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)

Come work at the best Department that exists (yes, I am biased).

📑❗️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...

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...

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...

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.

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

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.

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)

🚨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 ⬇️

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...

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...

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....

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!

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

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...

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

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.

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)

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

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 ⬇️

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:

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.

Wednesday we hosted Maria Pevchikh, chief investigator of the organization that Alexei Navalny founded. It was a very special event. A few thoughts.

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...

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?

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)

For anyone who is in the throes of grief a robin to remind us that love itself never dies only the body

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.

💡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

Very interesting reflections on interpreting trends in V-Dem data for a specific country (Mongolia) from an expert on that country.

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.

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

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.

💡 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

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

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/

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.

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

“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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now that’s tripwiring

📣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

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...

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.

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.