Paul Meiners

Disentangling the Sophistication-Emotion Link: Political Interest and Confidence-in-Knowledge, but not Knowledge, Drive Emotional Responses - Political Behavior Why do some people feel stronger emotions about politics than others? Past work suggests that political sophistication, consisting of knowledge and interest, is related to feeling strong emotions abou...

🎉 New paper out in Political Behavior (with @gijsschumacher.bsky.social & @mrooduijn.bsky.social)

Why do some people feel stronger emotions about politics than others?
💡Not political knowledge, but interest and confidence-in-knowledge drive emotional engagement.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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A "methods primer" article in the journal "BMJ Medicine", titled "Factors associated with: problems of using exploratory multivariable regression to identify causal risk factors"

We wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't put several variables into a regression model and report which are statistically significant - even as exploratory research. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/.... How did we do?

A blog post giving a more thorough take on survey experiments and the credibility revolution: cyrussamii.com?p=4168

The billions of research funds channeled into the pockets of Elsevier and other commercial publisher in return for very little actual value is one of academia's big inefficiencies that will eventually be replaced by more attractive Community-run alternatives

The official home of the Python Programming Language

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
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After a huge post-election flip in economic perceptions, I thought Democrats and Republicans might be lying to pollsters to send a partisan message — but I was wrong!

New in the Journal of Experimental Political Science (open access): doi.org/10.1017/XPS....

Don't worry, surely some statistical prediction machine will easily replace them. You just need an intern to speak english to a computer, right?

Super happy to see this out in @jeppjournal.bsky.social 🎉🎉

the disastrous refusal of the self-styled silicon valley technokings to keep anyone in their lives capable of questioning their increasingly incomprehensible politics has lead to a crisis of thinking so severe that a fifty-eight year old man believes something is important because he knows about it

How is that what OP is implying?

It's likely buried in many appendices. Made one such analysis for an appendix recently and it's mostly this. Less issue-specific knowledge and interest, less formal education and, of course, the good old gender gap.

Unless the article is fully generated (not likely) this is a symptom of a much older problem, which is that people aren’t reading many of the sources they cite — just gesturing at them.

Every time this worry comes up (www.ft.com/content/d419...) I post some Landy et al. (2018).

People just answer questions about proportions (of anything) in a rather particular way. So I think it's unlikely that what they are being asked about is as important as you might expect it should be.

Any comparable data for Europe out there?

First they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out (because the message test performed at a low percentile rank compared to other messages in our testing bank for non college men who opt into online surveys through various consumer reward programs)

It’s been a very helpful paper for me personally. Part of me still thinks that if you don’t have a somewhat credible causal design, you just shouldn’t go the quantitative route at all, but this approach is a good middle ground.

I wrote a thing about substituting LLMs for survey respondents
notstatschat.rbind.io/2025/08/15/i...

If the articles from my PhD were my children this article now published in @bjpols.bsky.social is my favorite. Written together with truly amazing supervisors and mentors, Pieter de Wilde, Oliver Treib, and Lene Aarøe, I had the support I needed in bringing this baby into the world. Summary below 👇

Now in an issue @psrm.bsky.social: I show that the 🇩🇰 Social Democrats could have won policy support for a pro-immigrant platform if their messaging were framed in moral terms. Findings provide a central corrective to the popular notion that the Social Democrats were destined to go anti-immigrant 👇🏻

Dangerous things are happening in Germany.
We know that a lack of trust is a significant factor in RR voting. Has anyone also looked at whether RR politicians trust the state? These people always seem to radiate intense hatred for democratic institutions. But maybe that's just for show.

Much More Than a Report: The Search for Europe's New Political Identity and the Politics of Competitiveness Click on the article title to read more.

📘🇪🇺 Much more than a report
In our new @jcms-eu.bsky.social piece, Lucia Quaglia and I argue that the Draghi and Letta reports go beyond competitiveness - they mark a shift in the EU’s political identity. But this entails huge challenges!

Open access here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Nice but how about these 10 different methods from machine learning instead? 🙃

It might be my own bias, but I think many of the individual-level dynamics of the rise of the far right are strikingly similar across Western countries.

Plot with the evolution of vote share for CH: 1.3% to 7.28 % to 18.06% to 22.08%

The Portuguese far right party CH has been growing spectacularly, shattering views of the country as immune to this phenomenon.

This has prompted a discussion about where their votes come from.

Some thoughts on this, prompted by newly released survey data:

Far-right challenges to liberal democratic press norms: “indexing by proxy” in a German immigration debate Abstract. This study examines the mechanisms by which illiberal politics make the news by disrupting democratic systems. During the late 20th century, a li

✨NEW PAPER OUT✨
“Far-right challenges to liberal democratic press norms: ‘indexing by proxy’ in a German immigration debate”
together with Lance Bennett & @ulrikeklinger.bsky.social in
@journal-of-comm.bsky.social.
Why do far-right issues keep making the news? 🧵⤵️
academic.oup.com/joc/advance-...

I am often told that public critique of published articles must also solve the issues found. I think this frequently enforced requirement hinders scientific self-correction.

Blog post:

mmmdata.io/posts/2025/0...

The main figure from the voter turnout paper -- no effect of any nudge intervention on voter turnout.

A *null* result I'm very proud of!

Led by Rustam Romaniuc, 35 coauthors from all over France tested nudge interventions to boost voter turnout.

None worked, and we are possibly not surprised -- but a well-powered null result *is* a result!

Paper:

kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

Trade policy update.

🚨 New publication 🚨 : Happy to share that my paper, "Losing Touch: The Rhetorical Cost of Governing" is now forthcoming at @cpsjournal.bsky.social. Short 🧵 about the paper here 👇 1/10

Extremely excited to share the first effort of the Revived Genomics of Personality Consortium: A highly-powered, comprehensive GWAS of the Big Five personality traits in 1.14 million participants from 46 cohorts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...