Andreas Küpfer

⏬📽️Excited to talk about (1) studying videos from complex local meetings (w/ @mirya.bsky.social + @simko.bsky.social), (2) substantively using eye contact seeking in legislative debate videos, and (3) workflow managers to process video data (w/ @chrisguarnold.bsky.social + @pluggedchris.bsky.social)!

Upcoming 2026-05-13 | Input talk | Lion Behrens (Data Scientist & Independent Researcher) Modeling Causal Heterogeneity with Machine Learning more 2026-04-22 | Input talk | Leah von der Heyde (GESIS) AIn't Nothing But a Survey? Using Large Language Models for Coding Open-Ended Survey Responses more 2026-03-11 | Input talk | Andreas Küpfer (TU Darmstadt & University of Birmingham) Politics in Action: Studying Multimodal Data from Local Meetings to National Parliaments more 2026-02-25 | Input talk | Klara Müller (University of Mannheim) When Events Change Samples: Disentangling Causal Effects from Compositional Bias in Quasi-Experimental Designs more

▶️ Social Science Data Lab: Spring 2026 Events

Four input talks by great researchers (see below ⤵️)!

🗓️ Details & Zoom:
socialsciencedatalab.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/page/events/

👥 Organizers:
@rubac.bsky.social,
@denis-cohen.bsky.social and Alexander Wenz

Congrats!

BJPolS abstract of a scholarly article discussing the influence of legislators' gender on the questioning behaviors in parliamentary activities.

NEW -

Gender Bias in Legislative Oversight: Do Parliamentarians Control Women Ministers More Tightly than Men Ministers? - https://cup.org/45Rm9Z6

- @corinnakroeber.bsky.social, @lenastephan.bsky.social, @sarahdingler.bsky.social & @camilamontero.bsky.social

#OpenAccess

8th Annual Conference 2026 - The COMPTEXT Association 8th ANNUAL COMPTEXT Conference 2026                     Call for papers: 8th ANNUAL COMPTEXT Conference 2026 Welcome to COMPTEXT 2026 — the Eighth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on the...

The submission deadline for papers and workshop proposals to #COMPTEXT2026 is this Friday, January 16th. We are looking forward to receiving your proposals. Feel free to share the news and circulate shorturl.at/gRg0p #sharingiscaring #sciencerocks See you in Brum, 23–25 April 2026!

How to analyse audio, text, and video data for more than 15,000h of German parliamentary speech? For our #DFG project, we spent last year building compute infrastructure. Pushing ▶️ on the server soon. First results in summer #PoliticalScience #ComputationalSocialScience #sciencerocks #watchthisspace

Thank you, @marcratkovic.bsky.social! See you soon!

Thank you! 🙌

Thank you, Tom! 🎉

Danke, Elias! Und Danke fürs Koautor sein! 🥳🥳

Danke!! 🙏

Danke, Thomas!

🥳

4️⃣ The final chapter of my dissertation is a single-authored article on open science and the replicability of (sensitive) social media studies, published @polanalysis.bsky.social.

Link to the study: doi.org/10.1017/pan....

3️⃣ "The politics of seeking and avoiding discourse in parliament" (already published @ejprjournal.bsky.social) with @eliaskoch.bsky.social studies the emergence and avoidance of two-stage interactions between political actors.

Link to the study: doi.org/10.1111/1475...

2️⃣ Building on the idea of alignment in audiovisual data, the second, single-authored chapter studies how and when different MPs seek eye contact with competitors as a signal of confrontation: "Look Who’s Confronting: Opposition Status, Gender, and the Far Right"

1️⃣ A working paper of the first dissertation study on how "Alignment Helps Make the Most of Multimodal Data" (with @chrisguarnold.bsky.social) is available online.

Link to the preprint:
doi.org/10.48550/arX...

The dissertation centres on the analysis of multimodal (text/video/audio) political communication, verbal and nonverbal interaction seeking and avoidance between politicians, as well as the replicability of social media studies.
Please find an overview of the studies below ⤵️

Also, many thanks to my committee (Thomas Gschwend, Marc Ratkovic, and Christian Stecker) for their excellent feedback on my dissertation, as well as to the co-authors of two of my dissertation studies, @eliaskoch.bsky.social and Chris Arnold!

🎊 I successfully defended my PhD at the University of Mannheim yesterday! Huge thanks to my fantastic supervisors, Christian Stecker (@pluggedchris.bsky.social) and Chris Arnold (@chrisguarnold.bsky.social), for guiding and supporting me every step of the way!
#multimodaldata #politicalbehaviour

🚨 Postdoc in Comparative Politics/Public Opinion (2 years)

We’re hiring a 100% Postdoc at the University of Greifswald.

✨ What makes this job special: Two full years to focus on research (no teaching, no admin overload) embedded into an International Research Training Group

The Call for Papers and Panels for #COMPTEXT2026 in Birmingham (23-25 April) is out; feel free to circulate: shorturl.at/gRg0p!
Deadline: January 16!

Cover page of the article. "Affective States: Cultural and Affective Polarization in a Multilevel-Multiparty System" by Dylan Paltra, Marius Sältzer and Christian Stecker. "Affective Polarization—the growing mutual dislike among partisan groups—has been identified as a major concern in democracies. Although both economic and cultural ideological divides contribute to ideological polarization, their affective consequences can differ. This paper argues that cultural polarization becomes especially consequential when mobilized by far-right parties. Using data from 116 elections in Germany’s 16 states (1990-2023), we combine more than 550 state-level manifestos with more than 150,000 survey responses to examine how party polarization translates into voter affect. Our analyses show that both economic and cultural polarization increase affective divides, but cultural disagreements fuel hostility only in the presence of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Acting as a cultural entrepreneur, the AfD amplifies the emotional impact of cultural divisions such as immigration, employing affective rhetoric and provoking strong rejection from other parties and voters. These findings highlight the catalytic role of far-right parties in transforming ideological competition into affective polarization."

🚨Publication Alert!
My first first-author publication with @msaeltzer.bsky.social and @pluggedchris.bsky.social is out in @polbehavior.bsky.social, which began as my bachelor's thesis. We study how party polarization shapes affective polarization—with a particularly important role of the AfD. (1/7)🧵

⏰ Two weeks left to apply for SekMethoden 2026 — the annual meeting of the DVPW Section "Methods of Political Science"!

⬇️ See below for the CfP and link to the application portal.

@gessler.bsky.social @lukrudolph.bsky.social @donyhu.bsky.social @dvpw.bsky.social

In a talk at the @hertieschool.bsky.social, @ankuepfer.bsky.social, explored how eye contact functions as a form of confrontation in parliamentary settings, and what this reveals about party competition, gender dynamics, & interactions with the far right.

Read: www.hertie-school.org/en/datascien...

Join us tomorrow!
@hertieschool.bsky.social
@ankuepfer.bsky.social

Join us at the last Data Science Brown Bag this year for a talk by @ankuepfer.bsky.social “Look Who’s Confronting: Opposition Status, Gender, & the Far Right.”
He’ll share insights on how politicians use eye contact as confrontation in parliamentary debates.
👉 www.hertie-school.org/en/datascien...

Brave New Data Access World: What the Digital Services Act (DSA) Means for Researcher Access to Digital Platforms Hybrid event [A5, 6, Room A231 + Zoom] Dezember 03, 2025, 13:45-15:15 Abstract The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) marks a turning point for the study of digital platforms by establishing a legal framework for researcher access to platform data, including from major social media companies. Article 40 of the DSA outlines how researchers can request such access, opening unprecedented possibilities for empirical investigations into the digital public sphere. Yet, the practical implementation of this right to data access raises important challenges. Questions of eligibility, the scope of accessible data, and the ethical and technical standards required for secure processing are central to understanding what this new regime will mean in practice. This talk provides an overview of the DSA’s data-access provisions, explains their relevance for the research community, and discusses what opportunities—and limitations—emerge for studying systemic risks, algorithmic effects, and platform governance. It reflects on early experiences with Article 40 implementation and considers what it will take to build a sustainable infrastructure for independent, policy-relevant research on digital platforms in Europe. Presenter Jakob Ohme leads the interdisciplinary "Digital News Dynamics" research group at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin, exploring the impact and dissemination of professional journalism on digital platforms versus other sources like influencers or AI. His work emphasizes the changes digital and mobile communications bring to news consumption and political engagement, particularly across different generations. Jakob Ohme is dedicated to advancing digital methodologies in political communication and journalism research, notably through the innovative use of digital trace data. He's also a Co-Principal Investigator in the #DSA40 Collaboratory, foc…

🚨 Upcoming: "Brave New Data Access World: What the Digital Services Act (DSA) Means for Researcher Access to Digital Platforms"

👤 @dscheykopp.bsky.social (Weizenbaum Institute Berlin)

🗓️ Wed, December 3, 13:45-15:15 CET

📺 Register for the live stream: us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

University of Birmingham photo

SAVE THE DATE! We are pleased to announce that the 8th COMPTEXT Conference will take place at the Institute of Data and AI (lnkd.in/ebN7za_Q) of the University of Birmingham, 23-25 April 2026, with @chrisguarnold.bsky.social serving as the lead local organiser. Call for Papers coming soon!

Delighted to announce we are advertising our first academic post in the Centre for Advanced Social Science Methods (CASSM). The position is Associate Professor in Politics, Technology and Computational Social Science and is joint with Politics, the Oxford Internet Institute, and Reuben College 1/n