News

The PICR (Psychology of Intergroup Conflict and Reconciliation) Lab at Hebrew University led by Prof. Eran Halperin invited Jenny and Francisca to a hybrid lab meeting (Jenny in-person and Francisca via zoom from Berlin) to discuss the experimental design of their work in progress on social mobilization and citizens’ evaluations of political elites.​

The Tel Aviv University political science department invited Jenny to give a seminar 

talk on the ERC project, and on the work in progress co-authored with Francisca Castro titled "Does Social Mobilization on Contentious Issues Affect Citizens’ Evaluations of Political Elites?". Francisca joined from Berlin via zoom, and PRD team members Aya Shoshan and Barak Zur joined the event in person (see the event poster). ​

The "Rector's Lecture Series" at Ben-Gurion University invited Jenny to give a lecture on the ERC project for this series, which is designed for academics and administrators from all departments in the university to share the fruits of their research and ideas. PRD team members Aya Shoshan and Raya Even David contributed to the event, along with students from the webinar series course.  

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The Hebrew University political science department invited Jenny to give a seminar talk on the ERC project and key works in progress, and PRD team members Francisca  and Aya participated in the seminar and discussion. 

Jenny's first semester course "Political Participation: A Research Dialog with Leading International Scholars" began November 6, 2024 and includes a webinar series that is co-facilitated by BA, MA, and PhD students, as well as course auditors. We are proud that this course was selected as a grant recipient from BGU's "Teaching Center" to support innovative teaching. See our webinars page for the zoom link, speakers list, and videos from prior webinars. 

We celebrate the announcement of Jenny's promotion to Full Professor! A nice opportunity to highlight recent research from the Van Leer Institute on Gender Inequality in Israel which shows Jenny will contribute to the almost 20% of female full professors in Israel, documented as of 2020.  

PRD senior researcher Dr. Nir Grinberg presented a paper "Who is Listening to Political Influencers" at the "Digital Democracy Workshop" at the University of Zurich, co-authored with Jenny and with Dr. John Wagner of the University of New Mexico. 

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The Israel Young Academy's fall retreat included a "TED talk" by Jenny on the PRD project's recent published research and works in progress.

At the American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Conference in Philadelphia,  PRD researchers presented several papers:

• Castro, Francisca & Jennifer Oser. “Does congruence pay off? Citizen-elite alignment on contentious issues” 

• Lindqvist, Jesper, Jennifer Oser, Ruth Dassonneville, Mikael Persson & Anders Sundell. “Are the politically active better represented?” 

• Lyrvall, Johan, Roberto Di Mari, Zsuzsa Bakk, Jennifer Oser & Jouni Kuha, "Latent class analysis with covariates: Applications for public opinion research"

At APSA's Political Communication pre-conference, Jenny presented a co-authored paper with Aya Shoshan on "Social Media and Social Movements".

At Haifa University's "Political Behavior Lab," Jenny gave a seminar talk on the topic "Are the Politically Active Better Represented?".  See the event poster and participant pictures.

The Israel Political Science Association's Annual graduate student conference, Pirchei Mechkar, included an opening talk from Jenny on "Building a Research Profile," and a graduate student research panel co-chaired by Jenny and Aya.   

At the European Political Science Association (EPSA) Annual Conference in Cologne, Germany, PRD researchers presented several papers:

• Castro, Francisca & Jennifer Oser. “Does congruence pay off? Citizen-elite alignment on contentious issues” 

• Lindqvist, Jesper, Jennifer Oser, Ruth Dassonneville, Mikael Persson & Anders Sundell. “Are the politically active better represented?” 

• Schulte-Cloos, Julia, Jennifer Oser & Hahrie Han.  "Becoming architects of political change: The organizing capacity of democratic micropractices in the digital age"

Jenny was a Guest Professor for a research stay at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, invited by Prof. Swen Hutter, the Director of WZB's Center for Civil Society Research and Lichtenberg Professor for Political Sociology at the Free University of Berlin. The research stay focused on collaborative exchanges with WZB researchers on topics related to participation and representation in the digital age.

We updated our R package on multilevel latent class analysis, available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). At the date of this update, the package has already been downloaded 4,568 times! To access the package:

Di Mari, R., Lyrvall, J., Bakk, Z., Oser, J., & Kuha, J. (2024). multilevLCA: Estimates and Plots Single-Level and Multilevel Latent Class Models. CRAN, version 1.5.1, published 2024-05-02. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=multilevLCA 

To access the version 2 guide to this package:

Lyrvall, J., Di Mari, R., Bakk, Z., Oser, J., & Kuha, J. (2024). multilevLCA: An R package for single-level and multilevel latent class analysis with covariates.  [v2] Wed, 10 Apr 2024. arXiv:2305.07276v1.

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.07276

Jenny launched her second semester course "Representation: A Research Dialog with Leading International Scholars," which includes a webinar series that is co-facilitated by students in the course. In addition to Ben-Gurion University students at the BA, MA, and PhD level, we are pleased to welcome graduates students as committed auditors from several Israeli universities. We are proud that this course was selected as a grant recipient from BGU's "Teaching Center" to support innovative teaching. 

At the Midwest Political Science Association Annual conference, PRD researchers presented several papers online in hybrid panels:

-Shoshan, A. & Oser, J. "Social Media and Social Movements: Visualizing the Scholarly Landscape"

-Castro, F., Oser, J., Feitosa, F., & Grinberg, N. "External Cues and Policy Preferences: Rethinking the Drivers of Policy Positions"

-Rincon, L. & Oser, J. "From the Streets to the Seats: The Political Influence of Feminist Activism"  

Jesper and Jenny presented their co-authored research on participation and policy implementation at Gothenburg University's annual conference of the Gothenburg Research Group on Elections, Public Opinion and Political Behavior (GEPOP, February 6-7); and Jenny presented her co-authored research on participation types using latent class analysis in Gothenburg's GEPOP seminar (February 13). 

Francisca presented co-authored research in the 2024 APSA Virtual Research Meeting on how external cues - including from former President Trump and social peers - affect individuals’ policy positions.

Johan began his research visit (February - August 2024) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he is conducting research on direct effects in multilevel latent class modelling with covariates under the supervision of Dr. Jouni Kuha.

PRD's first newsletter included an introduction of our inaugural research team and new website, along with links to our recent publications and first semester webinar series. 

Johan presented research on the development of an R package multilevLCA for multilevel latent class analysis.

Lyrvall, J., Di Mari, R., Bakk, Z., Oser, J., & Kuha, J. (2023). multilevLCA: An R package for single-level and multilevel latent class analysis with covariates. CMStatistics. Berlin, Germany.

Jenny enjoyed a Guest Professor research stay at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, invited by Prof. Swen Hutter. The position supports collaborative exchanges with WZB researchers during a two-week research stay, to be continued in summer 2024.

Jenny was invited to serve as an Editorial Board Member of Political Communication, a leading journal in the fields of political science and communication. Her term of service in this role is from January 2024 - December 2027.

Johan conducted research at Leiden University as a Visiting PhD researcher in the Methodology and Statistics Unit under the supervision of PRD Senior Researcher Prof. Zsuzsa Bakk. Among several research talks Johan gave during this stay, he gave a departmental seminar on a solo-authored working paper titled "The impact of classification error underestimation in bias-adjusted three-step latent class modeling."

As Jesper completes his work as a research associate with Prof. Mikael Persson and Prof. Anders Sundell at Gothenburg University which informs his PRD postdoctoral role, his research has been presented in several conferences, including: 

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Lindqvist, J., Persson, M., Schakel, W., & Sundell, A. (2023). Poor choices? Examining the link between party choice and unequal opinion-policy congruence, European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) General Conference, Prague, Charles University, September 4-8. 

Lindqvist, J., Persson, M., & Sundell, A. (2023). The Effects of Policy Responsiveness. American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, August 31 - September 3.

Aya gave a presentation on lessons from protests in Spain for Israelis.

Shoshan, A. (2023). Building alternatives from within and without: Insights from the Spanish case for protests in Israel. Inter-University Workshop on Political Thought in Israel. The Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, Israel.

Aya presented PRD research in a conference on contemporary Israeli protests.

Shoshan, A., & Oser, J. (2023). Social media networks as a tool for political change in Israel: Between the 2011 and 2023 protests. Protest 2023 - Initial Research Dialog. Hybrid, Technion Institute of Technology, Haifa Israel. Online, hybrid format.

At the American Political Science Association (APSA), Jenny presented co-authored research in a hybrid panel on political exposure on Twitter.

Shamir, A., Oser, J., & Grinberg, N. (2023). Who is curating my feed? Characterizing political exposure of registered U.S. voters on Twitter. American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting, Los Angeles (Online, hybrid format).

Jenny’s visiting scholar research stay with Prof. Markus Gangl’s ERC Advanced project “POLAR” at Goethe University Frankfurt focused on topics of data harmonization, and the connection between economic inequality and electoral turnout.

At the European Political Science Association (EPSA) annual conference in Glasgow, Jenny presented a co-authored conference paper on political participant types.

Oser, J., Di Mari, R., & Bakk, Z. (2023). Political participant types and socio-economic stratification across contexts and over time: A multilevel latent class analysis. European Political Science Association (EPSA) Annual Conference. Glasgow, Scotland.

Jenny’s visiting scholar research stay at the European Union Institute in Florence Italy, hosted by Prof. Filip Kostelka, included a seminar lecture:

Oser, J. (2023). Participation and representation in the digital age (PRD). Presented at the Seminar Series of the Transnational Democracy in the 21st Century Cluster, European University Institute, Florence, Italy.

The “Survey Data Recycling Project,” a project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, organized a research workshop in which Jenny presented a talk on the ERC project: 

Oser, J. (2023). Investigating participation and representation in the digital age. Workshop on Comparative Analyses Using Multi-Source Databases: Insights from the Survey Data Recycling (SDR) Project, Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio.

We posted to arXiv a working paper that presents a guide to our new R package multilevLCA.

Lyrvall, J., Di Mari, R., Bakk, Z., Oser, J., & Kuha, J. (2023). multilevLCA: An R package for single-level and multilevel latent class analysis with covariates. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.07276 

Jenny was elected as a new member of the Israel Young Academy, which includes distinguished early career scholars in Israel who work to promote Israeli higher education and scholarship. 

During the four years of IYA members (2023-2027), Jenny looks forward to advancing initiatives with IYA colleagues aimed at providing support and training for Humanities and Social Science PI’s of ERC-type grants to thrive as scholars and academic leaders.