Dimiter Toshkov

We are grateful to @tadegquillien.bsky.social and the @hotpoliticslab.bsky.social group for very useful comments on earlier drafts. The editor and reviewers @polpsyispp.bsky.social were also very helpful in improving this study 🙏.

Motivated causal judgments and responsibility for civilian casualties in military conflicts Causal judgments are ubiquitous in politics and crucial for assigning responsibility and blame. Cognitive science has demonstrated that people are more likely to pick factors as “causal” when they ma...

Loyalty to favoured groups trumps the effects of causal structure in making causal judgments on issues of politics.
When identities are not provided, causal structure matters; when they are known, they are almost all that matters.
Here is the link to our study onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Our article with @honoratam.bsky.social on ✨motivated causal judgements✨ is out in @polpsyispp.bsky.social!

When something bad happens, whose actions produced the outcome and who bears responsibility? It depends much more on the identity of the actors than on the details of the situation.

Thank you! I'm working on a new edition, so any feedback and suggestions are welcome.

yeps

Nope, you cannot make statements about whether scientisits as a whole find Twitter useful (as in the title) from the subset who also have accounts on another platform. This is a form of selection bias.

Right

data is not shared because of 'privacy concerns' .... huh? how difficult is it to delete the column with the twitter handles and share the rest?! And what would be an 'unreaasonble' request to obtain the data?

Is this a joke 🤡? The sweeping claims are based on a sample of 813 self-selected responses on a survey posted on the author's feeds. Respondents *self-declared* to be scientists 😉and were *required* to have a bluesky account. The 'survey' was open for one month (it doesn't say in which year 🤷).

Thnanks!

I wish this was a settled question already, but it ain't. Conspiratorial claims that the government reactions to the pandemic were unnecessary abound. Yes, it's really hard to identify the causal impact of policy. But, to the extent that we can do that, it apepars to be significant and positive.

Our study of the impact of policy on excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic is out @plosone.org.

We find that the policy measures saved lives. They did so by reducing mobility (in addition to people's direct reactions to the pandemic) and other channels.

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

The European Parliament voted yesterday to refer the MERCOSUR deal to the European Court of Justice. The two biggest party groups were quite split:
- 28% of the present European Socialists (S&D) voted in favor of this motion;
- 24% of the present European People's Party (EPP) MPs voted in favor.

Contested Competences in the European Union: The Law and Politics of Institutional Choice Abstract. What role do rules really play in shaping the behaviour of legislative actors? In theory, competences and procedures provide a framework within w

well, well, well if it isn't the book I started working on in 2017:

academic.oup.com/book/61769

Bulgarian government resigns after weeks of street protests Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov handed in his government's resignation on Thursday following weeks of street protests over its economic policies and its perceived failure to tackle corruptio...

The Bulgarian government resigns in the wake of the mass protests.

Now the current parliament will fail to form another government, the president will appoint an interim cabinet and schedule new elections, which - most likely - will lead to another stealmate.

www.reuters.com/world/europe...

Finally, the classic Left-Right vs. pro-anti Europe plot of party positions, to confirm that at the party level the pattern still holds in 2024, with some small but significant variations across regions.

You can explore the country-level relationships in the app here:
dimiter.shinyapps.io/ches/

Dissent and party positions on European integration

Next, we look at the measure of internal party dissent with regard to EU positions. Dissent is of course related to the clarity of positions, but the two are not the same.
Western European parties with moderate positions on Europe have the highest levels of internal dissent, on average.

Blur and party positions on European integration

Next, blur of positions on European integration:
Again, Eurosceptic and pro-European parties have the clearest positions, whille the parties in the middle are the most likely to have blurred or unclear positions on Europe. This is especially true for parties in Eastern and Southern Europe.

Salience and party positions on European integration

First, let's look at salience:
A rather pronounced inverted U-curve, with the most Eurosceptic and the most pro-European parties having the highest levels of saliance. Not much difference across Europen regions, but in Western Europe, the dip in saleince for centrist parties is the deepest

It is almost 10 years since Hanspeter Kriesi published his seminal article on the politicization of European Integration @jcms-eu.bsky.social.

A short thread on how things stand as of 2024, with @chesdata.bsky.social, looking at salience, clarity, and unity of party positions towards the EU 🧵:

My study of 🇪🇺 public opinion is now published! Check it out if you want to know how attitudes towards European integration really covary with political ideology, which policy views predict EU support, and how party positions structure public opinion.

www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandg...

Deadline extended until 14 December (Sunday) ⌛!

You can still apply to the ECPR SGEU 2026 conference (1 – 3 July 2026) until the end of thes week!

Join us in sunny Sicily, in the air-conditioned rooms of Università di Catania!

ecpr.eu/Events/341

That's a great way to put it!

In your example, the experiment primes identity, so it manipulates its recency and availability in the minds of respondents. This might be important for real world interventions, such as political speeches.

New work on on Immigration attitudes, out in @irpp.org with @natashagoel.bsky.social

We show dramatical increase in anti-immigration opinion in Canada over the past couple of years.

Its very different than previous shifts like in 1990s...

I don't think that's correct. First, most survey experiments control 'which' vignette is presented, not the order. Second, the differences in answers to a question following exposure to alternatives vignettes is not necessarily the same as a stated preference.

I think that's what practitioners of conjoints will say, only in their case the 'behavior' is actually responding to a different survey rather than an actual purchase, vote, etc.

Not a fan of conjoints, but for the sake of argument: asking directly would *not* reveal your preference for women due to social desirability bias or imperfect introspection. So the conjoint identifes a version of a causal effect (with limited transportability to the real-world IMO, but still).

In your example, you have estimated the causal effect of exposure to the word 'coffee' or 'tea' on my tendency to say 'yes' or 'no'. Whether this causal effect has any real-world or theoretical relevance is a different question. Meanwhile, you have *also* measured my preference for tea or coffee.

The blog post puts 'priming interventions' as measurement-oriented. But they identify the causal effect of the prime, hence causal inference. And, in principle, this effect can be useful for policy purposes, for example in the design of information or communication strategies.