Alex Hartland

Judicial diversity and immigration appeals: evidence from the United Kingdom Almost all studies of judicial behaviour and diversity conceptualise judges’ race and gender as independent, additive variables. Specifically, black and female judges are often seen as more liberal...

I have a new paper out in @wepsocial.bsky.social looking at immigration rulings in the UK (doi.org/10.1080/0140...). It's a short read, but the two main findings are:

1) the success of an immigration appeal depends a lot on who the deciding judge is

2) BAME women are (surprisingly) strict judges

🚨 New paper in Science Advances @science.org

Can changing how we argue about politics online improve the quality of replies we get?

T HeideJorgensen, @gregoryeady.bsky.social & I use an LLM to manipulate counter-arguments to see how people respond to different approaches to arguments

Thread 🧵1/n

YouTube video by Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) Studying polarisation with social media data | Alex Hartland | #ActEU Mid-Term Conference

How is #polarisation reflected on social media❓ @uni-saarland.de's @alexhartland.bsky.social responded to this question in his presentation at the #ActEU mid-term conference 🎓

Check it out on YouTube 👉 youtu.be/3l9XQFZAlQU

🚨Job Alert
W2 (TT W3) Professorship in Computer Science "AI for People & Society"
@saarland-informatics-campus.de/@uni-saarland.de is looking to appoint an outstanding individual in the field of AI for people and society who has made significant contributions in one or more of the following areas:

Screenshot of our paper "Missing the Margins: A Systematic Literature Review on the Demographic Representativeness of LLMs"

Details about what we annotated in our systematic review

Do LLMs represent the people they're supposed simulate or provide personalized assistance to?

We review the current literature in our #ACL2025 Findings paper and investigating what researchers conclude about the demographic representativeness of LLMs:
osf.io/preprints/so...

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Article abstract, which says: The educational cleavage is restructuring electoral competition in many democracies, yet there has been insufficient attention on how variation in educational content affects this. In order to address this, this article combines English administrative school records with a unique representative panel of adolescents to estimate the within-individual effect of studying different subjects at school on political party preference. This analysis finds that studying arts and humanities subjects leads to greater support for socially liberal parties, whilst studying business and economics increases support for economically right-wing parties. Students who study technical subjects become more likely to support socially conservative and economically right-wing parties. These relationships between particular subjects and party support also persist into adulthood. As such, this article provides new evidence on the importance of subjects taken in secondary school for political socialisation, during the impressionable years of adolescence.

📣 NEW PAPER ALERT! 🚨

"School subject choices in adolescence affect political party support"

Just published in @wepsocial.bsky.social with @nspmartin.bsky.social and @rolandkappe.bsky.social.

doi.org/10.1080/0140...

🧵👇

Exploring LLMs for Automated Generation and Adaptation of Questionnaires | Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces

I am happy to share that our work titled "Exploring LLMs for Automated Generation and Adaptation of Questionnaires" has been accepted to the ACM Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) Conference 2025.

Check our work: doi.org/10.1145/3719...

@cui.acm.org #CUI2025 #ACM

Observatory of Online Politics - Toxicity_1 01.07.2025 In times of political tension, the way people speak online, especially on social media, can become a reflection of deeper divides in society. Just like elections reveal what people really ...

🤖💬 Can AI tell the difference between toxic speech and emotionally charged political debate?

Liliia Mairova and Ariq Suryo Hadi P. provide some interesting insights in the next blogpost of the Observatory:

politics.i2sc.net/blogposts/to...

Extremely happy to see my first single-authored paper published! Check it out in @ersjournal.com 👇

In doing so we find that the UK's registration difficulty level is closer to that of countries transition in and out of democracy, as opposed to other electoral democracies (according to V-Dem's categorization)

Comparing registration systems using the International Difficulty of Registration Index (IDORI). How difficult is electoral registration in the UK? Abstract. Electoral registration in the UK is often critiqued for making it hard for voters to participate in elections. However, without a tool for a syst

Mine and @profsob.bsky.social paper
Comparing registration systems using the International Difficulty of Registration Index (IDORI). How difficult is electoral registration in the UK?
has been published. Please read it here,
url: academic.oup.com/pa/article/d...

Cover

Our new #PoliSci collected volume on border regions as laboratories of European research is finally here. Check it out (in German): www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/10.5771/9...

A key function of the state is to ensure the #welfare of its citizens. But do more generous welfare policies also foster more #political #trust?

🎉 Our paper, co-authored with Matthijs Gillissen and Anna Ruelens, was accepted ‪@polstudies.bsky.social‬!

@vd-researchgroup.bsky.social‬ #HIVA

Observatory of Online Politics - TikTok_2025 20.06.2025 While TikTok is becoming increasingly relevant among social media users, its role in elections remains understudied. The successful social media campaign targeting youth by the party Die L...

📢 New on the Observatory of Online Politics blog!

🎯 TikTok and its role in the 2025 German Elections
By @rosanavarrete.bsky.social & Ariq Suryo Hadi P.

Read more
politics.i2sc.net/blogposts/ti...

Wann join us in Vienna? 😊Apply for a 4year phd position with the @compcommlab.bsky.social

Here's another workshop at the intersection of #NLProc and politics: cpss-sig.github.io/CPSS-2025/cf...

Deadline is June 13th, if you have any questions about the submission format, ping me, @gabriellalapesa.bsky.social @cklamm.bsky.social or @dede1989.bsky.social

@politicsunisaar.bsky.social

YouTube video by Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) Triggers of political engagement | Alex Hartland | #ActEU Mid-Term Conference

What are the drivers of political #engagement in Europe❓ #ActEU researcher @alexhartland.bsky.social (@uni-saarland.de) explores the triggers of political participation in our latest video recording from our December mid-term conference 📺

Watch it on YouTube ➡️ youtu.be/M7Rcmco6jCQ?...

The role of key European issues in the 2024 election campaign International crises and Euroscepticism have made European issues prominent in citizens’ lives. This article studies the role of three key European issues – migration, the environment, and EU integ...

🛎️ New Publication 🛎️

How did public and party priorities interact during the 2024 European Parliament elections?

In our new @wepsocial.bsky.social article, Daniela Braun, @giucarny.bsky.social @rosanavarrete.bsky.social @annreinl.bsky.social and I find some connections

tinyurl.com/yhc4ae8m

🧵

Baseline models. PTVs by most important issue, manifesto salience and individual variables. Note: Multilevel regression models with random intercepts for individuals and parties.

As migration, climate change, and other issues cut across borders, we would expect increasing links between public and party salience

In reality, we find the relationship is largely dependent on the issue and country context. PTVs increase where parties talk more about migration or the environment

Pooled model interactions. Note: Multilevel models with random intercepts for respondent, party and country and random slopes for the most important issue at the country level

Multilevel models for the interaction of environment salience

Multilevel models for the interaction of migration salience

But this is not consistent across the public as a whole.

Where we really see a difference is in the mediating effect of individual priorities. When the public cares, they support parties who care too.

We see this in both our aggregate and country-level analysis on migration and the environment.

Abstract of the article "The role of key European issues in the 2024 election campaign" by Alex Hartland, Daniela Braun, Giuseppe Carteny, Rosa M. Navarrete and Ann-Kathrin Reinl. Published online first in West European Politics.

Figure 3, displaying the effects of EU polity (left panel), environment (middle panel), and migration (right panel).

Figure 4, displaying the PTVs by most important issue, manifesto salience and individual variables for nine countries.

Figure 5, displaying pooled model interactions. Salience EU policy (left panel), Salience Environment (middle panel), and Salience migration (right panel).

@alexhartland.bsky.social Daniela Braun @giucarny.bsky.social @rosanavarrete.bsky.social & @annreinl.bsky.social observe a gap between the concerns of citizens & the issues political parties emphasise.

doi.org/10.1080/0140...

Part of the Symposium "European Parliament Elections 2024"

This is a very interesting observational paper for those working on gendered dynamics of far-right, descriptive rep & femonationalism

Does women's descriptive rep. lower anti-gender discourse among far-right? No, it *increases* it (according to parl speech data 2009-2023)

doi.org/10.1177/1465...

⬇️New week - new publication ⬇️ This time we focus on the 2024 EP elections🗳️
Thanks for putting this @wepsocial.bsky.social symposium together @simonhix.bsky.social!

🚨⬇️Publication alert ⬇️🚨

How did public and party priorities interact during the 2024 European Parliament elections? Take a look at @alexhartland.bsky.social 's summary on how our work contributes to a better understanding of issue voting.

Ah, it's also #openaccess :)

We are very grateful to @simonhix.bsky.social for organising the symposium of which this work is a part, and the @wepsocial.bsky.social editors and two anonymous reviewers for a smooth and constructive review process

Thanks also to @politicsunisaar.bsky.social and ActEU colleagues for their support

We then used Llama3 to classify open-ended MIPs for our individual-level salience measures (along similar lines to @jonmellon.bsky.social et al 2023)

Our data comes from the Horizon Europe-funded #ActEU survey, which also supplies the PTVs and control variables

Our paper has a novel methodological contribution too, using a fine-tuned manifestoBERTa model to provide the first (as far as we know) published classification of the Euromanifestos (AT, CZ, DE, DK, ES, FI, FR, GR, IT) for our party salience measures

Contact @giucarny.bsky.social for more on this!

A Review of Public Issue Salience: Concepts, Determinants and Effects on Voting - James Dennison, 2019 In this article, I offer a review of the uses and findings regarding public issue salience in the political science literature, with a focus on electoral behavi...

Our work contributes to a better understanding of party priorities in EP elections, and issue voting in general, particularly on the role of elite- and individual-level salience. See work by @jamesrdennison.bsky.social, whose 2019 article pointed us in the right direction: tinyurl.com/2s38wpmb

Although many parties emphasise EU polity issues, we find this has little to no connection with the public, similarly so for defence and the economy.

This indicates some mismatch between party and public priorities and a dilemma for the parties