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Jens Wäckerle

@jwaeckerle.bsky.social

2.4K followers 270 following 30 posts

Post-doctoral researcher at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics (University of Cologne) https://www.jenswaeckerle.com/

www.jenswaeckerle.com

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Jens Wäckerle @jwaeckerle.bsky.social · 2h

This dataset truly was a monumental team effort, it took more than three years to put together. Thanks to everyone who contributed and gave feedback along the way. If you find any errors or have ideas for extensions, please contact us!

Jens Wäckerle @jwaeckerle.bsky.social · 2h

As a first application, we show that women across all countries are much more likely to be assigned to low and medium prestige committees (coding from WhoGov by @jacobnyrup) and as members rather than leadership. We are excited to see the many ways other people will use this data!

A plot describing the share of women among low, medium and high prestige committees and among members and leadership across the fourteen countries. In almost all cases, women are more likely to serve in low and medium prestige committees and as members rather than leadership.

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Jens Wäckerle @jwaeckerle.bsky.social · 2h

Each position is assigned a role according to the table below. Committee members are by far the most common, but there are other types. We also collect executive positions.

A table listing the roles minister, deputy minister, minister of state, parliamentary secretary, committee chair, party spokesperson, deputy committee chair, deputy party spokesperson, committee member, and deputy committee member. The first four roles are in the executive branch, the others in the legislative. The table also lists typical positions for each role.

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Jens Wäckerle @jwaeckerle.bsky.social · 2h

The dataset covers European countries plus New Zealand and the US from 1989 to 2024. Overall, there are over 130,000 positions! Each entry is one MP’s position for one party within one legislative term.

A table listing the cases in the 14 countries in the dataset. Overall, there are 134295 positions from 1989-11-21 to 2024-12-31. 96.51% of them have Wikidata IDs connected to them.

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Jens Wäckerle @jwaeckerle.bsky.social · 2h

New data for legislative scholars! Committee Membership Dataset with @bcastanho.bsky.social, @dmpullan.bsky.social and Firuze Taner:

Committee assignments for all MPs (Wikidata IDs!) in 14 countries
Harmonized roles/policy areas

Data: doi.org/10.7802/2940
Working paper: tinyurl.com/vf54r78p

⬇️

GESIS-Suche

doi.org

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Reposted by Jens Wäckerle

Bruno Castanho Silva @bcastanho.bsky.social · 20d

The current consensus in political science is that Nazis hating me and me hating Nazis are both equal parts of the ~polarization problem

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Jens Wäckerle @jwaeckerle.bsky.social · 21d

Give Tadej Pogacar French citizenship and we'll avoid the runoff!

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Reposted by Jens Wäckerle

Sophie E. Hill @sophieehill.bsky.social · Sep 8

Blog post: github.com/sophieehill/...

TL;DR: There are a LOT of errors/inconsistencies in the results reported in this paper (estimates outside CIs, sign errors, duplicates, asymmetric CIs). Even in the abstract itself!

This suggests manual editing of results tables.

Which is not good...

🧵

Summary
Unfortunately, this example is not an isolated issue.

Across 9 appendix tables with 256 regression coefficients, I find:

5 cases of estimates outside their reported confidence interval
46 duplicates (i.e. estimate/CI combinations with an identical match in the same table)
At least 20 cases of asymmetric confidence intervals, which cannot be explained as rounding errors
17 values rounded to 4 decimal places (all others to 3 decimal places), indicating manual editing of tables
Over 50% of all estimates and confidence intervals are multiples of 0.008
It is difficult to diagnose exactly what is going on without access to the underlying data and code.

However, two broad conclusions can be drawn:

There are many errors and inconsistencies in the results which appear to be the result of manual editing.
There are strange patterns in the results which, if genuine, should have been noted and explained by the authors.

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Reposted by Jens Wäckerle

Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 27d

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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Jens Wäckerle @jwaeckerle.bsky.social · Aug 15

The "somewhat" is just perfect. How many placebo Europes matter more?? HOW MANY?!

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Reposted by Jens Wäckerle

EPSS @epssnet.bsky.social · Aug 7

EPSA have announced that they will hold a conference in July 2026.

😵‍💫 We understand that there might be some confusion about EPSS and EPSA.

👉🏽 So we thought we would clarify some things.

A short 🧵

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Reposted by Jens Wäckerle

Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · Aug 1

It tells us so much about the debate around immigration that the first response by journalists and politicians here is not: does this mean they are over- or underrepresented? This bias and ignorance used to be limited to the most lurid and hateful parts of the media. It is now a standard response.

Ben Ansell @benansell.bsky.social · Aug 1

Others have noted that this means foreign-born people are LESS likely than UK-born people to be in prison. What I want to note is that The Times is now referring to foreign-born UK citizens as ‘foreigners’. This includes Boris Johnson, Sir Mo Farah, Emma Watson, Rory Stewart and little old me.