Alexander Horn

🚨New publication out in @reggovjournal.bsky.social

@danielk24.bsky.social & I show that the support for green subsidies by unions & business interest groups in the 🇺🇸 & in 🇩🇪 goes hand in hand with the support for eco-social policies.

Open access here: doi.org/10.1111/rego...

A summary below 👇

Really excited that after several years of working on it, revising, and getting lots of rejections, our paper (w/ Rune Stubager & Mads Thau) on citizens’ responses to group appeals is *finally* out @ejprjournal.bsky.social

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

A 🧵 on our findings...

The—AI-related—stigmatization of the em dash makes it even harder to squeze my very German thoughts into english words.

Very excited to announce the next term of the TADA speaker series!

This term revolves around the validity of LLM generated data in the Social Sciences. We have a set of four great speakers to enlighten us on different aspects of this issue.

If you'd like to join, sign up here: TADA.cool

🚨 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

Banner featuring the hashtag "#OpenAccess" in white text on a green background, above the name "American Political Science Review" in white text on a blue background.

'Why Inequalities Persist: Parties’ (Non)Responses to Economic Inequality, 1970–2020' by @alexanderhorn.bsky.social, Martin Haselmayer & @klueserthan.bsky.social was the most-downloaded @apsrjournal.bsky.social paper in August 2025.

You can read it #OpenAccess here - https://cup.org/4nwEeCo

Getting organized for the 2026 CES conference (deadline fast approaching); if you have a paper you're planning to present that is either on 1.) group appeals, or 2.) contemporary sources of social closure, lmk and we can see whether there's enough overlap for a shared panel submission! #polisky

Social investment—A (mis)leading paradigm? Why we need to distinguish different types of social investments - Julian Garritzmann, Silja Häusermann, Bruno Palier, 2025 Social investment has become a buzzword among social policy-makers and welfare state scholars alike. Social investments seem to be the natural social policy res...

Can we have 8 min of your time please?

@siljahausermann.bsky.social @bpalier.bsky.social & I wrote a very brief reflection on why social investment might be a misleading paradigm. Way forward: please distinguish different types of social investments!

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

No pun intended!

Social progress at the expense of economic equality? New data on left parties' equality preferences ALEXANDER HORN, K. JONATHAN KLÜSER, MARTIN HASELMAYER

📘 64.4

@legalmusings.bsky.social, @klueserthan.bsky.social & M.Haselmayer address how left‑wing parties have prioritised social progress over economic equality 💱 in recent decades.

#PoliSky #OA

Many thanks for letting me know, @bschlipphak.bsky.social.

If I ever get tenure, the offer will be send to another Horn(e) (;
bsky.app/profile/alex...

Just out at JOP (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....) : Why do so few working-class people hold office? It's not lack of interest. Noam Lupu and I ran 10 surveys in 8 countries and found no evidence of a social class gap in how often qualified people consider running.

„Aber stimmt das eigentlich?“
Sehr empfehlenswerter Text ⬇️

(Wobei keines der drei klassichen Felder in den items ist, scheint mir)

Me when my paper's policy implications still haven't been implemented one year into into the peer review process.

Das Klima der Ungleichheit. Zur sozialen Struktur von Klimakonflikten - Berliner Journal für Soziologie The article maps how political conflicts over climate change are intertwined with social inequality. Building on studies of Dörre et al. on industrial transformation conflicts, four forms of social in...

Warum wir beim Klima zwar alle in einem Boot sitzen, es aber entscheidend ist, dass manche im halbgefluteten Maschinenraum mitfahren und andere auf dem Sonnendeck:

Neuer Artikel zu Klima, Klasse und Konflikt, mit @steffenmau.bsky.social und @thomaslux.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

We present our new preprint titled "Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation". We quantify LLM hacking risk through systematic replication of 37 diverse computational social science annotation tasks. For these tasks, we use a combined set of 2,361 realistic hypotheses that researchers might test using these annotations. Then, we collect 13 million LLM annotations across plausible LLM configurations. These annotations feed into 1.4 million regressions testing the hypotheses. For a hypothesis with no true effect (ground truth $p > 0.05$), different LLM configurations yield conflicting conclusions. Checkmarks indicate correct statistical conclusions matching ground truth; crosses indicate LLM hacking -- incorrect conclusions due to annotation errors. Across all experiments, LLM hacking occurs in 31-50\% of cases even with highly capable models. Since minor configuration changes can flip scientific conclusions, from correct to incorrect, LLM hacking can be exploited to present anything as statistically significant.

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**.

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

Today at 2 and tomorrow at 12, these two panels take place at @apsa.bsky.social. The papers are so intriguing that I finished reading them pre-arrival! 😱 @leoahrens.bsky.social & me also present. Including work on the class biases in pledge breaking

#APSA2025 #polisky @apsainequality.bsky.social ‬

Three weeks left to apply 👇

What drives public support for redistribution?
Join us on 18 September for a compelling keynote by Professor Leslie McCall exploring public demands for redistribution.

🗓️ 18 Sept 2025 | 9:15–10:30am
📍 LSE Auditorium & Online
🔗https://buff.ly/xLKeFB4

🥳 awesome - what a comeback! Congrats Flori!!

Returning from vacation and looking for a late summer read? @ivobantel.bsky.social and I got you covered!

In our new @wepsocial.bsky.social paper, we assess how mainstream parties rhetorically create an affect-based "common front" against the radical right.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Issue congruence outweighs geography: Understanding the appeal of Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) in east and west Germany

New Publication 📖 with @aikowagner.bsky.social in @electoralstudies.bsky.social
"Issue congruence outweighs geography: Understanding the appeal of Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) in east and west Germany"
Full paper (open access)👉
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
What did we find? 🧵

Ever asked yourself how to detect and extract social groups from texts with computational social science? @haukelicht.bsky.social and me have a solution for you out at @bjpols.bsky.social. You can also find the pre-trained models on huggingface!

I’m very excited to share that my paper “Cleavage theory meets civil society: A framework and research agenda” with @eborbath.bsky.social & Swen Hutter has now been published online in ‪@wepsocial.bsky.social‬ (w/ open access funding thanks to @wzb.bsky.social‬!)

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Meant ro say:
something else (than demand for redistribution at the voter level) is missing. To then go through what we call a leaky pipeline (positional response, policy response, and effects of policies on inequality)

Thanks for this,Timo! Leo Ahrens and me are citing it already (in the piece presented yesterday at Espa). I have to reread it more carefully though bc I "pair“ the citation with Hillen and Steiner to argue that the demand is there, so else is missing …

"Overall, our findings suggest a “ratchet-effect” heuristic: left parties may still push back against rising disparities but have given up on lowering existing levels of inequality"

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

Wahlprogramme ignorieren Ungleichheit

Beim Deutschlandfunk durfte ich 10 Minuten über unsere neue Studie zur oft ausbleibenden Reaktion von Parteien auf hohe ökonomische Ungleichheit sprechen. Und darüber, warum das ein Problem für Demokratie ist. Die (APSR) Studie deckt 12 Länder 1970-2020 ab

www.deutschlandfunknova.de/beitrag/stud...

Excellent question! Focus on the gap faker/finder — empathy tool and humaniser to (ia) backward-translate peers need pro version

✨Very happy to see my paper "Attitudinal ambivalence toward multiculturalism" out on @jeppjournal.bsky.social !

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

1/8 🧵