Bruno Castanho Silva
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bcastanho.bsky.social
Bruno Castanho Silva
@bcastanho.bsky.social
3.7K followers 910 following 260 posts
Ass. Prof. of Methods in Empirical Social Research at FU Berlin and EB member @methodsnet.bsky.social

Politics, methods, and occasionally memes

https://bcastanho.github.io/
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bcastanho.bsky.social
Periodic reminder.

I will come to your office and set your computer on fire 🔥
Screenshot of a tweet that contains two slides from a presentation: the first reads "If the first line of your R script is setwd("C:\Users\jenny\path\that\only\I\have") I will come into your office and SET YOUR COMPUTER ON FIRE", the second reads "If the first line of your R script is rm(list = ls()) I will come into your office and SET YOUR COMPUTER ON FIRE
September 17, 2025 at 5:31 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
August 15, 2025 at 10:38 AM
bcastanho.bsky.social
And the freestyle causal inference top Play of the Week goes to the @economist.com Charlemagne piece on Europeans needing to work more
Extract from the Charlemagne column in the Economist, reading: "more working means more money, and more money means added clout in global affairs. Until the 1960s Europeans toiled longer hours than Americans, and mattered somewhat more in the world. That is no coincidence"
August 14, 2025 at 5:00 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Signing up for @epssnet.bsky.social and it's time to learn who the truly nasty reviewers are
Print from sign up page for epss showing a list of social networks a user can indicate their profile from, including Yelp
June 27, 2025 at 3:17 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Kombucha girl meme. Two pictures of the same woman side by side. On one she has an expression of disgust, written on top "cancelling government contracts for political vendetta". The other side she looks interested, and it reads "the contracts are with Elon musk companies"
June 5, 2025 at 6:59 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Both quotes below from the same page. Looks like the writers at The Economist are in fact able to find the letters F A and R in their keyboards to talk about at least some right wing leaders. Wondering what's the difference 🧐
economist.com/the-world-th...
June 5, 2025 at 6:47 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Re-reading Zaller's book to prep for class, and wondering how many people at the time of those events were yelling Cancel Culture! and Woke Mind Virus!!!1
screenshot of a paragraph from Zaller's book on the structure of public opinion, saying: By 1930, however, the attitudes of political elites seemed to be changing. In that year,President Hoover's nomination of John Parker of North Carolina to the Supreme Court was rejected in large part because of a ten-year-old speech in which Parker had said that "The Negro as a class does not desire to enter politics" and that the "participation of the Negro in politics is a source of evil and danger to both races" (cited in Kluger, 1975: p. 142). That a single racist speech, of a type that was entirely conventional throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, could become a basis for the rejection of a Supreme Court nominee by the Senate was an indication that attitudes toward race were undergoing a historic shift
June 3, 2025 at 3:08 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
NBA fans who live in Europe today be like
Meme of a couple in bed. The woman looks suspiciously at the man, thinking "i bet he's thinking of other women", while the man's thoughts have a screenshot of the schedule for NBA playoff game 7 tomorrow between Denver and Oklahoma scheduled for 21:30
May 17, 2025 at 4:05 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
I know I'm the last person who should be posting this...
Meme of Bernie Sanders saying "I'm once again asking you to stop correlating populist attitudes with everything. they don't matter
April 22, 2025 at 8:11 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
So many political scientists tried accessing the data to look themselves up that we broke dataverse??
Screenshot of Harvard's dataverse landing page with an error message saying the service is interrupted due to ongoing maintenance
March 28, 2025 at 9:30 AM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Latin American side of my feed right now watching as Canadians and Europeans find out the US might not be a beacon for freedom and democracy abroad
Scene from a movie with James Franco having a rope around his neck, about to be hanged, and asking the person next to him "First time?"
March 12, 2025 at 5:55 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Maybe I'm too cynical. But I remember all too well when we thought that Republicans attached to small-c-conservative values would rein in Trump and his MAGA crowd, to now be too hopeful about any open letter Angela Merkel might put out
Cover of the traditional American conservative magazine National Review, from February 2016, with a large Against Trump print and a list of their editors who had essays in that issue opposing Trump
January 30, 2025 at 10:41 AM
bcastanho.bsky.social
"So you're saying people will support any policy if you phrase it right? Crazy, do tell me more please..."
Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, talking on the telephone
January 27, 2025 at 2:23 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
So how's that working out huh?
Screenshot from a tweet by Deutsche Welle from when Jens Spahn was in the republican national convention in June 2024 to network with Trump supporters, saying his party could find common ground with a Trump administration
December 29, 2024 at 10:50 AM
bcastanho.bsky.social
"oh but democratic transition is unlikely and the outcome will probably be chaos or another dictatorship etc etc"
Cartoon where one character holds the other's lips shut while saying "shhh let people enjoy things"
December 8, 2024 at 10:34 AM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Same here but love it!
Screenshot from Spotify wrapped with the music mood in January, saying pumpkin spice strut pop
December 5, 2024 at 9:18 AM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Fascinating talk today by @stefaniereher.bsky.social at @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social on the representation of people with disabilities!
November 20, 2024 at 10:04 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Inspired by @dtoshkov.bsky.social and the upcoming conference abstract season, types of EPSA papers
Meme with titles of papers that sound like things people present at epsa conferences, such as fancy models to tell left parties are left wing and right parties are right wing or finding that tomato consumption predicts radical right support (but very well casually identified!!)
November 20, 2024 at 11:04 AM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Alright that settles it, not worrying about submitting something for APSA next year
November 18, 2024 at 1:50 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Scene from series Mad Men where a character says I'm Peggy Olson and i want to smoke some marijuana
November 5, 2024 at 2:47 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Young people are up to 5% more likely to vote if their favorite party has a main candidate under 40 than over 70. And that's only been the case since the mid 00's!

Main findings of my paper now accepted at EJPR based on CSES data.

Link here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/edz12...
April 17, 2024 at 9:45 AM
bcastanho.bsky.social
The program for the 3rd MethodsNET Summer School at Radboud Uni in Nijmegen is out!

40+ courses by excellent instructors on a truly pluralist range of methods

www.ru.nl/en/education...
January 15, 2024 at 2:55 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
Preparing tomorrow's R part of my text analysis seminar with data from the 2017 TV debates between candidates, and a certain someone better have changed her speaking style in the last years if she wants to compete on the AfD field...
Plot with a measure of readability of the speeches of seven German politicians, showing Sahra Wagenknecht has the most difficult to understand language among all
October 24, 2023 at 6:28 PM
bcastanho.bsky.social
This below is the description we give to coders who look for the speeches. Good catch though, should be part of the codebook, our mistake!
October 18, 2023 at 11:52 AM
bcastanho.bsky.social
"Oh I'm gonna hack this code together just so it works and worry about making it pretty later" and well one day the later comes doesn't it
Meme with the same person having a happy and sad face side by side. Above the happy face saying "paper gets accepted", below the sad face "put together replication files"
October 4, 2023 at 4:21 PM