Is research performance related to academic freedom? A preprint co-authored with @lutzb.bsky.social conducts a large-scale empirical analysis on the national level to this question. osf.io/2mh8f #academicfreedom #AcademicFreedomIndex Short 🧵

Is research performance related to academic freedom? A preprint co-authored with @lutzb.bsky.social conducts a large-scale empirical analysis on the national level to this question. osf.io/2mh8f #academicfreedom #AcademicFreedomIndex Short 🧵

A new piece I wrote appearing in FOREIGN AFFAIRS today www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/warn...

Lowering recruitment standards in police organizations is standard authoritarian practice. It makes it easier to hire people who will do the regimes bidding "no matter what it is". They have worse outside options and are hired for their loyalty, not their competence.

How can resilience of democratic procedures, processes & principles be improved? Aurel Croissant & @larslott.bsky.social present a novel conceptualization & measurements of democratic resilience: buff.ly/Z7psEZm (OPEN ACCESS) @vdeminstitute.bsky.social @fau @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social @sagepub.com

How can resilience of democratic procedures, processes & principles be improved? Aurel Croissant & @larslott.bsky.social present a novel conceptualization & measurements of democratic resilience: buff.ly/Z7psEZm (OPEN ACCESS) @vdeminstitute.bsky.social @fau @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social @sagepub.com

Does higher state capacity go together with lower risk of democratic breakdown? Many political scientists certainly believe so! Yet, in an article just published in @polstudies.bsky.social , David Andersen, @skaaning.bsky.social and I highlight important nuances to this general relationship.

Why are some democracies more resilient than others? How can their resilience be improved? Together with Aurel Croissant, I’ve developed a conceptualization of democratic resilience as resilience performance and resilience capacity. Read the full article here (Open Access): doi.org/10.1177/0032...

Not convinced by every word but figure 4 captures the American predicament: strong civil society & civic culture combined with cratering trust, institutional dysfunction, intense polarization and one autocratizing party. That’s why it’s so hard to predict the US future.

Why are some democracies more resilient than others? How can their resilience be improved? Together with Aurel Croissant, I’ve developed a conceptualization of democratic resilience as resilience performance and resilience capacity. Read the full article here (Open Access): doi.org/10.1177/0032...

Are you using online surveys in your research? Recruiting participants through paid ads? Then @anjaneundorf.bsky.social and I have an article you’ll want to read: academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

A few years ago, @danweitzel.net, John Gerring, @skaaning.bsky.social and I were curious how well one could predict subjective democracy measures using easy(ish) to code observables. Turns out, *quite* well, even out of sample. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Who supports free speech, and how consistent is the support? Together with @suthank.bsky.social, I’ve conducted a survey of citizens in 33 countries for The Future of Free Speech. A lot of interesting findings (see 🧵 + link): futurefreespeech.org/wp-content/u...

Marine Le Pen is going to jail and won't be able to run in 2027. Judges have applied the law in a case that has exposed extraordinary amounts of criminal activities. Don't make this a question of public opinion or what the far right and foreign leaders think of it. It's the rule of law at work.

One of my all-time favourite projects: - built with @astro.build & Svelte - geodata preprocessing with R - Index data streamlined by @larslott.bsky.social - markdown from Notion - really robust: 3rd annual Index update in a row - maintenance: pnpm up -iL 🔗 academic-freedom-index.net

📢 Out Now! V-Dem Dataset v15 and the V-dem Institute Democracy Report 2025 The Dataset: v-dem.net/data/the-v-d... DR25: "25 Years of Autocratization - Democracy Trumped?": v-dem.net/publications... #DR25 #DemocracyReport2025 #VDemDatasetV15 #polisky #PoliticalScienceData #PoliSciSky 🧵1(3)

The 2025 AFI Update is out. This year's Update points to the electoral success of anti-pluralist parties as a potential driver of academic freedom decline. Thank you to @vdeminstitute.bsky.social for the great collaboration and to @volkswagenstiftung.bsky.social for their financial support.

"Nicht mehr internationale Spitze" Jedes Jahr wird weltweit überprüft, wie frei Wissenschaftler arbeiten können. Jetzt ist Deutschland beim "Academic Freedom Index" aus der Spitzengruppe gefallen. Was steckt dahinter? Ein Interview. Im Tagesspiegel & im #WiardaBlog: www.jmwiarda.de/2025/03/13/n...

A lot has happened in those 20 years.

@carotorreblanca.bsky.social , Will Dinneen and I have a new working paper “The Evolving Landscape of Political Science: Two Decades of Scholarship in a Growing Discipline.” See below a thread describing the paper and our main findings. osf.io/preprints/os...

Turned this thread into a piece for @goodauth.bsky.social. An astonishing moment that showed how flattery and deals can't change Trump's core beliefs, why leaders' beliefs are so sticky, and how much leaders can alter the course of international politics. 🧵below. goodauthority.org/news/trump-a...

Ukraine is Europe! We stand by Ukraine. We will step up our support to Ukraine so that they can continue to fight back the agressor. Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.

Trump and Vance have sunk to a new low. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died defending their country, and the west, from an aggressive dictator. Trump and Vance are the ones being disrespectful. I am sickened and saddened by what America has become www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Dear Volodymyr Zelenskyy, dear Ukrainian friends, you are not alone.

🚨Publication Alert 🚨 New article published in @poppublicsphere.bsky.social together with my coauthor Janika Spannagel: doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724001968 We assessed the quality of the #academicfreedomindex from the @vdeminstitute.bsky.social dataset. \1

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state... This is by far the best, clearest and most realistic analysis of what we're in for that I've seen.

Für die Wähler:innen ist es relevant. Für die künftige Regierung ein Dauerthema. Für die Zukunft Deutschlands existenziell. Und sie stellen im #TVDuell nicht eine einzige Frage zum Klima. Unfassbar.

The globe map also serves as an interface for displaying and exporting detailed data for individual countries. Here, the US, showing some declines in all five indices on which the aggregate Academic Freedom Index is based. Same chart for Hungary for comparison. 4/

In incumbent-led de-democratizations in Hungary, India, Nicaragua, Poland and Turkey, academic freedom—including freedom to research and teach—has suffered, as per V-Dem's estimates. In the US, the indices captured a decline comparable to that in Poland already by 2023. /1

In #Germany, a watershed moment: Just hours after commemorating the Holocaust, the centre-right has accepted the support of the #farright #AfD to pass a (largely symbolic) motion against immigration, tearing a massive hole into the so-called 'firewall', Germany's variety of the cordon sanitaire.

Wie werden die liberalen Teile und die taktische Wählerschaft der Union auf diesen Tiefschlag für die wehrhafte Demokratie reagieren? Ducken und mitmachen oder aufmucken und abstrafen? Davon hängt jetzt viel ab.

Liest in der Union und FDP niemand "How Democracies Die" oder redet mit Sozialwissenschaftler:innen? Oder glaubt man, man wüsste es einfach besser? Denn dieses mal ist alles anders, weil... ?

It's out in @polanalysis.bsky.social! David Armstrong and I develop a way to present estimates and their CI that accurately visualizes the underlying pairwise tests. We provide packages in R and Stata, check it out! doi.org/10.1017/pan....

📢 The pre-election questionnaires of the GLES Rolling Cross-Section 2025 have been published (in German) and can be used for pre-registration of research projects and analyses. Post-election questionnaire and English versions of the questionnaires will be added shortly: www.gesis.org/fileadmin/up...

Meinungsfreiheit schützt die Äußerung vor der Zensur. Wenn wir aber von einem globalen Netzwerk sprechen, das mit unglaublichen monetären Mitteln die Verfassungsfeinde systematisch fördert, geht es nicht darum, was Bürger Elon sagen darf, sondern wie Oligarch Musk seine Diskursmacht ausbaut.

We are hiring: 4-year post doc position at our department, open to all topics in political science. 75% research and 25% teaching, good salary, great department and colleagues, and a beautiful city. Deadline: February 15 www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Gemütlich im Mittelbau #einkuscheln?! Ihr wisst: Ich habe #IchBinHanna gestern im Wissenschaftsausschuss des NRW-Landtags vertreten. Was ich da alles gesagt hab? 1 🧵! Da ich vermute, dass Euch das besonders interessiert, fange ich mal mit meiner Reaktion auf das Einkuscheln an. (1/8)

He analyzes academic freedom and just received the "Fundamental Academic Values Award" by @daadworldwide.bsky.social for his work. Congratulations to FAU researcher Dr. @larslott.bsky.social 🏆🎉 Learn more 👇 www.fau.eu/2024/12/11/n...

Thrilled that my article has just been published at @apsrjournal.bsky.social! 🎉 The article argues that low statistical power is a major impediment to acquiring cumulative knowledge on questions concerning cross-national differences: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Thrilled to have this #openaccess article, co-authored with seven colleagues including @danpemstein.com and @silindberg.bsky.social, published in IPSR! Shockingly long🧵follows. doi.org/10.1177/0192...

Our JSS article is out! And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned. www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...

We are living in the age of old leaders. These are some of the guys who have been dominating politics for long and would be on pension had they had a normal job: Xi Jinping (71) Modi (74) Putin (72) Khamenei (85) Erdogan (70) Trump (78) Lula (79) ... and the list goes on. 1/5

We often focus on superstar prizewinning professors in academia, but it's hard to deny that some of the greatest contributors to academic research are the people who design and improve the software we use. Not sure I could have done most of my work without people like @hadleywickham.bsky.social. 📉📈

Wer das Netzwerk kritisiert, betreibt Cancel Culture. Das Netzwerk bekämpft Cancel Culture. Wer das Netzwerk deshalb kritisiert, betreibt Cancel Culture. Ein wunderbarer Zirkel. Ad infinitum?

Public support for democracy is crucial to prevent backsliding. But existing survey questions focusing on “democracy” may not measure the concept well, as the term “democracy” varies in meaning and may prompt social desirability. polisky 1/3

I just spent three hours reformatting a paper for submission after it sent back on technical grounds. Why do we do this to ourselves? Journals outside of political science often require formatting compliance only after acceptance. Stop the torture! Polisky

📢 First peer-reviewed publication under my new name: The Ambivalent Effect of Autocratization on Domestic Terrorism has been published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (toghether wirh Aurel Croissant and Christoph Trinn) doi.org/10.1080/1057...