Dimiter Toshkov
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dtoshkov.bsky.social
Dimiter Toshkov
@dtoshkov.bsky.social

comparative politics, European Union governance, research methods and design, data visualization, bureaucracy and public administration

Political science 63%
Business 13%
Pinned
How do attitudes to 🇪🇺 European integration relate to political ideology and policy preferences?

A major update of my study:
- I added the latest 2023 ESS data for citizens and 2024 CHES data for parties
- I built an app to explore these relationships across datasets, indicators, years & countries

It's quite absurd that there is no funding to keep ParlGov updated: this is essential data infrastructure for political science! No funder is interested in keeping the data backbone of comparative politics alive, while millions get spent on all kinds of BS. Ridiculous!
Just learned that Holger Döring retired from ParlGov in October.

If I'm not misreading his message, then this great resource will not be updated anymore 🖤

parlgov.org/2024/10/01/r...
Retiring from ParlGov - ParlGov project
parlgov.org

Reposted by Dimiter Toshkov

Just learned that Holger Döring retired from ParlGov in October.

If I'm not misreading his message, then this great resource will not be updated anymore 🖤

parlgov.org/2024/10/01/r...
Retiring from ParlGov - ParlGov project
parlgov.org

Reposted by Dimiter Toshkov

The deadline (10 December) for the call for papers and panels for the 13th biennial SGEU conference (1-3 July 2026, Università di Catania) is approaching fast!

Submit your panels and papers to one of 18 sections via the
@ecpr.bsky.social webpage: ecpr.eu/Events/341.
13th Biennial Conference of the SGEU, Università di Catania, 1 – 3 July 2026
European Consortium for Political Research
ecpr.eu

Yeps, 2024

yeps, it's telling that the Renew vote on the Omnibus Simplification Directive was split, with 17 MPs siding with the EPP.

Indeed, but the proximity between the EPP and Renew average positions makes you wonder about the reasons to have them as separate groups

For example, here are the positions on deregulation and the environment, relevant for the vote on the Omnibus Simplification directive last week. It is no mystery why the EPP voted with the ECR, PfN and ESN: their positions are much closer and allow the EPP to achieve its policy objectives.
🤩 Party positions in the 2024 European Parliament 🇪🇺!
I merged the CHES expert survey with EP composition data to visualize the political space of the current EP. The graphs make the center of gravity in the EP quite clear, on multiple dimensions and policy issues.
dimiter.shinyapps.io/ches/

Reposted by Dimiter Toshkov

Our study on public immigration misperceptions is out! Prior research overstated their prevalence due to flawed measurement. Our new approach separates real misperceptions from uninformed guessing — showing they’re less common than widely assumed and ideologically motivated.
doi.org/10.1017/psrm...
Beyond innumeracy: measuring public misperceptions about immigration | Political Science Research and Methods | Cambridge Core
Beyond innumeracy: measuring public misperceptions about immigration
doi.org
NEW -

Public Support for Pro-environment and Environment-Critical Movements - https://cup.org/3XzCAEJ

- @dirckdekleer.bsky.social, @catherinedevries.bsky.social & @simonvanteutem.bsky.social

#OpenAccess

It is an interesting paper 😉 osf.io/preprints/os...

My suspicion is that some of the resistance to any work that doesn't follow the canon comes from young scholars who feel they need to 'enforce' the boundaries of the field they have been socialized into. But this is also just a hunch.

Reviewer 2:
You have no definition of 'sanctions'. Also, I don't like your definition of 'sanctions'. 😂😡🥹

So findings from general studies of human behavior are invalid because people don't know much about international organizations 🤷‍♂️ ...
One of the joys of doing social science for me is reading and learning from different fields. But too often reviewers encourage the exact opposite. Why?

It is truly disappointing how small-minded some political scientists can be 😮‍💨. For a recent study on enforcement in the EU, we dug deep into the general literature on enforcement, which spans evolutionary psychology, anthropology, economic behavior, etc.
Here is what Reviewer 2 has to say:

This is some very thorough empirical work on judicial bias in Germany 👏
New paper with @mhamjediers.bsky.social

German judges have discretion to apply rehabilitative juvenile criminal law (Jugendstrafrecht) or punitive adult criminal law to 18–20-year-old offenders. We show that immigrant youths are ~10 percentage points less likely to be sentenced under juvenile law
NEW -

Anti-Immigrant Bias in the Choice Between Punitive and Rehabilitative Justice - https://cup.org/49vUfVa

- @riazsascha.bsky.social & @mhamjediers.bsky.social

#OpenAccess
New paper with @mhamjediers.bsky.social

German judges have discretion to apply rehabilitative juvenile criminal law (Jugendstrafrecht) or punitive adult criminal law to 18–20-year-old offenders. We show that immigrant youths are ~10 percentage points less likely to be sentenced under juvenile law
NEW -

Anti-Immigrant Bias in the Choice Between Punitive and Rehabilitative Justice - https://cup.org/49vUfVa

- @riazsascha.bsky.social & @mhamjediers.bsky.social

#OpenAccess

I see what you mean, but then it would be TAN/GAL ... which does have an interesting ring to it 😆

by the way, from the app, you can download the integrated Chapel Hill Expert Survey dataset on party positions (1999-2024) with proper country codes and variable names that reference the polarity of the party positions 🤓.

Thanks for using it. Any feedback welcome (incl. requests for features).
For my course on Conflict and Representation in the EU, I made an interactive Shiny app that plots CHES party positions, for all countries, years (1999-2024) and (most) dimensions in the dataset. Enjoy!
dimiter.shinyapps.io/ches/

#polsci #Polisky #EUsky #Comparativesky #polbehaviorsky
Planning a panel related to the EU 🇪🇺 or European integration for the next @ecpr.bsky.social General Conference (8-11 September 2026 in Krakow 🇵🇱)?
The section proposal on the EU is prepared by Adam Holesch (IBEI) and @nathaliebrack.bsky.social. Get in touch with them before 7 November to co-ordinate!

'The contact [on a public transit system in the US] results in exclusionary attitudes toward the outgroup', according to the conclusions of this RCT www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Causal effect of intergroup contact on exclusionary attitudes | PNAS
The effect of intergroup contact has long been a question central to social scientists. As political and technological changes bring increased inte...
www.pnas.org

oh, I didn't see that! thanks for pointing it out

Pedantic point, but the reported increases/decreases are not in % (percentages), as suggested by this @nieuws.nos.nl table, but in percentage *points*.

NSC lost 97% of its vote share, not 12.5%.

Same graph for prospective voters of VVD (in blue) and GL-PvdA (red). VVD supporters are quite negative of GL-PvdA voters already, shortly after the fall of the cabinet. Feelings seem to be mutual, with GL-PvdA supporters quite negative towards VVD voters as well.

Affective polarization (negative/positive feelings towards voters of different parties), for prospective voters of D66 and CDA, as of june 2025. Dots show the averages per groups of party voters.

DD6 voters were much more negative towards JA21 than CDA voters were negative towards GL-PvdA voters.

Call me old-fashioned, but I find such open endorsement of political figures by university professors on professional social networks inappropriate.
It is actions like this one that erode the credibility of social scientists as independent experts.

The period without a proper government will only be extended after the elections this week, until a new governing coaltion is formed. Last time this took more than seven months, to form a cabinet that lasted 11 months 🤷.

I find it quite remarkable that in the past 8 years, the Netherlands has had no regular government for 2.5 years, or 30% of the time.
For two-and-a-half years the country has been governed by 'demissionary' cabinets with a very limited mandate (prepare elections and take care of ongoing business).

Reposted by Dimiter Toshkov

Vandaag in Trouw: Veel kiezers steunen de democratie, maar niet iedereen verstaat hetzelfde onder "democratie". Waarom wil een grote groep kiezers een onbegrensde meerderheidsdemocratie? Lees mijn bijdrage (samen met @dtoshkov.bsky.social) hier: www.trouw.nl/opinie/opini...
Opinie: De steun voor democratie hangt af van haar resultaten
Het is niet zo gek dat burgers aandringen op een systeem van ‘de meerderheid beslist alles’, schrijven Lars Brummel en Dimiter Toshkov.
www.trouw.nl