George Melios

Weather to Protest: The Effect of Black Lives Matter Protests on the 2020 Presidential Election - Political Behavior Do mass mobilizations drive social change? This paper explores this question by studying how the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death influenced the 2020 U.S. presidential electi...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

An interesting collection of opinions @theguardian.com on whether and how the 2020 BLM protests change the world. Covers our work with @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social on @polbehavior.bsky.social. Link on the first comment

New paper out in @polbehavior.bsky.social. We focus on an important and timely question. Do protests matter? Do they drive social change? @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social summarises our work nicely in the following thread.

Great summary of our paper!

Very excited to be in Vienna yesterday for the kick-off meeting of our new Horizon Europe grant "MultiPod" on promoting political participation and creating the "Public Space for Citizen Deliberation" in Europe!

Check out our new publication. Excellently summarised by @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social

Thanks to @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social for the great collaboration on this project. Looking forward to continuing this line of research! #PoliticalScience #Polarization #AmericanPolitics

Why do these findings matter? A lack of trust in government when the "other side" is in power can hinder democratic functioning. It makes it harder for citizens to hold their own party accountable and can lead to efforts to undermine opposing governments. 🏛️

Why? Highly educated people show a stronger president-in-power effect, and they've increasingly shifted towards identifying as Democrats over time.

Citizen Erased: Contrary to popular belief, we found no evidence that this effect has grown faster among Republicans. If anything, it may have increased slightly more for Democrats in recent years.

Moreover, perceived ideological distance to the other side has increased:

Megalomania: The increase is driven by intensifying partisan identification:

Darkshines: Fast forward to 2021. The effect has increased by 2 to 4 times! When one’s party loses the presidency, partisans' trust in government plummets. When they win, it soars. The increase is illustrated by the red line below:

Bliss: Let's rewind to simpler times. In the 1970s, the "president-in-power effect" was relatively small. Although larger for Republicans, both sides had relatively high levels of trust in government, regardless of who held the White House.

New Born: After a long journey, our paper is finally seeing the light of day! In this paper, we examine how partisans' trust in government changes when their party is in/out of power, and how this ‘president-in-power effect’ has evolved since 1974.

🚨Publication alert🚨 Thrilled to announce my paper with
@bkleinteeselink.bsky.social entitled "Origin of (A)symmetry: The Evolution of Out-Party Distrust in the United States" is now accepted and available at @thejop.bsky.social! 🎉 A thread in 5 songs from the album 'Origin of Symmetry' by Muse...

Check out our new WP

Best way to kick off work for 2024 after leave! Thread coming soon!

No better way to celebrate the end of term, and thank your TA for all the amazing help, than a truffle burger and a beer.

Drop something blue from your gallery