Democratic frontsliding in the EU is real! #Hungary Curious what people think: how does our frontsliding framework travel from Poland to Hungary? In our new paper @chrishillion.bsky.social, @tommasopavone.bsky.social & I examine the challenges of democratic restoration after backsliding. 👇 thread

Survey research is often interpreted as showing that belief in conspiracy theories can be surprisingly widespread, including belief in conspiracy theories that would be astonishing if true. For example, in The Atlantic we learn that “12 million Americans believe lizard people run our country”

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.

In an effort to promote open data, I just uploaded my media-based data collection on political DDoS attacks from 2008-2016 with manual coding of attacker types, targets, and attribution certainty. Feel free to explore the early days of Anonymous and Russian hacktivists: osf.io/preprints/so...

Interested in legal mobilization & strategic litigation? Check out my new open access chapter w/ @silje-hermansen.bsky.social! We ask: who litigates EU law? Who wins @ @eucourtofjustice.bsky.social? W/ what downstream impact? New dat/comparisons to litigation in the US included! tinyurl.com/bdznr98v

Yes, we made a podcast about the Hungarian elections. Bear with us. 🇭🇺🫠 🗳️ Why a poll lead isn't enough 🏛️ Why a new government inherits a system designed to outlast it 🌍 Why rule of law enforcement matters more if the opposition wins With Alida Steigler (@unioslo-jus.bsky.social). 🎧 sptfy.in/arena

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊 💀 Apr 04, 1923 John Venn died in Cambridge, England 🇬🇧 1880: Developed the eponymous Venn diagrams to represent logical relationships

👀ICYMI: "public writing adds a certain texture to a scholar’s profile. It shows an ability to communicate beyond disciplinary boundaries, to enter conversations that move through society rather than only through journals." #AcWri #AcademicSky

Thinking about poster presentations today in our weekly group meeting. Remember to use white space, font size, and graphic design to draw people in. This oldie-but-goodie is a nice reminder of that. 🧪

Denmark climbs the representational ladder worldwide, rising from 17th to 8th rank. The results of the Danish national election show that 86 women were elected, a record of 48 % women MPs. There are still many gendered challenges in parliament, but what a result! #dkpol #fv26

🎧 Audiobook Giveaway Lottery! Dive into the secret logic behind repression & coups with our new audiobook: "MAKING A CAREER IN DICTATORSHIP" I’m giving away 3 FREE copies! 1️⃣ Repost this 2️⃣ Do it by Monday 12 PM (noon) After that, I’ll randomly select 3 winners and send the audiobook links!

Election parties in Greenland, you say? 🇬🇱 Alright. let’s go. Come along for a tour 👇🧵

Still feeling this...

Understand Danish and Greenlandic politics:

What happened exactly 69 years ago? On this day, in 1957, the Treaty of Rome was signed! 📖✍️

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said today that a media report alleging Hungary’s foreign minister regularly called his Russian counterpart to brief him during EU summits “shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.”

If you, like me, spent a lot of time in your school's library hiding from idiots and quietly educating yourself on topics that were never going to come up in class, aided and abetted by a friendly librarian, then you'll appreciate just how bad this story is. HT @klauspforr.bsky.social

So it turns out Reform are laundering their donations through crypto, before converting them into cash, hiding the original source of the money. So who is really funding Nigel Farage and Reform UK? observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Bored while your Bayesian model samples? Try my basically useless (and massively vibecoded) R package "bayeswatch🏝️"! You can watch some nice MCMC animations directly in your RStudio/Positron while you wait! "bayeswatch" simply wraps animations by Chi Feng on top of brms and rethinking 🧵

Remarkable story from Denmark's nat'l broadcaster. "When Danish soldiers were flown to Greenland in January...they brought explosives so they could destroy, among other things, the runways in Nuuk & Kangerlussuaq [to] prevent US mil aircraft from landing" www.dr.dk/nyheder/indl...

Two weeks left to apply!

Also finding it hard to keep up with new research? I built something to fix this. SciLove — swipe through recent papers in your field. The feed learns from your saves. Also matches you with researchers saving your work back (opt-out if you prefer). www.scilove.app 3,000+ journals, updated daily

Know your population: "New" vs "old" survey forcasting models. open.substack.com/pub/philippb...

V-Dem v.16 is now released, w. updated scores for 2025. Most countries remain stable from 2024, but some clear improvements (on diff’t democracy indices), incl. S. Korea, Sri Lanka & Mauritius. Largest declines came, by far, in the US. This figure shows 10-yr changes on the Liberal Dem. index.

BREAKING: Claude can now research like a Stanford PhD student. Here are 9 insane Claude prompts that turn 40+ research papers into structured literature reviews, knowledge maps, and research gaps in minutes (Save this)

Nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize closed on January 31. DAN JERKER B. SVANTESSON explains how the English translation of Alfred Nobel's will misses its core point, focusing solely on peace between nations rather than peace among the people. verfassungsblog.de/the-nobel-pe...

In recent versions of "countreg" the rootogram() has been moved to the "topmodels" package. It is my top priority for this summer to polish and publish both packages for CRAN. Both are fairly mature already, see: topmodels.r-forge.r-project.org/topmodels/ topmodels.r-forge.r-project.org/countreg/

Survey 160 is hiring for multiple contract survey manager roles. This is a particularly good fit for PhD students who are looking for some experience in industry or for someone a few years out of undergrad with some experience in the survey industry already. Please reach out to me with any questions

The Hungarian govt. is suing the EU court for fining them for breaking EU law (read that twice) Their three legal arguments: 1. It’s unfair 2. They don’t like it 3. Give me a break

‘The EU’s Court of Justice is not just pro-integration – it is politically divided’, by @silje-hermansen.bsky.social, Matthew Gabel & Jay N. Krehbiel, for @lseeuroppblog.bsky.social.

#ResistanceRoots #WomensHistoryMonth Today in history, 1907: Congress passes the Expatriation Act, which stripped American-born women of their citizenship if they married a non-citizen. A woman had to adopt her husband’s nationality, effectively making her a stateless alien in her own country. /1

The EU Court isn’t just pro-integration. It’s politically divided. In nearly 20,000 judgments (1990–2023), realistic shifts in economic left–right polarization among ECJ judges correspond to a ~52% increase in decision duration.🧵

what's a "pipes" ?? #rstats

The Court of Justice of the European Union is often described as a neutral engine of European integration. Yet as @silje-hermansen.bsky.social Matthew Gabel and Jay Krehbiel show on @lseeuroppblog.bsky.social, behind the Court’s unified voice lies a politically divided institution.

New article out with Ramona Coman & Sergiu Miscoiu! "Political Parties and Dissensus over Liberal Democracy in the European Parliament" — published in Comparative European Politics. 🔗//link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41295-026-00470-x

Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ... Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups? Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com: tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf

A sick crew member from a 🇺🇸US submarine was evacuated today by the 🇩🇰Danish warship HDMS Vædderen off 🇬🇱Greenland. This underlines Denmark’s dedication to assist any seafarer in distress regardless of his nation’s intent (Arctic Command) Photo not from today’s incident.

Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects doi.org/10.1177/2515...

Today in Encode/Decode @rdanielkelemen.bsky.social and @tommasopavone.bsky.social examine the consequences of #politicizing #international #institutions and the trade-offs facing executives double-hatting as #prosecutors and #policymakers. Read how data played a vital role: doi.org/10.1353/wp.2...

Together with his colleague Christian Gläßel from Hertie School, @ascharpf.bsky.social #UCPH has set out to investigate what it is that has ordinary people committing atrocities: uniavisen.dk/en/what-do-p...

It’s time to Hype that Hypothesis! @magnusrasmussen.bsky.social and @chknutsen.bsky.social develop three hypotheses to examine #state #development to explain how relatively weak political actors can shape national #policy by pursing local #reforms. Read their full article: doi.org/10.1353/wp.2...

The Guardian has a striking map suggesting Trump has pushed the world, especially Europe, toward China. It’s visually compelling. But misleading. The world isn’t moving away from the U.S. The U.S. is moving away from the world. as I show on @goodauth.bsky.social. goodauthority.org/news/the-wor...

"Zombie citations" of work that was never written are becoming a big problem in academic publishing. After encountering one recently I tried tracking down its source. Instead I found a growing mob of mutant references gathering on Google Scholar codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/t...

We‘re very excited for the next edition of the Summer School for Women* in Political Methodology in Mannheim! ✨ Join us and apply until 1 March! More info in @melinscribe.bsky.social‘s thread below and here: summerschoolwpm.org Application form: sosci.sowi.uni-mannheim.de/wpm/

The CJEU recently ruled that Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal no longer qualifies as a court under EU law. This is one of the EU’s most decisive legal responses to the capture of Poland’s judiciary under the PiS. Our @jakubjaraczewski.bsky.social and @profpech.bsky.social unpack the ruling 👇

Largely unnoticed outside of Argentina, President Milei is planning a massive expansion of the intelligence service's powers – SIDE. Among other things, agents would be allowed to arrest citizens. I spoke with the Buenos Aires Herald about possible consequences and parallels to the country's past.

📢 New book chapter 👤 Øyvind Stiansen (ISV) @oyvindstiansen.bsky.social 🔎 The Courts 📖 Published in Oxford Handbook of Norwegian Politics 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...

El Salvador approved two constitutional reforms that eliminate the minimum budget for the Judiciary and modify the term of electoral magistrates. In a year, the ruling party has made six reforms to the Constitution that weaken balances. beta.elfaro.net/en/el-salvad...

From November 2025 - Leveling and Spotlighting: How the European Court of Justice Favors the Weak to Promote Its Legitimacy - cup.org/4oWD6ZT - @silje-hermansen.bsky.social, @tommasopavone.bsky.social & @louisabo.bsky.social #OpenAccess

‪ Studying the role of courts & judicialization in the welfare sector? 📝 Join us at #ecprgc26 in Kraków (September, 2026)! Submit your paper proposal: ecpr.eu/GeneralConfe... (deadline January 9 ⏰) & send an email to [email protected] - or, check out the other great panels in the Section👇