Armin Schaefer

⏰👋🏼 Jetzt bis Montag noch schnell anmelden für unsere Jahrestagung des AK Hochschullehre @dvpw.bsky.social an der @unitrier.bsky.social. Auch wenn es nur an einem der beiden Tage passt, wir freuen uns, wenn Ihr Zeit und Lust zum Austausch über gute Lehre und Lehrprojekte habt.

Foto von einer kleinen, brennenden Kerze in Kuchenform mit dem Schriftzug "Happy Birthday". Unten rechts das Logo der DVPW in Dunkelgrau. Text in Dunkelgrau und Weiß: Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft #75JahreDVPW #DVPW75.

Happy Birthday #DVPW! 💐🥂

Heute vor 75 Jahren wurde die Deutsche Vereinigung für #Politikwissenschaft in Königstein gegründet - gefeiert wird das Jubiläum mit einem Symposium am 7. Mai 2026 in Lüneburg 🥳

#75JahreDVPW #DVPW75

Post Daniel Laurison ‪@daniellaurison.bsky.social‬ This is a great piece! One of the recommendations is to focus on turnout over moderation, which I 100% agree with. There were steep declines in turnout among low-income voters in 2024; Grumbach & Bonica point to the increased racial gap in turnout to ~11%, income gaps were closer to 30 points. Chart with Turnout on the Y axis & election year (2016, 2020, and 2024) on the X axis. 6 lines, 3 for White, Black, and Hispanic in households making over $100k/year, 3 for the same groups in households making under $30k/year. Overall you can see turnout increasing among higher-income people in all three racial groups, and declining (White and Black) or staying flat (Hispanic) among low-income people; the turnout gap by income is much larger in 2024 than in 2020 or 2016. from 2016 -> 2024: - White $100k turnout goes from 65% to 78% while white under $30k turnout goes from 55% to 49% - Black over $100k turnout goes from 51% to 64% while Black under $30k turnout goes from 48% to 33% - Hispanic over $100k turnout goes from 52% to 67% while Hispanic under $30k turnout stays flat at about 36% (higher in 2020 at 42%). Caption: "Our analysis, Cooperative Election Survey Data, Validated Votes." ALT ‪Jake Grumbach‬ ‪@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social‬ · 1d We have a Boston Review Forum out today on the Democratic Party in a time of authoritarianism www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no... Senator Chuck Schumer conducts a news conference in the U.S. Capitol in May 2025. Image: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images FORUM How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism Moderation used to help Democrats win, but its advantages now have been greatly exaggerated. Adam Bonica, Jake Grumbach With responses from → Cori Bush, Amanda Litman, Matthew Yglesias, G. Elliott Morris, Julia Serano, Eric Rauchway, Suzanne Mettler & Trevor E. Brown, Thomas Ferguson, Timothy Shenk, Jared Abbott & Milan Loewer, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Lily Geismer, Danielle Wiggi…

chart showing family income of voters & non-voters in 2024; people in families earning under $50k/year were over half of nonvoters; more than half of voters had incomes over $70k.

I keep posting these images because they get at a really deep problem - the class divide in political participation.
Those who want our democracy to truly represent all its citizens need to create and sustain real connections with people and communities who do not currently feel represented.

Are the Politically Active Better Represented? - Political Behavior Political participation is considered an important path for people to influence politics. However, whether those who participate actually see more of their preferred policies implemented remains an op...

🧵I am happy to announce a new article in Political Behavior @polbehavior.bsky.social, “Are the Politically Active Better Represented?”, co-authored with @jenny-oser.bsky.social, @rdassonneville.bsky.social, @professormpersson.bsky.social, and Anders Sundell.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Veranstaltungsplakat zur Podiumsdiskussion zur Landtagswahl 2026 in Rheinland-Pfalz: Die Veranstaltung beginnt am 5. Februar 2026 um 19:00 Uhr im Hörsaal P1 (Philosophicum). Schwerpunktthemen sind Bildung, Wohnen, Arbeitsmarkt & Wirtschaft. Auf Einladung des Fachschaftsrats Politikwissenschaft am Institut für Politikwissenschaft der JGU und des Vereins der Freunde der Mainzer Politikwissenschaft e. V. diskutieren: • Gregory Scholz (SPD) • Thorsten Rohe (CDU) • Katrin Eder (Bündnis 90/ Die Grünen) • Philipp Fernis (FDP) • Christian Zöpfchen (Freie Wähler) • Rebecca Ruppert (Die Linke) Moderiert wird die Veranstaltung von Journalist und Gutenberg-Alumnus Sebastian Scheffel.

5.2.2026 - Podiumsdiskussion zur Landtagswahl Rheinland-Pfalz 2026 - auf Einladung des Fachschaftsrats des Instituts für Politikwissenschaft der Uni Mainz sowie des Vereins der Freunde der Mainzer Politikwissenschaft e. V. 👇

Decoding German Politics with StateParl—A Text Corpus of Plenary Protocols in the 16 German Länder Parliaments - Politische Vierteljahresschrift The availability of large amounts of machine-readable text data has enabled political scientists to explore a variety of novel and innovative research questions. In this context, parliamentary documen...

Looking for speeches from all German state parliaments?

@cgnguyen.bsky.social , Eric Beltermann, Sabine Kropp & Antonios Souris have you covered.

Introducing the StateParl Corpus. Now open access with PVS:

doi.org/10.1007/s11615-025-00643-5

Following this advice, should we skip the theoretical arguments and literature review included in your own work? Why still bother writing them? I see too many papers where people clearly have not read what they cite.

Habermas weist auf ein wichtiges Buch von @arminschaefer.bsky.social und Michael Zürn hin: Die demokratische Regression @suhrkamp.de
Es zeigt, wie das demokratische (Gerechtigkeits)Versprechen durch die von der Elefantenkurve beschriebene Einkommensentwicklung an Glaubwürdigkeit verloren hat. 5/5

Very happy to see this out in CPS! We study class identities and their social and political relevance over several decades in Britain, Denmark, Norway, and the US. A small thread:

journals.sagepub.com/eprint/SIRW4...

"Looking at the share of a justice's decisions that favor the wealthy over the course of our analysis period, we see that the court becomes more and more polarized along partisan lines." www.nber.org/papers/w34643

American democracy is truly in dire straits...

In that case you should eat cake instead.

we have 5 positions open at @goetheuni.bsky.social in Frankfurt
- a 4,5 year postdoc in my @erc.europa.eu project on the educational cleavage
- 2 postdoc & 2 PhD positions, 4 years, in a research group on Reconfiguration & Internalization of Social Structure

www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794784/FB0...

Thank you!

Thank you!

I am not a general skeptic, I use survey all the time. But it is a leap of faith that weights will remedy the underlying cause. It seems plausible to me, for example, that those who do not trust science are more hesitant to participate in a survey.

My sense is that countries that started with low rates (e.g. Switzerland) first saw an increase but then a drop, too. The average response rate of round 11 is 41 per cent. I am mostly concerned about the unequal response rates based on attitudes, though.

Perhaps even more dramatic...

The patterns are similar across countries. If willingness to participate is linked to the attitudes we research, such as populist attitudes, scepticism towards science or (lack of) political interest, socio-demographic survey weights are not the answer. Do we know what causes this trend?

This plot shows average response rates of the European Social Survey. Between 2002 and 2023 the have fallen from 61 to 41 per cent.

This plot breaks down ESS response rates by country. In almost all countries, the rate has gone down over time - in some cases, like Sweden, quite dramatically so.

In line with the 'credibility revolution', we are thinking about research designs that allow us to get closer to causal effects. Those who use surveys have often turned to survey experiments. At the same time, survey response rates have dropped considerably. Below are the figures for the ESS.

BJPolS abstract describing the introduction of a global database called PtP, which contains detailed individual-level data on political, occupational, and social backgrounds from 144,789 cabinet members across 141 countries between 1966 and 2021. The text highlights the database's relevance to researchers in various fields including political and social sciences.

From October 2025 -

Paths to Power: A New Dataset on the Social Profile of Governments - https://cup.org/47i6oKQ

- @jacobnyrup.bsky.social, @chknutsen.bsky.social, @peterla.bsky.social & Ina Lyftingsmo Kristiansen

#OpenAccess

🎧 JETZT REINHÖREN: #Forschungspodcast #MindsOfMainz – #DerGutenbergTalk | Folge 28: Demokratie im Fokus: Warum Politische Theorie heute die Gesellschaft bewegt | mit Prof. Claudia Landwehr 👉 www.magazin.uni-mainz.de/minds-of-main…

#Demokratie #Politikwissenschaft #PolitischeTheorie

Money Doesn't Buy Elections. It Does Something Worse. Campaign ads barely move the needle. The real influence is hiding in plain sight.

Study after study shows campaign ads barely move the needle. So where does money’s real power come from? I ranked the five ways money corrupts politics—from least to most corrosive. What I’ve learned from 15 years of tracking political money:

1/ Does growing up poor always lead to political apathy?

Very happy to share my first paper published (open access) in @electoralstudies.bsky.social, where I show that parents' influence mitigates the poverty gap in participation, while economic mobility does not.

🔗 shorturl.at/p5Bac

"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.

令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social

Join us! Die Abteilung für Innenpolitik & Politische Soziologie sucht zum 01.04. eine*n neue*n Kollegin*en. Wir bieten: volle Promotionsstelle (EG13) für drei Jahre (Verlängerung um 3 Jahre möglich), flexible Arbeitszeitregelungen, kollegiales & forschungsstarkes Team. Mehr Informationen hier👇

Am Mittwoch, 3. Dezember (16 Uhr, P5), freuen wir uns auf den Besuch von Jale Tosun (Universität Heidelberg) in unserer #Forschungswerkstatt. Sie spricht zum Thema "Die Wirksamkeit nationaler Klimapolitiken: Evidenz aus 43 OECD- und Schwellenländern".
Alle sind herzlich willkommen.

Heute begrüßen wir Markus Patberg (Universität Hamburg) in der #Forschungswerkstatt (16 Uhr in P5, Philo). Wir freuen uns auf einen spannenden Vortrag zum Thema: „Oligarchische Vereinnahmung: Soziale Medien und politische Öffentlichkeit"

Alle sind herzlich willkommen!

Members of the IPP gathered for the 11th consecutive retreat in Bodenheim close to Mainz on 13th and 14th November. The main purpose of the retreat was once again to foster the exchange of research ideas and collaboration and talk about the future of the IPP.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has doubled its vote share in the February 23 elections, marking what Professor Kai Arzheimer calls “a turning point in post-war German politics.” While expected, this surge solidifies the AfD as Germany’s second-strongest party, normalizing far-right rhetoric in mainstream discourse. Arzheimer highlights how economic anxiety, deindustrialization, and anti-immigration sentiment fuel AfD’s rise. He also warns that mainstream parties risk losing credibility by mimicking far-right policies rather than offering bold alternatives. Despite its growing influence, AfD’s radicalization presents both an opportunity and a challenge for German democracy. As political fragmentation deepens, the response of centrist parties will determine whether this shift is temporary—or part of a long-term realignment. Interview by Selcuk Gultasli The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has cemented itself as a formidable force in German politics, nearly doubling its vote share in the February 23 elections compared to 2021. According to Professor Kai Arzheimer, a... Professor Kai Arzheimer: AfD’s Surge is a Game-Changer in Post-War German Politics

There are very good reasons 𝘯𝘰𝘵 to panic about the #AfD's success in the #btw25 election, but their result is certainly historic. Want to know more? Or just can't go back to sleep? Tune in to my chat with Selcuk Gultasli