James Dennison
@jamesrdennison.bsky.social
2.9K followers 600 following 64 posts
Political and social scientist Prof @mpc-eui.bsky.social @eui-eu.bsky.social & Pierre Keller Prof @harvardkennedy.bsky.social Interests: attitudes, behaviour, comms, migration, quant, 🇬🇧 & 🇪🇺 politics www.jamesdennison.eu
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Reposted by James Dennison
Reposted by James Dennison
⚠️New publication @ssreditorial.bsky.social

📖 #ethics in the practical implementation of #migration information campaigns

➡️ Sender credibility and Anxiety-trigger both impactful for information provision
➡️ but via distinct paths: No double-down-effect

🛄 Multi-treatment RCT, N=2612 in Nigeria
Reposted by James Dennison
reminded today of the incredible Summerhill parody in The Day Today, which is both *extremely* specific and very funny even if you have no idea what Summerhill was.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tebh...
BRASS EYE - The Drumlake Experiment (E02 - Drugs)
YouTube video by dysfunksjon
www.youtube.com
Reposted by James Dennison
Reposted by James Dennison
New Zealand prevaricates on whether to recognise Palestine as a state, or not.
My Stuff #cartoon today #NZpol #Palestine #Gaza
Cartoon. Image shows NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in Gaza’s ruins, talking to a gaunt woman, huddled with her two children. He’s saying, “New Zealand is a very principled nation. We won’t be rushed”
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The light of dawn hits cirrus clouds just right for a beautiful palette of cool and warm colors. Photo taken at Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. August 2025.

#Stunday #CratersoftheMoon #Idaho #NationalParks #photography #travel #camping #dawn #clouds
The light of dawn hits cirrus clouds just right for a beautiful palette of cool and warm colors. Photo taken at Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. Nearby there are green bushes and grass, with a few pines farther away.
Reposted by James Dennison
1/ How does migration affect political attitudes? Using 380k obs from 104 sending & 28 receiving countries, @filipkostelka.bsky.social, Nicolas Sauger & I find some migrants’ attitudes align with locals, while others exceed origin-host context, reshaping ideological space.
👉 doi.org/10.1111/ajps...
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Another problem is that UK politics has a serious "pipeline problem".

If Starmer keeled over tomorrow, I've no idea who would replace him.

I don't even know who the frontrunners would be.

There are no experienced, tested candidates in either main party, because UK politics no longer develops that
I suspect Starmer would be in more peril if MPs still picked the leader.

Under the present rules, Labour MPs can fell a prime minister but they can't replace him. And right now, no one can predict who the membership would choose.

That will make many MPs nervous.
www.ft.com/content/1487...
Extract from article by Stephen Bush: "Badenoch may not be the only leader not to make it all the way to the next general election. Starmer’s government increasingly resembles Boris Johnson’s in the early autumn of 2021: struggling with inflation, hit by scandals and developing a reputation among its own MPs for a nightmare combination of bullheaded stubbornness and brittleness under pressure.

There is a significant appetite among Labour MPs to believe that the government can still be turned around without a change of leader and all the instability that would bring. But a moment of crisis or panic could very swiftly make this government resemble Johnson’s in 2022: undone by panicking, unhappy backbenchers, blundering from landslide to disaster in a single term. "
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The evil that men do lives after them
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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 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.
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Donald Trump, Peter Mandelson & Jeffrey Epstein. From Matt.
Well done, this looks great. And, yes, the firepower going into this is terrifying.
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Remembering my childhood in Camberley, Surrey (at a later date, Michael Gove’s seat) where the Conservative controlled council proudly flew the 🇪🇺 flag outside their offices, at about that period of time.
IN NEW ISSUE: British attitudes to ‘Europe’ have been long characterised as ‘reluctant’. @jamesrdennison.bsky.social explores the exception between 1988–1992 - Britain’s Pro-European Moment: buff.ly/3D41PIx (OPEN ACCESS)

@polstudiesassoc.bsky.social @uoypolitics.bsky.social #ECRs @sagepub.com
Reposted by James Dennison
IN NEW ISSUE: British attitudes to ‘Europe’ have been long characterised as ‘reluctant’. @jamesrdennison.bsky.social explores the exception between 1988–1992 - Britain’s Pro-European Moment: buff.ly/3D41PIx (OPEN ACCESS)

@polstudiesassoc.bsky.social @uoypolitics.bsky.social #ECRs @sagepub.com
Reposted by James Dennison
"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?"

Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.
A pika sits on a mossy rock. Tighter crop of the same pika, focusing on its head. An even tighter crop, focusing more on the pika's eye. An extremely tight crop of the pika's eye, emphasizing their reflection of an early morning mountain scene.
Reposted by James Dennison
We asked people who experienced "sweeps" of homeless encampments to write about it in their own words.

In Portland, Teresa Stratton told us about how her husband’s ashes were taken in a removal:
Handwritten text on a notecard: My husbands ashes; I made me feel alone scared, empty, now I wonder where he is and if he's all still in his urn and if hes ok and I hope he's not in the dump
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If you work in message testing or persuasive communication, this may be the most importantly paper you will read this month, perhaps all year. From @carnes.bsky.social and Henderson in @bjpols.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
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“transformed a once mono-ethnic country into one where a fifth of the population was born overseas + anger over a lack of affordable homes has fuelled resentment towards immigrants and asylum seekers” Are you sure about that? Ethnicity of victims suggest attacks were racially motivated.
‘Why is this happening?’: violent attacks terrify Ireland’s immigrant community
Spate of physical incidents includes attack on a six-year-old girl at a County Waterford housing estate
www.theguardian.com
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And were I the new President of the EUI I might be a little concerned if I had briefed the journalist and given them this impression…
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So apparently we’re wizards 🧙‍♂️ now??
It's nice to see a full write up in The Economist of the EUI but this is pretty off the mark. Of course a history department is going to produce historical research! This feels like a puff piece but not for the EUI.
www.economist.com/europe/2025/...
Europe’s Hogwarts has a new Dumbledore
Patrizia Nanz is trying to make the European University Institute relevant
www.economist.com