James Dennison

James Dennison

@jamesrdennison.bsky.social

Political and social scientist Prof @mpc-eui.bsky.social @eui-eu.bsky.social & Pierre Keller Prof @harvardkennedy.bsky.social Interests: attitudes, behaviour, comms, migration, quant, 🇬🇧 & 🇪🇺 politics www.jamesdennison.eu

3,023 Followers 602 Following 76 Posts Joined Aug 2024
1 week ago
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Academics Need to Wake Up on AI Ten theses for folks who haven't noticed the ground shifting under their feet

Sorry, Bluesky, but I have to say it: AI can already do social science research better than most professors with PhDs. And, for the first time in my life, I really have no idea what happens in five years.

Things are changing already, we just need to wake up.

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1 day ago
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Mass psychopathy. They are laughing at committing war crime after war crime.

Disgusting.

Understand that this is the ELECTED leader of America. He is a reflection of the rot in the country's culture.

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2 days ago
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The Iran war should be a lesson for Keir Starmer's Government. If you take a clear line on an issue where the public agree with you then it's your opponents who end up having to back down, not you

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2 days ago
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Why do some people want to migrate while others don’t—even in similar conditions?🌍

My new #openaccess article in IMR shows how psychology🧠—notably values, risk tolerance, and personality—predict both aspiration and irregularity willingness.🔎🔓
journals.sagepub.com/eprint/XEJZT...

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1 week ago

This is actually what I most wanted to highlight. I remember hearing a Labour MP argue that politics was ultimately just "a game of competitive storytelling", and then reflecting on just how disturbing the implications for democracy, accountability, and policymaking would be if that were wholly true

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1 week ago

fuck, I’m sorry, I can’t compete with this

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1 week ago
A watercolour study of parrot tulips

Watercolour of parrot tulips, a good subject to struggle with
#botanicalart #watercolour #watercolor

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1 week ago
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How do institutions communicate about #migration?

With @jamesrdennison.bsky.social & @mcduarte.bsky.social, we built a database of migration communication campaigns in Europe.

We’re expanding it now. Do you know a campaign? Please take this 1-min survey.

eui.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

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1 week ago

The bad thing about this happening in a Labour seat is it gives the press a big excuse to ignore the fact Reform’s strategy is failing. They’ve now lost 3 in a row in 3 different countries to 3 different parties because their plan of coming through a split vote isn’t working. Their vote is too low

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2 weeks ago
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Violent and non-violent death tolls for the Gaza conflict: new primary evidence from a population-representative field survey This first independent population survey of mortality in the Gaza Strip shows that violent deaths have substantially exceeded official figures whereas the demographic composition of casualties aligns ...

New evidence estimates that the Israeli military directly killed 75200 Gazans between Oct '23 and Jan '25. 22800 children were killed. Children, women, and the elderly were 56% of the killed. Non-violent deaths were also far higher than pre-"war". www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

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3 weeks ago
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Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They Were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next? How private equity reshaped the local and the postcode tool that shows the pubs most at risk.

Amazing analysis of pub closures in the UK, by @laurenleek.eu, and the corporate interests behind them. Some important political and policy implications open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

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1 month ago
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Defending the Political Constitution: A Book Launch of Richard Bellamy’s latest book This event is organised by the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.

Details of my book launch are now available - everyone welcome. It will be hybrid for those not in London and recorded.
www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/...

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1 month ago
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The long-term effects of childhood residential mobility on social capital Abstract. When a child moves home multiple times, the consequences for the adult they will later become can be substantial. This study investigates how fre

New at ESR!

Does moving often as a child weaken social capital later in life?
#RValente #MVacchiano find a more complex picture: childhood moves reduce place attachment, but can strengthen personal agency, supporting social capital in adulthood!

🔥 #OpenAccess: doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcag001

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1 month ago

Congrats Leo, this looks excellent.

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1 month ago
From context to congruence: Immigration salience and voter socialization
Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2026
Leonardo Carella and Francesco Raffaelli
This paper considers how issue salience environments affect long-term patterns of political choice via processes of political socialization. Drawing on the well-known ‘impressionable years’ hypothesis, we theorize that voters who grew up in high-immigration salience contexts subsequently exhibit higher levels of voter-party agreement on immigration (issue congruence). We find support for this hypothesis from two studies, which leverage cross-sectional variation within cohorts in exposure to immigration salience in voters’ formative years. The first employs congruence data from a survey of 10 European countries, linked to historical salience data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. The second is a within-country study, measuring salience and congruence from two long-running German public opinion survey series. The analysis suggests that growing up at times when immigration is high on the political agenda can have long-term consequences for the relationship between voters’ preferences on that issue and their political choices, shedding light on the mechanism behind ‘generational realignment’.

Really happy this work with @fraraffaelli.bsky.social found a home at EJPR. We show that growing up at times of high salience of immigration produces cohorts of voters who are more likely to vote for parties that they agree with specifically on immigration.

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

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1 month ago

It's a shame that in these anti-political times, Jenrick doing extremely lucrative planning favours for mega-rich donors is not something anyone bothers to mention about him

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1 month ago
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1 month ago
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Robert Jenrick sacked by Tories for 'plotting to defect' - live updates Reform UK leader Nigel Farage says while no deal has been signed, he had conversations with Jenrick and plans to call him today.

Surely, surely, this will allow most Reform supporters finally to wake up to the fact that they are backing the very same self-serving, corrupt, venal right wing grifters they’ve been trying to reject since the last election?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cr...

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1 month ago

On the Robert Jenrick defection psychodrama:

His team have been plotting for months, so it was going to blow up at some point!

Most of my Tory sources agree he decided to defect after months of losing momentum in his bid to topple Badenoch as leader, as she started to improve

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2 months ago

Spoiled brats are running the world.

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2 months ago
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Margaret Thatcher was kept in dark over Reagan's attack on Grenada Daily Telegraph. It's an old tradition of the "special relationship."

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2 months ago
Image is a popular astronaut meme. An astronaut is looking at the earth from space saying wait, I am worthy of love? An astronaut is behind him holding up flowers and saying always have been

A message for you all to carry through the year

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2 months ago
That’s why HAVN designed the EMF-blocking beanie.
Powered by our proprietary WaveStopper™ Technology, it forms a barrier that blocks over 99% of WiFi, 5G, and Bluetooth radiation right where it matters most: your brain.

They gentrified the tinfoil hat

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2 months ago

"social science has to answer questions that people beyond academia care about..academia can['t] just be self-referential as it grows infinitely. I think there are challenges to understand what’s going on in the United States and the world and to talk about it to broad audiences in plain language.."

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2 months ago
Daily Mail+

BORIS JOHNSON: If Labour MPs try to reverse Brexit they will be walking into a hail of machine gun fire - and if that's the fight they want, bring it on! But they should heed my warning before things get bloody...

The worst, most dishonest prime minister we’ve ever had, rocks back and forth in his Daily Mail cubbyhole spewing out idiotic bilge to kid himself that he and his disastrous Brexit weren’t an almighty national fuck-up.
A deeply pathetic threat from an abject failure of a man.

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2 months ago
BORIS JOHNSON: If Labour
MPs try to reverse Brexit they will be walking into a hail of machine gun fire - and if that's the fight they want, bring it on! But they should heed my warning before things get bloody..

Jo Cox was murdered before the vote by a far-right terrorist & this is the language this complete disgrace chooses to use

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2 months ago
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This is extremely important

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2 months ago
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Revealing long-term trajectories of public opinion and polling in Britain: a new resource of historical data from the Gallup Poll in Britain, 1955–1991 From the 1930s to early 2000s, the British affiliate and later subsidiary of the Gallup Organization conducted around three thousand surveys of public opinion in Great Britain. While the records of...

For the historical polling nerds out there, an article about our project with @ropercenter.bsky.social that digitised ~800 surveys by Gallup poll in Britain between 1955 and 1991 has been published in JEPOP. The merged dataset contains over three-quarters of a million respondents.

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