Jens Wäckerle

These nuanced perceptions hold interesting potential for parties when they try to persuade citizens of a minority government. Stay tuned for more insights on political representation under minority governments from our #MINORITYRULE project!

Figure of perceptions about minority and majority governments

Despite low knowledge levels and general opposition towards minority governments, citizens believe them to work better with the opposition and listen to the demands of all voters. Meanwhile, they see min. governments as less stable, less able to solve conflicts, less legitimate and less reliable.

Figure describing preferences for majority and minority government.

Next, we find that citizens dislike minority governments in all countries. In Sweden, only 10% of respondents like them! Especially older voters and government supporters dislike them. Knowledge about minority governments increases opposition towards them.

Overview of all answers to the knowledge question in the three countries.

More likely to answer correctly? Citizens with ⬆️ education, ⬆️ political interest, older voters, and men (although for men likely due to guessing). Small country differences. Most common mistakes: Minority governments defined by getting less than half of votes or by exclusion of the largest party.

Estimates of the true knowledge of voters about minority governments and other political information.

Our survey shows that about 1 in 4 citizens can correctly define a minority government (excluding lucky guesses). This is about the same as the share of people that can correctly define the roles of all parties in parliament.

Screenshot of the start of the paper. Title (Political knowledge and perceptions of minority governments in Europe), authors (Jens Wäckerle and Sven-Oliver Proksch) and journal (European Journal of Political Research)

New from @erc.europa.eu project #MINORITYRULE with @sopro.bsky.social: We study voters’ knowledge about and perceptions of minority governments in 🇩🇰, 🇩🇪 and 🇸🇪.

Link: doi.org/10.1017/S147...

When survey researchers or politicians talk about minority governments, what do voters understand? ⬇️

The German data is not great, I collected it from the member's pages of the individual MPs. Once you have all those in a list (which MP was in which committee per term), combining it with the existing dataset is straightforward (just need to check and jnify names and code policy areas).

This dataset truly was a monumental team effort, it took more than three years to put together. Thanks to everyone who contributed and gave feedback along the way. If you find any errors or have ideas for extensions, please contact us!

A plot describing the share of women among low, medium and high prestige committees and among members and leadership across the fourteen countries. In almost all cases, women are more likely to serve in low and medium prestige committees and as members rather than leadership.

As a first application, we show that women across all countries are much more likely to be assigned to low and medium prestige committees (coding from WhoGov by @jacobnyrup) and as members rather than leadership. We are excited to see the many ways other people will use this data!

A table listing the roles minister, deputy minister, minister of state, parliamentary secretary, committee chair, party spokesperson, deputy committee chair, deputy party spokesperson, committee member, and deputy committee member. The first four roles are in the executive branch, the others in the legislative. The table also lists typical positions for each role.

Each position is assigned a role according to the table below. Committee members are by far the most common, but there are other types. We also collect executive positions.

A table listing the cases in the 14 countries in the dataset. Overall, there are 134295 positions from 1989-11-21 to 2024-12-31. 96.51% of them have Wikidata IDs connected to them.

The dataset covers European countries plus New Zealand and the US from 1989 to 2024. Overall, there are over 130,000 positions! Each entry is one MP’s position for one party within one legislative term.

New data for legislative scholars! Committee Membership Dataset with @bcastanho.bsky.social, @dmpullan.bsky.social and Firuze Taner:

Committee assignments for all MPs (Wikidata IDs!) in 14 countries
Harmonized roles/policy areas

Data: doi.org/10.7802/2940
Working paper: tinyurl.com/vf54r78p

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The current consensus in political science is that Nazis hating me and me hating Nazis are both equal parts of the ~polarization problem

Give Tadej Pogacar French citizenship and we'll avoid the runoff!

Blog post: github.com/sophieehill/...

TL;DR: There are a LOT of errors/inconsistencies in the results reported in this paper (estimates outside CIs, sign errors, duplicates, asymmetric CIs). Even in the abstract itself!

This suggests manual editing of results tables.

Which is not good...

🧵

The social sciences face a replicability crisis. A key determinant of replication success is statistical power. We assess the power of political science research by collating over 16,000 hypothesis tests from about 2,000 articles in 46 areas of the discipline. Under generous assumptions, we show that quantitative research in political science is greatly underpow- ered: the median analysis has about 10% power, and only about 1 in 10 tests have at least 80% power to detect the consensus effects reported in the literature. We also find substantial heterogeneity in tests across research areas, with some being characterized by high power but most having very low power. To contextualize our findings, we survey political methodologists to assess their expectations about power levels. Most methodologists greatly overestimate the statistical power of political science research.

The pretty draft is now online.

Link to paper (free): www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....

Our replication package starts from the raw data and we put real work into making it readable & setting it up so people could poke at it, so please do explore it: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

The "somewhat" is just perfect. How many placebo Europes matter more?? HOW MANY?!

EPSA have announced that they will hold a conference in July 2026.

😵‍💫 We understand that there might be some confusion about EPSS and EPSA.

👉🏽 So we thought we would clarify some things.

A short 🧵

It tells us so much about the debate around immigration that the first response by journalists and politicians here is not: does this mean they are over- or underrepresented? This bias and ignorance used to be limited to the most lurid and hateful parts of the media. It is now a standard response.

I'm adding to the Seoul novelty hats as political science concepts collection:

Comments from Reviewer 2

The end. Shout out to Nyunyu wholesale dongdaemun for an excellent collection.

10. Political theory

9. Climate politics

8. Political behaviour

7. Social democracy in crisis

6. Regression to the mean

5. Median voter theorem

4. Democracy

3. Populism

2. Qualitative methods