2-2026.org

✔️ Submissions open December 15th
✔️ Keynotes will be announced between now and February
✔️ Full program of selected talks and tutorials will be available in late April

Out now! Sociology in the Weimar Republic. 2 Volumes 🥳🤓 some of the structural problems and crises of Weimar society are very similar today, so that the earlier sociological analyses of these problems still remain relevant…

Fragmentation or integration? Ethnic diversity and the structural cohesion of adolescent social networks Abstract. This paper addresses a key yet untested proposition in social cohesion research: ethnic diversity fragments social networks and leads to an overa

How is ethnic diversity linked to the cohesion of social networks?

@glorenz.bsky.social & #C_Rjosk analyse >1,300 adolescent friendship networks to examine how connectivity varies with ethnic diversity, and its consolidation with gender and SES.

👉 doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcaf051

An Audit of Social Science Survey Experiments Abstract. Survey experiments have become a popular methodology for causal inference across the social sciences. We study the efficacy of survey experiment

Needed - larger samples, more realism about (the lack of) heterogeneous treatment effects:
-"less than a third of proposed hypotheses were supported... the largest predictor of positive exp. results was sample size"
-"moderation hypotheses were rarely significant"
academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

Now available online and open access! The results of our adversarial collaboration on:

Students’ motives for restricting academic freedom: Viewpoint discrimination and prosocial concerns | PNAS

@pnas.org
@nilsweidmann.bsky.social
@kunkakom.bsky.social
@drfell.bsky.social

Returning to the Venice Workshop of Analytical Sociology this week meant a lot to me--smart talks, kind people, and lots of cool ideas. Shout out to the lovely community on Bluesky @kauspurg.bsky.social @marklutter345.bsky.social @verenaseibel.bsky.social @sawalzenbach.bsky.social ...

Cool, thanks!!

Interesting, do you have a paper on this?

Screenshot der Website hinter dem Link: Cover und bibliografische Informationen zum rezensierten Buch.

Universitäten stehen heute in einem intensivierten Wettbewerb um Exzellenz. Richard Münch analysiert, wie der „akademische Kapitalismus“ Forschung, Wissen und institutionelle Dynamiken beeinflusst. @hartmutesser.bsky.social hat „Wissenschaft im Wettbewerb“ gelesen:

www.soziopolis.de/wider-die-ve...

Two AI generated images showing 1) a boy walking through a disorderly neighbourhood with graffiti and trash and 2) a boy walking through a very similar but cleaned up neighbourhood without trash ad graffiti.

Can AI-generated images work as visual vignettes in survey experiments? I argue yes - and discuss how . in my new @sscratsage.bsky.social paper: doi.org/10.1177/0894...

📊 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-...

🗳️ New study (w @jessicakuhlm.bsky.social) on AfD success in integration council elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany: AfD achieved significant results in councils elected exclusively by voters with migration backgrounds. It's not about economics—it's about political competition. (1/3)

Studying social sciences & humanities makes students more left-leaning, controlling for initial views & major preference, driven by cultural views. Implies that if all students majored in business, college–noncollege ideological gap would shrink by 1/3
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Wide Social Influence and the Emergence of the Unexpected: An Empirical Test Using Spotify Data Article: Wide Social Influence and the Emergence of the Unexpected: An Empirical Test Using Spotify Data | Sociological Science | Posted October 23, 2025

Cool paper on social influence using Spotify data

NYU Abu Dhabi is recruiting a 3-year Postdoctoral Associate for a Computational Social Science project on the coevolution of ingroup bias and group boundaries.
For more details and to apply, please visit: apply.interfolio.com/173544.

💼🔎 We are looking for a post-doctoral researcher (100%) to participate in a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF).

Find all information about the job posting here:
www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/soziologie/a...

Assistant or Associate Professor in Computational Sociology at CREST in Paris
The position is open to computational sociologists regardless of their research area. Deadline for applications: January 31, 2026. All details here: www.shorturl.at/E57le

Gender Differences in Economics Seminars (Forthcoming Article) - We assess whether men and women are treated differently when presenting their economics research. We collected data across thousands of seminars, job market talks and conferenc...

Forthcoming in the AER: "Gender Differences in Economics Seminars" by Pascaline Dupas, Amy Handlan, Alicia Sasser Modestino, Muriel Niederle, Mateo Seré, Haoyu Sheng, Justin Wolfers, and Seminar Dynamics Collective. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Analyzing 1M Spotify users, we show how “wide social influence” exposes people to content beyond their usual repertoires—decoupling collective outcomes from initial preferences. The key: partial taste overlap between senders and receivers. Too little similarity, no influence; too much, no novelty.

...and not way earlier?

Interesting, but what is the explanatory mechanism here? If the reasons for the far right shiftgo that far back, why did the shift happened more or less recently?

Knowledge lost, parity gained? COVID-19 and gender gaps in Dutch academia - Scientometrics We investigated the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic impacted long-standing gender inequalities in Dutch academia. Dutch academia is an ideal case to gain insight on exacerbated gender differentials due to COVID-19 on employees, because men and women face comparable institutional contexts and any COVID-19 impact becomes visible and measurable fast through potentially decreased yearly publications. We reconstructed the complete publishing careers up till 2022 of more than 8000 Dutch scientists who received a PhD from 1990 onwards and still had an active publication career before the pandemic started. We compared the publication dip between men and women during COVID-19. Our data allowed us to investigate whether the gendered impact of COVID-19 varied across research domains, different PhD cohorts and type of research output. We consistently find that COVID-19 did not have more severe consequences on research output for women than for men.

"We consistently find that COVID-19 did not have more severe consequences on research output for women than for men."
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

This paper by @savolainen.bsky.social is very interesting!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New article in @socresonline.bsky.social ⤵️

"Cultural Omnivorousness in the Domains of Music, Film and Literature"

Findings suggest partial overlap across cultural domains.

🔓 Read it here: doi.org/10.1177/1360...
#OpenAccess #CulturalSociology

Who talks to the prof? Gender differences in interaction with senior scholars at four academic conferences - Scientometrics The percentage of women in academia is still lower than what would be expected statistically, especially in the sciences and among faculty (tenured professors). Theories on network closure suggest tha...

Just published in Scientometrics: "Who Talks to the Prof? Gender Differences in Interaction with Senior Scholars at Four Academic Conferences." Open access: link.springer.com/article/10.1...