🪞 Even shared terms do not always mean shared meanings. Among respondents who mention rights, left voters connect rights to equality, people, and citizenship. Right voters emphasize freedom of speech and expression.

🧭 Second finding: democratic meaning is politically structured. Far-right voters and non-voters are less likely to mention civil rights, elections, and horizontal accountability. Far-right voters more often invoke majority rule.

🔎 First finding: citizens most often define democracy through individual and civil rights. Multidimensional definitions are rare. Only 17% mention elections when asked in their own words.

💬 We fielded representative surveys in 14 countries and asked: "Using your own words, what are the essential elements of democracy in your view?" This gives us 25,509 open-ended responses.

📄 And another working paper: **Pretty much all citizens say they support democracy.** But what do they mean by that? We ask whether voters from different partisan camps mean the same thing when they talk about "democracy." Paper: osf.io/preprints/so...

✅ The correction works. It reduces belief errors by 11.6 percentile points among pessimists and 13.0 points among optimists. It also moves income satisfaction in the expected direction. But it does *not* reduce populist attitudes.

Then we ask the policy-relevant question: Can we correct the misperception? In a preregistered survey experiment with about 5,000 German respondents, we randomly show people personalized information about their actual income percentile.

💶 Compared to optimists, pessimists are materially better off and do not enter the analysis as already more radical-right in the previous wave. That is what makes them so interesting now that the far right is more normalized.

🔎 Key finding: people who underestimate their income rank report stronger populist attitudes, even when we account for their actual income position. And these "pessimists" are not the economically deprived group.

📄 New working paper out: osf.io/preprints/so... We (@thiloalbers.bsky.social @felixkersting.bsky.social and Fabian Kosse) try to understand why some citizens who are objectively well off still feel left behind, and why this matters for populist attitudes.

Arrived in Bamberg yesterday for a very special event: a workshop celebrating Thomas Saalfeld and his achievements. Safe to say that without Thomas, I would never have done a PhD. Thank you! If you'd like to read the Festschrift in his honor: www.routledge.com/Democracy-at...

Now traveling to @epssnet.bsky.social I would like to draw your attention to a panel on: Standards for Replication in Political Science 10:50-12:30 Thursday, 18 June, 2026, Bar 2 w. @bochkareva.bsky.social @fresejoris.bsky.social @macartan.bsky.social @aeggers.bsky.social and myself.

I like this @thejop.bsky.social : "We are now implementing a system in which the editorial team has the right to not consider submissions from authors who have failed to review for the journal three or more times, when invited to do so by the editorial team."

#thx 🙏 As always we thank many colleagues out there for their feedback. Specifically Celine Colombo who used to be a coA on the project a while ago and then left academia.

🗳️ That does not mean simple language directly wins elections. In the conjoint experiment, we do not find a direct average electoral bonus for simpler speech.

👀 But it also does something more surprising: Simpler language made respondents more likely to think the politician came from a lower-class and less-educated background. Plain speech can signal: this person is one of us.

📚What we find: First, simple language improves political knowledge. Respondents remembered statements better and identified politicians' positions more accurately when the wording was simpler. [a bit the obvious mechanical effect of simplicity]

🧪 We test this in two preregistered large-scale survey experiments in Germany (N=5,800 and N=7,200). 🎲 The key manipulation: we vary linguistic sophistication among other factors. In other words, how politicians say things, not just what they say.

🔍 Das Hauptergebnis: Wir sehen keinen breiten oder dauerhaften Einstellungswandel in der Bevölkerung zur Migration. Linksstehende Befragte und wahrscheinliche SPD-Unterstützer:innen blieben weitgehend unbeeinflusst.

📈 Bevor wir auf Einstellungen schauen, können wir auch zeigen, dass die Aussage die öffentliche Debatte tatsächlich verändert hat. Google Trends und Eurobarometer-Daten deuten beide darauf hin, dass Migration nach Scholz' Intervention schnell an Salienz gewann.

📄 Neues Paper mit MA-Studentin @jmschulte.bsky.social: Wenn Sozialdemokrat:innen in der Migrationspolitik nach rechts rücken, folgen die Wähler:innen dann tatsächlich? Wir untersuchen Olaf Scholz' radikalen Kurswechsel in Deutschland im Oktober 2023. (original: EN, Abstract Übersetzung via AI)

🇩🇪 Germany is a revealing case. The SPD had long been associated with a comparatively permissive migration profile, and much of the mainstream left electorate remained relatively progressive on the issue. So Scholz's call to deport people "more often and faster" was a visible break.

Stimmt, ich gehe künftig auch nur noch zur Arbeit wenn’s nicht „mies“ ist. Das muss mir schon reinlaufen, sonst nixe mixe.

Very grateful to my coauthors, the reviewers, and everyone who helped improve the paper along the way. We worked quite a long while on this. I'm specifically happy to publish yet another null!

📭 But that is not what we find. We see little evidence that MPs are more likely to send substantive replies when constituents agree with their party's stance.

🎲 Constituents first stated their policy positions in an online survey. In the survey we then randomly assigned one of eight pre-written email templates and sent the approved message to their MP. The key treatment: was the position aligned with the MP party leadership's stance, or not?

🧪 Between Nov 2018 and July 2019, during the Brexit negotiations, real constituents sent real policy queries to MPs across 9 salient issues tied to Westminster's Brexit debates. We then recorded MPs' replies to these queries.

🚨 New paper accepted at the @bjpols.bsky.social: we were in the field while Brexit dominated British politics. Do MPs respond differently when constituents disagree with the party line? What we find surprised us: a null! url: osf.io/preprints/os...

Thanks: Special thanks go out to @brendannyhan.bsky.social . Without him pushing us to write this up, we would have not written the paper! We also thank everyone else who has commented on this paper.

🧠 Potential mechanism: In our surveys, respondents rarely imagine a concrete social referent. - No interviewer. - No audience. - No visible evaluator. No referent -> no pressure.