Kyle Marquardt
@kailmarkvart.bsky.social
📤 1010
📥 939
📝 196
Professor,
@sampol.bsky.social
; Project Manager,
@vdeminstitute.bsky.social
; Iowan; klmarquardt.com
pinned post!
Excited to introduce a new working paper with
@danpemstein.com
,
@chknutsen.bsky.social
and other colleagues not on Bluesky! We use experimental and observational data to investigate the degree to which general biases affect expert perceptions of specific cases. 🧵 1/17
v-dem.net/media/public...
9 months ago
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Kyle Marquardt
Communist and Post-Communist Studies
3 days ago
Congrats to Natalia Otrishchenko, Artem Kharchenko, and Valentyna Shevchenko, for winning the AAUS best article prize for their article “Ukrainian Researchers in a War Documentation Project: Intertwined Experiences and Methodologies”! (Article link in next post)
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Leiv Marsteintredet
4 days ago
Come work at the best Department that exists (yes, I am biased).
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Isabelle DeSisto
4 days ago
📑❗️Our article with
@grigopop.bsky.social
and Graeme Robertson on the effects of Ukraine’s decentralization reform on satisfaction with public services (and democracy) in Ukraine 🇺🇦 was just published in Comparative Political Studies!
doi.org/10.1177/0010...
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Kyle Marquardt
Department of Comparative Politics UiB
5 days ago
We are hiring! Please share 👉 💡 2 PhD positions 🇳🇴 Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen 🗓️ 4 years 💶 Fully funded 👩🏫 25 % teaching ⏳ 11 August 2026 🔗
www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
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Isabelle DeSisto
7 days ago
Excited to announce that my paper "Socioeconomic development and the uneven legacies of authoritarian repression" has been published at the Journal of Historical Political Economy. This grew out of my second year ("591") PhD paper.
www.emerald.com/jhpe/article...
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Svend-Erik Skaaning
5 days ago
New book on democracy.
#OpenAccess
Seven Myths about Democracy by Jørgen Møller & Svend-Erik Skaaning, Routledge
taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mon...
. Challenges (full or partial) misunderstandings about the meaning, trajectory, causes, and consequences of democracy.
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Seven Myths about Democracy | Jørgen Møller, Svend-Erik Skaaning | Tay
This timely book challenges seven widespread misconceptions about democracy that continue to shape public and academic debates about its past, present, and
https://taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003746195/seven-myths-democracy-j%C3%B8rgen-m%C3%B8ller-svend-erik-skaaning
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Petra Guasti
16 days ago
New open-access window (2 weeks): Erica Marat & Aizada Arystanbek, Decolonial Disruptions in Central Asia (CUP Elements series Politics and Society from Central Europe to Central Asia). Download:
www.cambridge.org/core/element...
#CentralAsia
#DecolonialStudies
#MemoryPolitics
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Decolonial Disruptions in Central Asia
Cambridge Core - Comparative Politics - Decolonial Disruptions in Central Asia
https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/decolonial-disruptions-in-central-asia/24725BAEDD6AFD8D2318AE2A66E96281
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Scott Gehlbach
16 days ago
Either arXiv’s new policy on LLM-generated text changes nothing, or you should be asking yourself some hard questions about work with your human coauthors.
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On arXiv, LLMs, and What It Means to Put Your Name on a Paper
All you have is your name.
https://scottgehlbach.bearblog.dev/on-arxiv-llms-and-what-it-means-to-put-your-name-on-a-paper/
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Rahel Freiburghaus
17 days ago
Ok, as we are waiting for crunch time, I’m sure you absolutely want to see this rocket political science plot: The trend is clear, even if noisy: countries with higher liberal democracy scores also tend to perform better at
#Eurovision
#esc2026
(data:
@vdeminstitute.bsky.social
)
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Brendan Nyhan
19 days ago
🚨New Bright Line Watch report on the rule of law in the US - joint w/@rickhasen.bsky.social's Strengthening Democracy Project at UCLA Law The most comprehensive expert survey to date - 21 federal judges, 113 elite lawyers, and 193 law profs
brightlinewatch.org/erosion-of-t...
🧵 on findings below ⬇️
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Robert (Bob) Kubinec
20 days ago
Happy to share that my
#rstats
package for IRT/ideal point models, idealstan, is back on CRAN as v1.0! idealstan supports mixed outcomes, missing data, and time-varying methods (splines, AR(1), etc)--and latent regression \w new latent marginal effects. 😎
cran.r-project.org/web/packages...
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idealstan: Robust Measurement with 'Stan'
Offers item-response theory (IRT) ideal-point measurement modeling for diverse distributions, missing data, and over-time variation. Full and approximate Bayesian sampling with 'Stan' (<<a href="ht...
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/idealstan/index.html
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Very excited to be giving this talk on
@vdeminstitute.bsky.social
methodology on Tuesday, May 12, in Ulaanbaatar - it should be a great conversation! And thanks to
@mongoliafocus.bsky.social
for the great discussion (and contacts) that led to it!
mongoliafocus.com/2026/03/demo...
30 days ago
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It's a good example of how the V-Dem MM deals with experts with varying reliability and different levels of DIF - since the expert diverged substantially from the other experts their contribution to the overall estimate was substantially downweighted.
doi.org/10.1017/pan....
26 days ago
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Georg Picot
29 days ago
Willkommene Aktion von
@spd.de
,
@gruene.de
und
@die-linke.de
! Bleibt zu hoffen, dass die Accounts der Bundesregierung und aller anderen demokratischen Regierungen dem Beispiel endlich folgen. Unglaublich, dass demokratische Regierungen indirekt Elon Musk unterstützen!
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Brian Taylor
29 days ago
A few thoughts on the
@istories.bsky.social
story about "a report by an intelligence service of a European Union country on the real situation in the Kremlin and the condition of Vladimir Putin." 🧵 1) The basic idea that Putin is more concerned about his personal security seems plausible. 1/10
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Vladimir Putin fears an assassination attempt and a coup, tensions among security services are rising, an EU intelligence agency says
Независимое медиа. Расследования, репортажи, интервью и истории о том, что важно
https://storage.googleapis.com/istories/en/stories/2026/05/04/vladimir-putin-fear/index.html
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Very excited to be giving this talk on
@vdeminstitute.bsky.social
methodology on Tuesday, May 12, in Ulaanbaatar - it should be a great conversation! And thanks to
@mongoliafocus.bsky.social
for the great discussion (and contacts) that led to it!
mongoliafocus.com/2026/03/demo...
30 days ago
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Kyle Marquardt
V-Dem Institute
about 1 month ago
May 3rd is the
#WorldPressFreedomDay
. For this occasion, we use the V-Dem mapping tool to visualize the V-Dem v16 data for the Government censorship effort - media indicator in 2025. To show the differences between the last 20 years, we add a map with data for 2005. 🧵1(7)
#Polisky
#PolDataSky
#Media
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Mother Jones
about 1 month ago
A little more than a year ago,
@paperwords.bsky.social
received a letter from the US Forest Service detailing plans for a new wildfire recovery project. But a single word caught his eye—and alerted him to a secret, Big Tobacco-style campaign with ramifications for our forests.
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We are bombarding America’s forests with Roundup
Scientists are wary of glyphosate. MAHA loathes it. And our investigation shows California is spraying it everywhere.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/roundup-glyphosate-spraying-forests-monsanto-science-retraction-cancer-health-concerns-maha-trump-executive-order-supreme-court-bayer-lawsuits/
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Dylan Primakoff
about 1 month ago
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Juraj Medzihorsky
about 1 month ago
Fidesz ended up winning only 10/106 single-member constituencies: • 3 with the narrowest of margins • A further 4 with small margins (at least compared to Tisza's)
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Tom Pepinsky
about 2 months ago
For the cost of one Harvard Professor of the Constitution Only Applies to White People, you could endow 10 professorships of any less commonly taught language at any university in the USA
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Jonas W. Schmid
about 1 year ago
Ever felt uneasy about how concepts & measures of "grey zone" autocracies are used interchangeably across the literature? Then check out my 🚨new paper🚨 in
@democratization.bsky.social
and get some substance to back up your gut feeling:
tinyurl.com/ypdm2kna
Or at least read the main points below ⬇️
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Electoral autocracies, hybrid regimes, and multiparty autocracies: same, same but different?
There is a wide range of labels, such as electoral autocracy, hybrid regimes, or multiparty autocracy, and corresponding empirical measures to describe and measure political regimes that combine au...
https://tinyurl.com/ypdm2kna
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Dan Pemstein
about 2 months ago
My dad died a few weeks ago. He was a good dad and funny and interesting and lived a remarkable life. He was a journalist, and, as a result, his friends tend to write wonderfully. I want to share this delightful remembrance by his friend John Jeansonne:
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Farewell to a friend
Ron Pemstein was a journalism star
https://substack.com/home/post/p-194081570
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Carl Henrik Knutsen
about 2 months ago
Why I don't expect liberal democracy to go away any time soon: My article on the resilience of liberal democracy, published in
@jeppjournal.bsky.social
. Perfectly timed to the day after Orbáns defeat and a small spike in "democracy-optimism". There are, I argue, good reasons for such optimism.
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Scott Gehlbach
about 2 months ago
Wednesday we hosted Maria Pevchikh, chief investigator of the organization that Alexei Navalny founded. It was a very special event. A few thoughts.
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The Demand for Hope Is Inelastic
A conversation with Maria Pevchikh, an avatar of hope
https://scottgehlbach.bearblog.dev/the-demand-for-hope-is-inelastic/
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Svend-Erik Skaaning
about 2 months ago
Three 2-year full-time postdoctoral positions in autocratic politics at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University (in connection to projects headed by Jakob Tolstrup and Alexander Baturo). Flexible start date. Application deadline: June 1, 2026.
international.au.dk/about/profil...
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Three 2-year Postdoctoral positions at Aarhus University: Projects on personality cults and strategic communication in autocracies - Vacancy at Aarhus University
Vacancy at Department of Political Science, Aarhus University
https://international.au.dk/about/profile/vacant-positions/job/three-2-year-postdoctoral-positions-at-aarhus-university-projects-on-personality-cults-and-strategic-communication-in-autocracies
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Moby Dick
6 months ago
But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?
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Robert (Bob) Kubinec
about 2 months ago
This debate exists because of the way we teach statistics in the social sciences--we focus on *linear models* instead of *distributions.* From a distributional perspective, the answer is easy. The Bernoulli distribution is the maximum entropy distribution for *any* binary variable. (1/2)
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Liza Adamczewski aka the accidental ecologist
2 months ago
For anyone who is in the throes of grief a robin to remind us that love itself never dies only the body
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Evan Torner
2 months ago
The world's academic systems are in some bizarre competition regarding which ones can, structurally speaking, feed the most young scholars' lives into the woodchipper.
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V-Dem Institute
2 months ago
💡What is a V-Dem Country Coding Unit? A V-Dem “country” is a political unit enjoying at least some degree of functional and/or formal sovereignty. Watch the video or read in the thread to find out more. 👇 🧵1(8)
#PoliSky
#PoliSciSky
#PolDataSky
#PoliticalScienceData
#VDemMethodology
#VDemDataset
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Very interesting reflections on interpreting trends in V-Dem data for a specific country (Mongolia) from an expert on that country.
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2 months ago
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Brendan Nyhan
2 months ago
The sharp and persistent decline in expert ratings we observe corresponds with declines reported by
@vdeminstitute.bsky.social
and
@freedomhouse.bsky.social
, but our more frequent surveys show the decline was concentrated in early 2025 and ratings have largely stabilized since.
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Brendan Nyhan
2 months ago
New Bright Line Watch report! -Expert ratings of U.S. democracy largely stable at lowest levels measured (since 2017) -Record partisan divide in public ratings of democracy driven by Republicans whose evaluations are highest since 2017 -Experts near-unanimous on many threats to democracy 🧵 below
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The Persistence of Diminished Democracy in a Second Trump Presidency | Bright Line Watch
https://brightlinewatch.org/the-persistence-of-diminished-democracy-in-a-second-trump-presidency/
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Juraj Medzihorsky
2 months ago
In 2010, Mr Orbán's Fidesz won power pledging to build up a "national bourgeoisie". They have since fulfilled it, and then some, with their hierarchical clientelistic project. Today's alternative to liberal democracy isn't "national" or "conservative" democracy. It's clientelist neopatrimonialism.
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Kyle Marquardt
V-Dem Institute
2 months ago
💡 What does V-Dem Data not cover? Watch the V-Dem Methodology video or read in the thread to find out! 👇 🧵1(9)
#Polisky
#PolDataSky
#PoliSciSky
#Academia
#VDemMethodology
#VDemDataset
@vdemamlat.bsky.social
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Demscore
2 months ago
Coming very soon: DEMSCORE Data version 7.0 released March 25th! The DEMSCORE v. 7.0 release includes the most recent data updates from
@viewsforecasting.org
,
@repdem-org.bsky.social
,
@qoginstitute.bsky.social
,
@vdeminstitute.bsky.social
and
#COMPLAB
.
#PolDataSky
#SocialScienceData
#Polisky
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Gabriela Greilinger
2 months ago
I've been asked over the last few days/weeks what I think will happen on April 12th in Orbán's 🇭🇺 (and the aftermath), so here's my assessment, looking at everything as it stands now 🧵 tldr: It's complicated, and no one really knows (and those who say they do are either lying or overly confident) 1/
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Ken Schultz
2 months ago
The claim in the new V-Dem release that the US now has the same liberal democracy score as in 1965 underscores the challenge of reducing a multidimensional concept to a single index. This graph compares the US in 1965 and 2025 on key dimensions V-Dem codes.
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Lars Lott
3 months ago
The Academic Freedom Index Update 2026 is out. This year, we focus on institutional autonomy and compare the decline in institutional autonomy in the United States with that in other major autocratizing countries.
academic-freedom-index.net
#academicfreedomindex
@fau.de
@vdeminstitute.bsky.social
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Academic Freedom Index
The Academic Freedom Index (AFI) assesses de facto levels of academic freedom across the world. It is a collaborative effort between researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (F...
https://academic-freedom-index.net/
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Kyle Marquardt
Juraj Medzihorsky
2 months ago
“Is it *really* a democracy?”—the type of question political scientists try to answer by converting fine-grained or multi-dimensional measures into few categories. And miss how such coarsening works. Convert a hi-res photo into a lo-res 8-color one. There’ll be information loss, possibly with … /n
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Juraj Medzihorsky
3 months ago
In states with R&D-intensive sectors, the challenge the polit elites curtailing acad freedom face is doing it w/o losing R&D's econ benefits. The PRC has innovated in this in an autocratic context, Hungary in an originally democratic one. Learning the effects however needs counterfactual estimation.
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This post raises a several important questions about the
@vdeminstitute.bsky.social
indices that I'll try to discuss broadly, then specifically in the case of Mongolia. Important caveat: I am not a Mongolia expert, so can't speak substantively about the case; I can discuss the V-Dem methodology.
add a skeleton here at some point
3 months ago
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Juraj Medzihorsky
3 months ago
1990-2010, the credentialed middle class's peak economic power and political influence. Adapting autocratic innovations, econ and polit oligarchies fueled by tech and cheap capital have been pushing it back since. In seemingly ideological attacks, raiders probe for easiest paths to resource capture.
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Bastian Herre
3 months ago
New data from V-Dem suggests that US democracy is now similar to what it was in 1965, which might sound strange. That's because the overall score is the same, but for different reasons: Elections are more democratic now, and civil liberties stronger — but checks on government are far weaker.
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Paul Musgrave
3 months ago
Now that’s tripwiring
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Yana Gorokhovskaia
3 months ago
📣Freedom in the World 2026 is now out!
freedomhouse.org/report/freed...
tl;dr: - Global freedom declined in 2025 & every year since 2005 - 20 yrs of backsliding has transformed the world: more autocrats, fewer democratizing states - Freedom deteriorated in the US last year & over the last 20
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The Growing Shadow of Autocracy
Global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025. But even in this especially challenging moment, there are reasons for optimism.
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2026/growing-shadow-autocracy
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Kyle Marquardt
𝙅𝙖𝙘🍩𝙗 𝙉𝙮𝙧𝙪𝙥
3 months ago
I have a PhD in political science, and I don't understand how Hungary's electoral system works. It is a good example of how authoritarian parties game the system in their favour, while keeping nominally free (but not fair) elections. From this excellent analysis:
tvpworld.com/92116709/hun...
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This post raises a several important questions about the
@vdeminstitute.bsky.social
indices that I'll try to discuss broadly, then specifically in the case of Mongolia. Important caveat: I am not a Mongolia expert, so can't speak substantively about the case; I can discuss the V-Dem methodology.
add a skeleton here at some point
3 months ago
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Kyle Marquardt
A 🧵on how the
@vdeminstitute.bsky.social
accountability indices help us understand how democratic backsliding is occurring in the United States. tl;dr: in principle, vertical constraints on the president remain strong; in practice, horizontal and diagonal constraints have been greatly weakened.
3 months ago
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