the first competitive authoritarian regime whose rise and fall I have closely followed as an adult. (Although the fall part is definitely premature to call yet)

3 weeks left to apply!

Slightly pursing my lips as I applaud President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner so everyone knows I'm not really supporting him

just an absolute banger this one, not much else to add. Time for a rewatch

we are all here to bear witness to the dying days of human-generated, text-based social media

not at all related to the OP but it just struck me how this is yet another facet of the varying salience of judicial politics in the US vs anywhere else. Court watchers are so sparse this side of the globe that we can't afford a single one of them to quit lest we be condemned to eternal darkness

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.

every time you think the bigot spigot is already turned up to max

EPSS Travel Grants for 2026 Belfast conference: PhD students & junior scholars @ institutions in European countries that are often underrepresented, can apply for full fee waiver & £500 stipend Apply: lnkd.in/ehXjhCgf Deadline: March 8, 11:59pm GMT. More details: lnkd.in/eZTP5sWR

FPTP giveth, FPTP taketh

true of most trade agreements. On the flip side, the political investment in their passage also rarely matches the projected benefits

Happy to release the initial version of ParlAT, an #rstats package wrapping the API of the Austrian Parliament @parlament.gv.at . If you are a researcher, student, journalist, simply someone interested in the AT Parliament, ParlAT hopefully comes as a helpful tool. werkstattcodes.github.io/ParlAT/

Nick Vivyan, Chris Hanretty (@chanret.bsky.social) and I have a new book out: “Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice”. The core of the book is making the argument that citizens’ views about political issues neither reduce to an ideological orientation nor to a lack of substance. (1/10)

almost six years since I first released the eurlex R package 📦 as a side product of my PhD. It is still alive and kicking. I streamlined the dependencies and released a new version this week. Back in October the package came second in UCL’s Open Science and Scholarship Awards, a nice recognition!

weird to me! I'd say I review 3-5x of what I submit in an average year and think it's a totally doable amount of work

We are pleased to announce that the call for the 4th Annual Early Career Workshop on Social Science Approaches to Law and Courts is now live. If you are a PhD student or postdoc working in this area, you can send us your abstract via this link: qualtrics.ucl.ac.uk/jfe/form/SV_...

For the 4th consecutive year @uclspp.bsky.social will be co-hosting a workshop for early career scholars in law and courts. We are trying to nurture an international, interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse community of scholars in this subfield. Apply via qualtrics.ucl.ac.uk/jfe/form/SV_...

Schumer and Jeffries negotiating to limit the number of journalist arrested by the Department of Justice each year to a maximum of 20.

maybe just to put this in context this is someone whose own psychological state is regularly questioned on the domestic scene (post-assassination attempt)

NEW PAPER ALERT! My paper, with @bjornhoyland.bsky.social , on how “policy loss” shapes support for the EU has just been published in @cpsjournal.bsky.social. Check it out! 1/

it's common (and maybe good) that this type of organising comes from outside opposition parties in democracies. The question then is of course how the party establishment responds to the new leaders these events are going to produce anyway: the US government is executing protestors in the street

a footnote to this discussion is that the EP acquired the power to request these opinions from the CJEU only in 2003, along with the general power to request the annulment of EU legislation

Recently accepted by #QJE, “The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890–2006,” by Lyons (@ronanlyons), Shertzer (@econhist-allday), Gray (@econhistoryorbust), and Agorastos: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

We just published the methodology behind CoPE, our 9B parameter model that matches GPT-4o at content classification at 1% the size! The model is already open source, but now we're sharing our training technique. blog.zentropi.ai/how-we-built... 🧵 1/6

I am visiting @eui-eu.bsky.social this term for my sabbatical. If you find yourself passing through Florence, do say hello!

What do people in England think about their local area? In this short report I take a look at surveys we conducted with @yougov.co.uk in 2022, 2024 and 2025 to gain some insights... Some key findings...

There is one week left to apply for @uclspp.bsky.social's new Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics role! Importantly, the successful candidate will also join our senior team and contribute to our research and impact activities. Applicants must have, or be near to finishing, a PhD. Apply 👇

been away from the Northern line for 3 weeks and the first ride back is always a bit of a shock to the system

The image of the Director of the CIA, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of Defense clustered in front of an emoji on X during the Maduro raid was just one of many Trump released on Truth Social. It conveyed a government completely besotted by social media.

can't wait to dig into the data with @tommasopavone.bsky.social. This is probably one of the largest survey experiments ever run in Slovakia, a country you will not find analysed in the big journals very often

reading open-text reflections on democracy and media by a representative sample of citizens

The Abundance movement often points to environmental groups as the obstacles to building. But who actually files the lawsuits blocking projects? It’s not environmental groups. It’s been lawyered-up HOAs protecting property values all along. Regulation by litigation is the problem.

the Netherlands was at one point the closest among continental European countries in creating a genuine international university environment. As that process reverses, I don't think we are going to see anything similar anywhere else in the current political and economic moment

well, well, well if it isn't the book I started working on in 2017: academic.oup.com/book/61769

I can honestly say that this is the best and most systematic treatment of competences of and decision-making in the #EuropeanUnion I have read (and I have tried a few ...). Check it out ... it's open access! 👇 #EUsky

well, well, well if it isn't the book I started working on in 2017: academic.oup.com/book/61769

perfectly timed for the proofs of my book

the parliament in Slovakia just abolished an office for the protection of whistleblowers. Among others it shielded policemen who previously investigated corruption charges against politicians and oligarchs close to the current government

same model specification with marginaleffects::plot_predictions(): condition="treated" on the left, by="treated" on the right I'll be mightily surprised if there aren't multiple replication notes highlighting this discrepancy in the coming years across various fields

why do we need gambling ads everywhere when scores of Londoners are weekend after weekend banking their plans on the normal functioning of the overground. The risk appetite in this city is already on a different level

Join and help to lead the Constitution Unit! @uclspp.bsky.social is looking for a Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics who will also join our senior team and contribute to our research and impact activities. Applicants must have, or be near to finishing, a PhD. Apply 👇

Not a drill - there's a Britain-focused lectureship (FT, permanent) available. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPQ588/l...

in addition to this being essentially an export tariff on UK services (novel!), international students have never been cross-subsidizing domestic students more than at present. So why not ask them to chip in some more while also putting more stress on a sector that's already under pressure

in one of my experiments with Claude code it produced a plausibly looking but suspicious figure claiming to represent some requested data analysis. When asked to explain how it got there the reply was along the lines of "sorry this is actually all made up, I couldn't run the real analysis"

heartening to see that occasionally Good Things can still happen

turns out project fear was in fact too optimistic over the long run

🗼Jonathan Golub & @movadek.bsky.social: Informal procedures, institutional change, and EU decision-making: evaluating the effects of the 1974 Paris summit 🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....