Events

New article out in Social Media + Society. In "Digital Media and the Surge of Political Outsiders: Explaining the Success of Political Challengers in the United States, Germany, and China", we argue that digital media neutralize two former monopolies in structuring political discourse and political coordination and mobilization. In the past, these monopolies allowed media and political organizations to channel politics.

We invite scholars at any stage of their career to submit abstracts and papers for a two-day conference on Comparative Research on Political Elites. The conference will take place at the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany from 29 to 30 November.

The aim of this project is to develop a contextual understanding of polling errors and their triggers. Unlike most previous studies, we take a cross-election comparative perspective and put the theoretical focus on characteristics of the electoral contest which may encourage polling errors.

This project addresses the essential role of individuals’ perceptions of economic fundamentals when it comes to forming preferences for redistribution in the EU. We study this question both theoretically and empirically using insights and techniques from behavioural economics and psychology.

The article "The Rippling Dynamics of Valenced Messages in Naturalistic Youth Chat" co-authored by Seth Frey, Karsten Donnay, Dirk Helbing, Robert Sumner and Maarten Bos performs a quasi-experimental analysis of hundreds of millions of chat room messages between young people. This allowed us to reconstruct how—and on what timeline—the valence of one message affects the valence of subsequent messages by others.

The ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments and the University of Konstanz are pleased to announce the conference on Advances in the Empirical and Theoretical Study of Parliaments. The conference will take place in Konstanz, Germany, from 26 to 28 September 2019. Keynote speakers are Kristin Kanthak (University of Pittsburgh), Georg Vanberg (Duke University), and Alan E. Wiseman (Vanderbilt University).

The workshop takes place on July 12, 2019 in room G 309 and is meant for anyone interested in using high performance computing (HPC) resources in their research. It first introduces HPC and the Scientific Compute Cluster (SCC) at the University of Konstanz. The scientific talks in the afternoon then highlight the potential applications of HPC for hardware intensive statistical and simulation tasks in the social sciences.

Karsten Donnay will contribute to a panel entitled "International and Domestic Conflict" presenting research related to the MERIAM project co-authored with collaborators in Geneva. The conference takes place from June 20 to 22 at Queen's University Belfast.

Karsten Donnay will give a talk on "Modelling the Subnational Risk of Acute Malnutrition in Conflict-Affected Settings" presenting a joint research project on malnutrition early warning with the NGO "Action Against Hunger", the Graduate Institute Geneva, University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University.