Steven Denney

More than a third of Lucid (now Cint) respondents in 2019 were "professional" respondents according to a new article in @polanalysis.bsky.social , and that's the conservative estimate

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

35 years ago, on October 3, 1990, Germany was reunified. Just two months later, voters in the former GDR went to the polls in the first free federal election since the Weimar era. Despite decades of socialist dictatorship, East German voting behavior displayed marked regional differences. Thread🧵

🚨 New paper in @thejop.bsky.social

Why do politicians often misperceive what citizens' policy positions are?

@simonotjes.bsky.social and I study ~10,000 estimates of public opinion by politicians in Denmark & the Netherlands to uncover the sources of these (mis)perceptions

Thread 🧵1/10

Now on FirstView!

This study examines how Japan’s graying influences immigration attitudes–offering insight the country’s unique stance on immigration and the political future of aging Western democracies.

#polisky #immigration #academisky

doi.org/10.1017/S104...

This is a really cool paper on the socialisation effects of studying at University. Surprisingly, the effects (moving in a leftward, liberal direction) are biggest for STEM students and those who move away from home to study, attend a single campus uni, and who live in ‘university towns’ and London.

🚨 New working paper! 🚨
@grattonecon.bsky.social and I just completed the first draft of "The Rise and Fall of Technocratic Democracies". Excited to present it in Munich this week—thanks to Laura Seelkopf, Christoph Knill & others for hosting us! 🧵👇
▶️ Motivation
Many democracies have undergone a

This paper explores how democratization can reconstitute understandings of nationhood by empowering a new class of “storytelling elites”---those with the institutional and rhetorical resources to challenge the state’s narrative. In this critical juncture, storytelling elites may challenge (1) the bottom-line premise or (2) the sideline elements of the prevailing national narrative. Their narrative strategies, in turn, shape how the terms of the debates are redefined and structured under democracy. I develop this argument through a comparison of “One Korea” and “One China” narratives in postwar South Korea and Taiwan. Using interpretive process tracing of archival and other qualitative data, I find that democracy helped entrench “One Korea” narratives in South Korea but displace “One China” narratives in Taiwan, as new storytelling elites challenged dominant narratives of “oneness” to varying degrees. This resulted in increasingly divergent support for unification as a national objective, with enduring implications for peace.

I’m happy to share this paper in @cpsjournal.bsky.social on democracy and national narratives, with insights from South Korea and Taiwan. It is part of a special issue on postcolonial narratives with @paulschuler.bsky.social, @deandulay.bsky.social, + others.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

🤙

4. Lee inherits a mandate (or at least an implied demand) to bring stability but faces an uncertain policy and political environment. Deep challenges remain: intensifying elite and popular polarization, weakened institutional guardrails, and an increasingly fraught geopolitical situation.

3. The political landscape is increasingly polarized. The left is organizationally unified but struggles to articulate a forward-looking agenda; the right is fractured and reactive. Both camps are shaped more by opposition than by coherent policy visions at present.

2. Lee is not ideologically transformative; he’s strategic and clearly understands power dynamics. His positioning draws on some anti-elite populism and affective polarization to shore up support among progressive partisans.

1. Lee’s rise doesn’t signal progressive (or democratic) renewal. It highlights institutional asymmetry: the Democratic Party remains electorally disciplined, but leadership on both sides has become more personalized and less programmatically anchored, especially in the wake of Yoon's removal.

My comprehensive overview of Lee Jae-myung's return to power, focusing on domestic political considerations. Some key takeaways and additional considerations given Lee's victory. 👇

Bottom line: We're not seeing a rupture with the past. It’s a reordering of priorities based on longer-term trends. Pressure from domestic polarization and regional instability will further motivate a more pragmatic agenda. What form the new government's FP takes and whether it "succeeds" is TBD.

4. Engagement with Japan remains fraught, but even here, Lee signals selective cooperation. Historical memory still matters, but security coordination and economic resilience increasingly weigh in.

3. Alliance thinking has evolved. For today’s progressives, the U.S.-ROK alliance is a tool, not a constraint. Lee frames it as an asset for economic security and industrial policy, not an ideological yoke, although Trump is of course a wild card.

2. Traditional pillars of progressive statecraft --ethnonational engagement with the North, alliance ambivalence, and anti-Japan postures -- are less sturdy and are unlikely to anchor progressive foreign policy. North Korea is a risk to manage.

1. Lee Jae-myung’s win is not a return to the Sunshine era. Progressive foreign policy in Korea has undergone structural recalibration: security pragmatism and economic statecraft now define the new baseline.

The most comprehensive account yet of how South Korea’s progressive bloc has evolved in the foreign policy domain -- and what Lee Jae-myung’s election victory tells us about changes to its foreign policy tradition. A must-read. The key takeaways, as I see them. 👇

High Speed Internet and the Widening Gender Gap in Adolescent Mental Health: Evidence from Spanish Hospital Records* We exploit variations in fiber optic (FTTH) deployment to assess the impact of high-speed internet access on adolescent mental health. Our findings re…

My new article shows that high-speed internet access worsens adolescent mental health, especially for girls. It increases screen time, reduces sleep, studying, and socializing, and encourages online coping with emotional distress. @wuvienna.bsky.social
Available at the Journal of Health Economics 👇

You can find the current manuscript, presentation from SoKEN conference, and project material at my Github: github.com/scdenney/gua...

Feedback most welcome.

We don't quite know *why* we see support for, say, guardianship democracy in South Korea; the observational data limits us here. But I'm in the process of designing a conjoint experiment that will test competing explanations.

Interestingly, in South Korea, younger cohorts (incl. democratic) are relatively supportive of strongman guardianship, contrary to expectations. This challenges the idea that democracy consolidates support over time. As shown in the paper, we see this in Taiwan, too.

Then, guardianship democracy support:

-Technocratic (Dahlian): Widely accepted in 🇰🇷 & 🇹🇼, stable over time
-Military: Endorsed in 🇵🇭, rising in 🇰🇷, rejected in 🇯🇵
-Strongman: Rapid growth in 🇰🇷 & 🇹🇼; ~50% support in latest wave
-🇯🇵 again stands apart: low across all variants

High-level summary:

-Democracy: strong support across all cases
-Technocracy: widely accepted, but stable over time
-Military rule: high in 🇵🇭 & 🇮🇩; low but rising in 🇰🇷
-Strongman rule: high & increasing in 🇰🇷 and 🇹🇼
-🇯🇵 Japan is the outlier—high democratic support, minimal elite-rule backing

Using events like the Yoon martial law declaration and world trends as motivation, I ask: To what extent do citizens endorse both democracy and elite-led alternatives?

Using longitudinal WVS data (1995-2020), I map support for three types of "guardianship democracy" across six Asian democracies.

I am presenting and participating today at the 8th Annual Meeting of the Social Science Korean Studies Network in Europe (SoKEN), hosted by @hannes-mosler.bsky.social at the University of Duisburg-Essen. My presentation explores support for 'guardianship democracy' in East and Southeast Asia.

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Ward, P., & Denney, S. (2025). Partisan voters in party systems with ephemeral parties: Evidence from South Korea. Party Politics. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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Our piece also connects with Hur & Yeo's (2023) article on nationalist polarization. Partisan voters in South Korea hold coherent policy preferences, especially in foreign and security policy: the very domains most saturated by nationalist competition.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Our piece connects well with Cheong and Haggard's (2023) recent article in Democratization on political polarization.

They, too, find that partisans are sorting on left/right issues, especially but not only regarding North Korea and the ROK-US alliance.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...