Stefan Müller

▶️ Political Methodology

👉🏽 Section chairs:
Andy Eggers
&
@stefanmueller.bsky.social

📢 Our section welcomes submissions for lightning rounds, author-meets-critics panels, and topical roundtables on political methodology.

/end

Will nobody think of the social scientists!

Solidarity with Stefan and Liam: this would’ve been really interesting.

There goes the paper on support for Jim Gavin among those interested in Gaelic games in Dublin versus rival counties.

Liam Kneafsey and I successfully applied for including these questions in the Irish Presidential Election Study, and we completed the pre-analysis plan and code last week. 😬😢

Wrote a Substack on this #aras25 poll:

Catherine Connolly is surviving her scrapes - yet Heather Humphreys is within the margin of error for winning

open.substack.com/pub/gavreill...

What's the difference between @epssnet.bsky.social and the "old" EPSA, and why you should come to our conference in Belfast in June 2026: epssnet.org/uncategorize...

If you're in Dublin next week come join me & @cooleyoneurasia.bsky.social at the Institute of International & European Affairs (IIEA) on Thursday where we'll talk about our new book Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics

Details: www.iiea.com/images/uploa...

Enjoyed discussing presidential politics with Art O’Leary & moderated by RTE’s Sheila Naughten. The first in a series of talks organised by @ucdpolitics.bsky.social Thank you @stefanmueller.bsky.social & colleagues for the invite. And best of luck with the new alumni initiatives.

Understanding error bars in charts Error bars illustrate the margin of error for a survey estimate by showing how precise that estimate is. Here are some answers to common questions that might help you better understand charts with err...

For those profs teaching data literacy.... www.pewresearch.org/decoded/2025...

Some professional news as I took my oath of office today:
On September 1st, I joined the University of Hamburg as a full professor of democratic political decision making👋

I'm very excited about this job & the chance to continue researching democracy, party competition and digitalization here
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Screenshot of the call for applications for MZES Visiting Fellowships, 22 September 2025. For the full text, please follow the link.

📣 Attention, postdoctoral researchers!

❗ Apply now for our MZES Visiting Fellowships 😊

💡 Spend 2-4 weeks at the MZES to share ideas
💰 Funding for accommodation, travel, daily allowance
📆 Deadline: 28 November

Full information:
👉 www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/en/news/deta...

Abstract: Social media have become a crucial tool for candidates seeking election, allowing them to build a public profile by posting curated content to appeal to potential voters. Focusing on the 2020 Irish General Election, this study investigates how candidates used Twitter to signal their campaign efforts and policy positions, and how their communicative priorities varied based on their gender, competitiveness, and political experience. To do so, we first demonstrate that a transformer-based machine-learning approach based on sentence embeddings can successfully identify social media posts that contain policy and electioneering content. Our findings show that experienced candidates are more likely to emphasise policy-related content than less experienced ones. This pattern also holds for electioneering content when we account for previous engagement with such posts. Contrary to our pre-registered expectations, we find no meaningful differences in the emphasis on electioneering or policy content based on candidates' gender or electoral competitiveness. Overall, our results demonstrate how candidates strategically use social media to shape their public personas during election campaigns in Ireland's candidate-centred electoral system, with multi-member constituencies and strict campaign spending limits.

New paper in Computational Communication Research with James Cross, @derekgreene.bsky.social & Martijn Schoonvelde: “Mapping Digital Campaign Strategies: How Political Candidates Use Social Media to Communicate Constituency Connection and Policy Stance”

PDF (open access): doi.org/10.5117/CCR2...

Ireland's Presidency: More Than a Figurehead? UCD School of Politics and International Relations SPIRe alumni in conversation with Art O'Leary, Executive of An Coimisiún Toghcháin/The Electoral Commission Kevin Rafter, Full Professor of Political Communication at DCU Moderator: Sheila Naughton, RTÉ RSVP and join us Tuesday, September 30 6:30pm, Museum of Literature Ireland

Are you a @ucdpolitics.bsky.social graduate? Join our discussion event on the upcoming presidential election. 

🎙️ Panelists: @kevinrafter.bsky.social, Art O'Leary & Sheila Naughton
🗓️ 30 Sept, 18:30
📍 Museum of Literature Ireland

Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
@ucddublin.bsky.social

Young Academy Ireland appoints new Executive Committee Members - Royal Irish Academy Announcing new Executive Committee members at Young Academy Ireland — new leadership for the dynamic network of early career researchers and innovators on the island of Ireland

Very happy to have been appointed to the Young Academy Ireland Executive Committee.

Many thanks to the outgoing EC members for their outstanding work in establishing and developing @yai.ie over the past two years!

www.ria.ie/2025/09/12/y...
@ria.ie

Why we launched Denmark’s second Young Academy (and what’s different about it) YATSI aims to represent scientists based in academia and in industry, and to build bridges between the two sectors.

Young Academies give a voice to and represent the interests of young scientists in academia, helping them to be heard by national governments and wider society

go.nature.com/4nr8SNh

New podcast out on your favourite/least-hated audio platforms now.

- Dissecting the 'powder keg' narrative of America.
- Threats against politicians here.
- The Áras race and whether Sinn Féin have bungled the whole thing.
- RTÉ's Eurovision move.

Fill your boots.

linktr.ee/TheGroupChat...

we're hiring assistant professor in computational social science, applications close 26/10/2025

We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science ❗

📚 jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Apply before 26 October and join an internationally outstanding group of social science methodologists 🌎

Inspiring day at the @yai.ie ‘s “evidence for policy summit” with a big focus on how early career researchers fit into the system across the island, with a focus on sustainability and a fair and inclusive society. Big thanks to Johnathan Dalzell from DAERA coming down from NI.

🚨 Reposting to avoid any confusion between EPSS & EPSA 🚨

If you want to support non-for-profit, member-led political science association, EPSS is the place to be!

More here 👇🏽

We're excited to share some EPSS @epssnet.bsky.social updates with you - and we're so grateful to the political science community in Europe (and beyond!) for the amazing support 👇

Some of the very best and most internationally renowned political scientists in Germany are at Cologne. This is a very real threat to a globally strong group.

As someone who spent some time at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics, I can just say that this used to be a great place educating many excellent scholars. It will be a great loss to see polsci in Cologne defunded. Sign 👇

Uni Köln spart: Droht das Aus für den Politikwissenschaft-Masterstudiengang? Die Uni Köln steht vor einem massiven Sparprogramm. Ab 2026 müssen jährlich zehn Millionen Euro eingespart werden. Besonders die Studierenden der Politikwissenschaft zittern nun um ihre Zukunft.

Auch der EXPRESS berichtet: „Die Uni Köln steht vor einem massiven Sparprogramm. Ab 2026 müssen jährlich zehn Millionen Euro eingespart werden. Besonders die Studierenden der Politikwissenschaft zittern nun um ihre Zukunft.”

www.express.de/koeln/brutal...

„Drastische“ Einschnitte geplant: Politik-Studierende der Uni Köln befürchten Streichung von Master Die Uni Köln muss ab 2026 jährlich 10 Millionen Euro einsparen. Derzeit diskutieren die Fakultäten intensiv. Das Politik-Institut an der Wiso-Fakultät soll überproportional betroffen sein.

Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger:
„Die Uni Köln muss ab 2026 jährlich 10 Millionen Euro einsparen. Derzeit diskutieren die Fakultäten intensiv. Das Politik-Institut an der Wiso-Fakultät soll überproportional betroffen sein.“

As a former assistant at the IR Chair (1993-1998) and Managing Director of the Institute (1998-2002) I kindly ask you to sign

Measuring Scalar Constructs in Social Science with LLMs Many constructs that characterize language, like its complexity or emotionality, have a naturally continuous semantic structure; a public speech is not just "simple" or "complex," but exists on a cont...

Very interesting work on extracting 'scalar constructs' from #TextData with #LLMs by @haukelicht.bsky.social and colleagues: arxiv.org/abs/2509.03116

Petition unterschreiben Keine WiSo ohne PoWi! Für eine starke Politikwissenschaft im Bachelor & Master

The University of Cologne plans drastic cuts to its Political Science department, potentially abolishing the MSc in Political Science and eliminating the professorships in IR and Comparative Politics. This would severely weaken the social sciences at @unicologne.bsky.social.
Petition (de/en) ⤵️

now with page numbers: Grossman & Guinaudeau (2025), "Tunnels of Attention: Reconsidering Issue Competition", Comparative Political Studies, vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 2559-2593.

Four UCD early-career researchers receive coveted ERC Starting Grants

💙💛 Warmest congratulations to Assistant Professors Mary O’Keeffe, Lucía Tiscornia, Kevin Daly and Graham Benham, who have each been awarded prestigious European Research Council (@erc.europa.eu) Starting Grants worth over €1.5m.
www.ucd.ie/newsandopini...

Some of the findings:
– Quality of training data is more important than quantity
– Separate binary classifiers performed best
– Grant peer review is much more positive than negative

We are now working on substantive applications (see thread below).

Classifiers: huggingface.co/snsf-data