The use by government agencies of AI in guiding important policy decisions (e.g., on policing, welfare, education) has generated backlash and led to calls for greater public input in AI regulation. But what does the public’s input on this topic entail? Does personal experience with the technology or learning about its implications change people’s views on using AI for guiding policy implementation? We study these questions experimentally in an online labour marketplace.

The POLLOT research project studies political lotteries, which randomly select individuals to take a political decision. Recently, lotteries have put citizens together to find solutions to today’s contentious, polarizing issues, such as disaffection, abortion reform, and climate change. What explains their varied success? Lotteries equalise opportunity of access to all. Random chance can strengthen those otherwise in the minority. A wider variety of opinions can also improve debate and reduce polarization.

We introduce the Opposition Movements and Groups (OMG) dataset, which includes rich information on 1,456 mass mobilization movements (and 1,805 movement-phases) across the world between 1789 and 2020. The stated goals, duration, size, tactics, ideology, and social and organizational composition of these movements have influenced political and social life worldwide.

Gender disparities in the workplace have been a resistant and long-standing issue. In the European Union, women still earn about 13% less than men on average (European Commission, 2022). Women also often face barriers to career advancement. They are less likely to apply for promotions and systematically seem to apply for lower-paying jobs than men (Haegele, 2021; Fluchtmann et al., 2021). This is also reflected in the persistent underrepresentation of women in top leadership positions.

Martin (2016) found that "holding a ministerial portfolio confers an electoral advantage, and so, in contrast to their co-partisans, politicians who are ministers simultaneously maximize policy, office and votes." In so, parties are not entirely unitary actors. To advance this point, I propose that cabinets should not be considered unitary either. Rather, cabinets are hierarchical, and cabinet committees mark a clear demarcation line of this hierarchy. In this paper, I propose and investigate two claims.

What explains support for European Integration? Why did people on the Left oppose, and Right support, European Integration in the 1980s, but this pattern reverse in the 2020s? In contrast to the common account of European Integration as a new ‘cleavage’ in European politics, on a par with class, religion, and geography, we argue that citizens evaluate European Integration by what it has on offer for them. If Europe offers them a policy-bundle in line with their own (left-right) preferences, they support it. If not, they are opposed.

It is a common complaint about public attitudes towards fiscal policy that voters want something for nothing, or that they want "Scandinavian levels of spending and American levels of taxation". However, these results typically come from survey questions which make expressing these views entirely possible, rather than asking respondents to internalise the relevant trade-offs. Recent research has begun to move in this direction by building in trade-offs with taxes when asking about spending proposals, as well as considering the necessary tax or spending consequences of deficit reduction.

Nationalism is something that the more one reads about it, the less sure one is of what it is. This talk recounts an intellectual outsider—one working on signalling theory and crisis-management experimentation—travelling through and pondering over the landscape of nationalism research. How many types of nationalism exist? Which types are theoretically valid and which are arbitrary? How can we tell? Is nationalism forever to be a contested concept, or can social science evolve it into an “uncontested”—or “less contested”—concept?