Simone Cremaschi

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨📰New WP 🚨📰
How does social housing design affect neighborhoods decades later? We study London gangs to show that postwar urban planning—specifically high-rise public housing construction—had lasting effects on gang formation
@cep-lse.bsky.social

Great!!

New year, new chapter: I’m starting a new position at @ox.ac.uk. Thrilled to join DPIR as a Departmental Lecturer and Nuffield College as an Associate Member. Looking forward to what’s ahead!

@yangyangzhou.bsky.social, @shuningge.bsky.social Naijia Liu, and I have a new (AND BETTER) draft of our paper "Liberalizing Refugee Hosting Policies withoutLosing the Vote".

Link: osf.io/preprints/os...
Comments are welcome!

🥳 New year, new publication

📑"Contested memories: the political effects of de-commemoration proposals" @jeppjournal.bsky.social

With Francesco Colombo, we study a street renaming proposal in Berlin and find -contrary to conventional wisdom- no political backlash, but a positive feedback effect.

A new paper by George Borjas—who served this past year in the Trump White House designing some of its anti-immigration policies—claims to display evidence of ideological bias among researchers who study immigration.

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

🧵 Thread—>

4. Ecological crises as accelerator of the far-right

@jksteinberger.bsky.social, Céline Keller and @simonecremaschi.bsky.social show that climate shocks hit hardest where austerity has hollowed out public services, breeding narratives of state abandonment and boosting the far-right (5/6)

A great overview of a great special issue, including our paper on the legacies of antifascist resistance in Italy.

Thank you again @laiabalcells.bsky.social @apvjustino.bsky.social @andrearuggeri.bsky.social !

I am very grateful to the QMMR editors Juan Masullo and @egocantos.bsky.social. It is an honor to be part of their last issue as editors, alongside so many thoughtful contributions.

Full issue here:
www.qmmrpublication.com/_files/ugd/7...

I hope this can be useful for PhD students approaching challenging fieldwork, or for anyone navigating uncertainty during the PhD journey.

The data I collected during those years now form the basis of my (slow-cooking) book project on labor exploitation and cooperation among marginalized migrants.

Now out in QMMR (Notes from the Field): I reflect on my PhD fieldwork in informal camps of migrant farmworkers in Italy, and on how the slow work of building trust in a challenging field environment radically reshaped my research questions and methods
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

INAS Conference 2026 - Nuffield College Oxford University

📢 Analytical sociology is coming home!

Call 4 INAS26 is open

🌍 1-3Jul26 @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social and @sociologyoxford.bsky.social (☔)

☢️ Deadline: 1Feb26

🦹 Organisers: @aksoyundan.bsky.social , @kasimirdederichs.bsky.social, D Kretschmer, @awaldendorf.bsky.social

Info: tinyurl.com/yc2tusjx

screenshot of my post

Big new blogpost!

My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.

--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

The geography of the party on the ground: Local branches in Italy and Sweden in the late twentieth century The idea that the presence of Western European political parties at grassroots level rose and fell in the twentieth century is central to some of the …

🎁 Christmas has come early for @ammassarisofia.bsky.social & me with the publication of our article "The geography of the party on the ground: Local branches in Italy and Sweden in the late twentieth century" in @politicalgeography.bsky.social:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

💪

Agree with much of what Cyrus says in his blog post and the comments below.

I'd add that some of the best recent work in poli sci is mixed methods, and uses a combo of observational data, experiments/quasi-experiments, and in-depth interviews/case studies to answer a puzzle from multiple angles.

Our paper just got accepted in the @thejop.bsky.social 🎉 and is now on the journal website: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... For me personally, it's a milestone: my first paper accepted after a peer review!

Abstract It is widely accepted in political science – and remarkably established in public discourse – that status anxieties fuel a far right backlash against progressive politics. This narrative suggests that right-wing conservatives perceive the status of women, racial, or sexual minorities as threatening. Using open-ended survey questions fielded in Germany, we show that women and minorities indeed figure in people’s perceptions of status hierarchies, but in very specific ways: First, overall, people still perceive status as largely socioeconomically determined. Second, sociocultural groups figure in perceptions of who is gaining/losing status, less so in perceptions of the top/bottom of society. Third, more than conservative voters, it is social progressives who mention women and minorities as “winners”. While on race/ethnicity, we find evidence for a backlash, on gender and sexuality we find more evidence for a progressive momentum. This matters for progressive politics today and for how we empirically study status concerns.

New article out in @cpsjournal.bsky.social with Tabea Palmtag and @dpzollinger.bsky.social 📝
We use open-ended survey questions (in Germany) to assess how and among whom social status shifts are perceived. This tests cultural backlash narratives in voters' perceptions.

🔗 doi.org/10.1177/0010...

🚨 New working paper 🚨

We often see populist parties like Reform UK blame higher energy bills on climate change policies. What are the political consequences of this strategy?

Very early draft; comments and criticisms are welcomed!

full draft: z-dickson.github.io/assets/dicks...

🌱 How do environmental protests affect public option? And what if they are disruptive? We have a 💫 new study 💫 out in the BJPS about public support for environmental protests. (cc @catherinedevries.bsky.social , @simonvanteutem.bsky.social ) Summary below 👇

Thanks!

Now out @apsrjournal.bsky.social with page numbers! 🫒

We advance a new argument on how economic crises fuel support for far-right parties in left-behind places by tapping into long-standing community narratives

shorturl.at/bA55v

@catherinedevries.bsky.social

Check out The Qualitative Metamorphosis in @comppol.bsky.social! Great review by @ajayverghese.bsky.social of books by @saragoodman.bsky.social, Jen Cyr, @marioluissmall.bsky.social, Jessica Calarco, @alanjacobs.bsky.social, and @macartan.bsky.social. 👇

www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cuny...

BJPolS abstract discussing the impact of removing controversial monuments and the societal reactions in an empirical study context.

NEW -

Exposure to Confederate Monuments: The Political Effect of Non-Intervention - https://cup.org/42ZHRc0

"results highlight the potential negative consequences of maintaining controversial commemorations"

- Ana Ruipérez Núñez

#OpenAccess

Featuring research with fantastic co-authors: @catherinedevries.bsky.social @paularettl.bsky.social @marcocappelluti.bsky.social Nicola Bariletto @zachdickson.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social

Public service decline → more far-right support: I summarize evidence from several coauthored studies in a new post for the @kpolanyisociety.bsky.social series on Fascism and Liberalism.

New UN report warns that welfare cuts can fuel far-right support. It features my work on public service deprivation with @paularettl.bsky.social @catherinedevries.bsky.social @marcocappelluti.bsky.social and on climate-related disasters and far-right incumbents with @pstanig.bsky.social

This new report of the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and
human rights docs.un.org/en/A/80/138 cites my work on trade shocks and economic nationalism with Italo Colantone, but also a paper of mine on extreme weather events with @simonecremaschi.bsky.social.

Cool paper by @eddieyang.bsky.social, confirming our LLM hacking findings (arxiv.org/abs/2509.08825):
✓ LLMs are brittle data annotators
✓ Downstream conclusions flip frequently: LLM hacking risk is real!
✓ Bias correction methods can help but have trade-offs
✓ Use human expert whenever possible