Mathis Lohaus
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Mathis Lohaus
@mathislohaus.de
680 followers 950 following 140 posts
Guest professor (EU & International Relations) at Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social

🏡 https://lohaus.org 💡 https://transnorms.eu
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
carlquintanilla.bsky.social
Now here’s the kind of news you drop going into a long holiday weekend. Maybe no one will notice. 🤡

@nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...
November 26, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
elvirarosert.bsky.social
Man weiß ja, wie schlecht es um die Bundeswehr und die Verteidigungsfähigkeit bestellt ist - aber das so konzentriert zu lesen, ist dennoch beklemmend.

Ein paar Snippets (mit Geschenklink zum Artikel):
FAS-Titelseite vom 23.11.2025: Scheitern de luxe; Bild von Boris Pistorius
November 23, 2025 at 11:15 AM
mathislohaus.de
An unexpected moment in the spotlight for EU researchers' favorite bit of jargon! 🇪🇺🙂
brandyzadrozny.bsky.social Brandy Zadrozny @brandyzadrozny.bsky.social · 5d
completely outside of politics, this is so charming
November 21, 2025 at 5:26 PM
mathislohaus.de
Für alle, die sich mit Korruption bzw. deren internationaler Bekämpfung beschäftigen, z. B. auch in der Lehre: Unser (@maxlesch.bsky.social & @mathislohaus.de) Beitrag "Das internationale Antikorruptionsregime" im Handbuch Korruptionsforschung ist online! link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/...
Das internationale Antikorruptionsregime
Das internationale Antikorruptionsregime setzt sich aus einer Vielzahl regionaler und globaler Verträge, Normen und Verfahren zusammen. Dieser Beitrag zeichnet nach, warum der Kampf gegen Korrupt...
link.springer.com
November 20, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
stefanaykut.bsky.social
What happens at #COP30 in #Belém?
So far, #COP30 has been far more interesting than many expected (including myself) — and also more encouraging, given the otherwise very bleak global outlook on climate and almost everything else.

Here are my takeaways from the first week:

🧵
November 19, 2025 at 7:16 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
profjacob.bsky.social
🚨🚨Breaking and bad #EU news: Lawmakers in @europarl.europa.eu agreed today to exempt more companies from green reporting rules after the center-right, right-wing and far-right groups allied to pass the EU’s first omnibus simplification package. #omnibus 🧵
www.politico.eu/article/epp-...
EU conservatives vote with far right to approve cuts to green rules
The outcome highlights the EPP’s willingness to abandon its traditional centrist coalition allies.
www.politico.eu
November 13, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
drsimevans.carbonbrief.org
NEW: Global fossil fuel use will peak before 2030 – unless 'stated policies' are abandoned

Contra some terrible news coverage, IEA World Energy Outlook shows coal near peak, oil peaking by 2030 & gas by 2035 (see chart)

What's going on? 🧵 + cool charts

www.carbonbrief.org/iea-fossil-f...
November 12, 2025 at 9:02 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
juliegoldberg.bsky.social
"[This] experiment, like other academic studies published...on A.I.’s effects on the brain, found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I. search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/t...
How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’
www.nytimes.com
November 11, 2025 at 4:09 PM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
chrauh.bsky.social
@ckreudersonnen.bsky.social and I are happy to announce two open research positions in our joint DFG-funded project VARICRIS (👉 bit.ly/varicris).
We are recruiting a #PostDoc and a #PhD candidate 🧵:

#PoliSky #PoliSkyJobs #polsci 🌐
Welcome! – VARICRIS
VARICRIS research project
bit.ly
October 22, 2025 at 2:40 PM
mathislohaus.de
New kinds of questions to ponder for a large political science (!) conference with (typically) ~50% participants from outside of North America. It used to be that "only" people with the "wrong" passports suffered visa issues; now it's about the risk of politically motivated sanctions.
isanet.bsky.social International Studies Association @isanet.bsky.social · Oct 19
Is Columbus safe for LGBTQI+ travelers? Can you be detained or profiled? Is the US military present at airports?
Get answers before #ISA2026.
🕒 20 Oct | 14:00 UTC
🔗 Submit questions now! buff.ly/2jedzSh
Text: Urgent advice on entering the us for ISA 2026 - with An Immigration Attorney October 20th, 2025 - Webinar • 14:00 to 15:00 UTC Image: photo of US customs & border protection at airport. ISA logo
October 19, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
catherinedevries.bsky.social
Every academic career is built on rejection, but we don’t show it.

CVs list publications, grants & awards, not rejected manuscripts, unfunded proposals, or failures.

But those invisible rejections shape us more than our successes ever do.

👉 catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/fail-bette...

🧵
Fail Better: Why Your Rejections Will Shape You More Than Your Publications
The Art of Learning from Rejection
catherineeunicedevries.substack.com
October 14, 2025 at 8:52 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
verenakunz.bsky.social
Next Wednesday (October 15, 17:00 Berlin time), we're kicking off next term's Speaker Series with a talk and package demo by Francisco Tomas-Valiente on "Uncertain Performance: How to Quantify Uncertainty and Draw Test Sets When Evaluating Classifiers". Paper and information on how to join ⬇️
The image shows photos and names of the five speakers of the TADA Speaker Series for the Fall term 2025.
October 10, 2025 at 12:21 PM
mathislohaus.de
Kleiner Gruß von der BVG an die @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social: Pünktlich zum Beginn der Vorlesungszeit ist drei Tage "Ersatzverkehr" auf der (einzigen) U-Bahn-Linie, die zur Uni fährt. Liebe Erstsemester, willkommen in Berlin! 🤡
Ausschnitt U-Bahn-Plan Berlin: Linie U3 mit Bus statt Bahn
October 9, 2025 at 7:48 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
andrew.heiss.phd
The amount of time it takes to grade things once they show an inkling of maybe-LLM-hallucinations is such a waste—gotta stop reading and spend half an hour to track down sources to see if they actually exist and say the things they claim to say
September 29, 2025 at 1:54 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
hongmathias.bsky.social
Evin Dalkilic @evinale.bsky.social:

Hochschulen und Bibliotheken "dürfen Diamond-Open-Access-Publikationen" wie den Verfassungsblog @verfassungsblog.de finanzieren.

Das Wirtschaftlichkeitsgebot steht nicht entgegen: "Um es kurz zu machen: Es handelt sich um ein Scheinproblem."

1/4
verfassungsblog.de Verfassungsblog @verfassungsblog.de · Sep 27
Den einen ist der Verfassungsblog nicht wissenschaftlich genug, den anderen zu kostenfrei, um von wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken finanziert zu werden.

Wieso an beidem nichts dran ist, erklärt EVIN DALKILIC im Editorial.

verfassungsblog.de/diese-wissen...
Zitat aus dem Editorial von Evin Dalkilic: „Der Verfassungsblog bietet Wissenschaftler*innen eine Plattform, um diesen Diskurs anzustoßen und zu führen, zwischen Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit, schneller als jede Zeitschrift und mit strengerer Qualitätssicherung als die meisten.“
September 28, 2025 at 11:31 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
carlmc.bsky.social
It’s really worrying that it takes a political scientist to point out all these irregularities in a paper that is picked up to such an extent by the press — reviewers, science editors, anyone listening? Anyone bothered to ask for the underlying data & code?
sophieehill.bsky.social Sophie E. Hill @sophieehill.bsky.social · Sep 5
As noted by @carlmc.bsky.social, one odd pattern in these results is that ALL the estimates and confidence interval bounds are multiples of 0.008

What could explain that? 🤔
September 6, 2025 at 8:35 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
dhnexon.bsky.social
🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics.

The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.
August 30, 2025 at 8:10 PM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
cullenhendrix.bsky.social
We are going to be digging out from all this for years and years and years.
maitelsadany.bsky.social Mai El-Sadany @maitelsadany.bsky.social · Aug 28
The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a peer-to-peer evaluation of a country's rights record. All 193 UN member states are expected to participate, and even states like Russia and China do.

Today, the US took the unprecedented step of withdrawing from the UPR www.reuters.com/world/europe...
US withdraws from key UN human rights report, draws criticism from rights advocates
The United States will not participate in a U.N. review of its human rights record, officials said, a move that rights advocates called a worrying retreat from Washington's global engagement on rights and justice issues.
www.reuters.com
August 29, 2025 at 3:26 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
bschlipphak.bsky.social
Together with the great colleagues @i4replication.bsky.social, we are organizing the first Münster replication games (28/11/25)! Highly recommended to junior & senior scholars. Joint project together with #MueCOS & #CDSC @uni-muenster.de. More info/registration: indico.uni-muenster.de/event/3526/
August 26, 2025 at 1:02 PM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
jeffcolgan.bsky.social
Very excited to share this new tool for teaching the politics of climate change. What are the different *theories of change* that underlie decarbonization efforts and policies? Help your students learn about them. Please share widely. 🌎🔌💡🛢️
August 7, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
brendannyhan.bsky.social
What a graph
July 29, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
pengzell.bsky.social
methods section said
“we follow standard practice”
because we did not
understand
what we were doing
but assumed
someone once had
July 17, 2025 at 8:40 AM
Reposted by Mathis Lohaus
jocmuel.bsky.social
📣 Postdoc (75 %, 3 yrs) at @unigreifswald.bsky.social — start autumn 2025 on perhaps Germany’s most beautiful campus. Know someone with a PhD (or nearly done) in Political Science? ⬇️ #PolSci #Postdoc
July 14, 2025 at 7:16 AM