Some job market news: in Spring 2027 I will join @cunef.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Quantitative Methods. I am excited about joining a fantastic group of social science scholars at CUNEF and moving to Madrid, one of the capital cities of European political science.

🚨 WORKSHOP ALERT ¿Te interesa la economía política de España? El I Workshop de SPEIN reunirá en Londres a economistas y politólogos que trabajan sobre los fundamentos de la España moderna: conflicto, autoritarismo, transición democrática y su legado. 15-16 de junio, @kcl-spe.bsky.social

Omg all the Covid influencers are popping up everywhere on my social media it must be a nightmare

Classical economics: 98% of the data is easily explained by one theory Behavioral economics: 2% of the data is easily explained by sixteen theories

Some extremely fascinating work, there is something to learn here about the roots of civil conflict These Chimps Began the Bloodiest ‘War’ on Record. No One Knows Why. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/s...

Over the last months, my coauthors and I have been rebuilding our pipelines for several digitization projects from scratch, using Gemini. Our experience so far is that the results are absolutely impressive. @sergisme.bsky.social 1/n

Poli sci did a good job on this one. Among others, shoutout to Grimmer for demonstrating in court (twice, I believe) that Eastman’s empirical claims about the 2020 election being manipulated were false

How has Senegal avoided major democratic backsliding? Social norms stemming from early nation-building, such as interethnic marriages. Easy read of my @AfrAfJournal article w Alioune Ngom in @democracyinafrica.bsky.social 👇

It's hard to overstate the importance of this election for Hungary and Europe, but also for the comparative study of democracy. Hungary was the epitome of democratic backsliding.

Saving local news means saving our shared memory. When archives disappear, communities lose their history. Learn about the librarians & archivists helping safeguard local history, & the collaboration between @archive.org, @poynterinstitute.bsky.social, & @ire.org that’s providing tools & training ⬇️

The takes like "Democracy is not great because Hitler, Mussolini etc etc" mostly reveal ignorance about the history of fascism.

Follow-up work by the authors: Persuasion in RDD: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26517 Persuasion in DiD: arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14871 Hard to overstate how much I endorse these applied econometrics agendas. We need tighter connections between the estimands of popular designs and theoretical concepts.

Today, April 7, is Kwibuka32, the commemoration of the 32d anniversary of the first full day of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. Past US presidents marked the date with stock statements of “never again.” Today the president instead echoed the language & threats of the perpetrators.

In this new era, should I keep talking like a psyched music/podcast bro (new paper dropped) or switch to psyched tech bro instead (new paper shipped)

Can we have an Italian polisky to bash the shitshow that this referendum campaign is

One of the world’s leading authorities on autism - very important read: www.tes.com/magazine/tea...

So happy to see this great paper in print. @rmajumdar.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

This is also a Sanremo hater account

Sorry to my Barcelona friends, on the other hand tonight is a good moment to reveal this is also a Toko Shengelia stan account 🏆 🇮🇹🏀 ⚫️⚪️

Four years ago, the lives of millions of people like me, including friends of mine, were devastated. On a much more minor note, my political identity changed maybe for good.

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

So happy to work on this with @haasvioleta.bsky.social!

Seeing several non-US online commentators justify (if not praise) threats of invasion, abductions, and now plain murders, just because they like Trump and dislike the left of their countries, I feel bad for when in grad school I thought Svolik was overstating the role of polarization.

Imagine your last act in life being to try to pick someone up off the icy ground and the consequence is you get repeatedly pistol whipped in the face and then shot to death. Donald Trump and his goons robbed a human being of their life during a moment of compassion. It is hard to even imagine.

In just over eight months, Berlin will hold its 20th state election since 1946. While its well known East West divide in voting behaviour is often attributed to the city’s former split into capitalist and socialist halves, these differences existed even before the city’s division. A thread. 🧵

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1/10 🧵 The U.S. just captured a sitting head of state in a military operation—and Trump says the U.S. will "run" Venezuela “for now.” Whatever you think of Maduro, this is the most consequential unilateral move in the hemisphere since Panama (1989).

Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress.

Look, libs, he is a man of peace, not like that Hillary Clinton warmongerer, ok?

Very important and underrated point. In HPE people often use historical surveys without discussing the original sampling and measurement process. Historical researchers had their own research questions and constraints. A common problem I found on my own digitization - linguistic surveys.

The IT newspaper I subscribe to (which normally has a good coverage of international news) gave a very disappointing "analysis" of the Chilean election. The 3 key words: Trump, Pinochet, Allende (the latter evoked as a contrast with the present). No serious discussions of Chilean domestic politics

I promise if you’re not Jewish and don’t know any Jews quite well you really do not understand the level of justified paranoia baked into most public Jewish gatherings: Security at swimming lessons at the JCC, off duty police outside a bar mitzvah as a favour, etc. It shocked me.

Combining a high-quality probability sample with data from larger online panels statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/14/c...

Three days ago. No more words.

you hate chomsky for posing with bannon, i hate chomsky for denying genocides going back decades we are not the same

New Nobel Prize for racism and electoral interference just created!

Trump administration - FIFA A marriage of the two most corrupt orgs of the globe

New paper! @william-dinneen.bsky.social @guygrossman.bsky.social Yiqing Xu and I use GPT to code 91k articles from 174 polisci journals (2003–2023)and track research designs, transparency practices, and citations. How has the credibility revolution reshaped the discipline? doi.org/10.31235/osf... 🧵

📢 📢 Call for Papers IV Yale–UB Historical Political Economy Workshop Organized by @Didacqueralt.bsky.social & @Cescamat.bsky.social 🎤 Keynote: Lisa Blaydes (Stanford) 📍 University of Barcelona 🗓 June 29–30, 2026 Submit your papers by Jan 21, 2026: shorturl.at/oZTNy #pleaseRT

“He combined more than 30 plays for the theatre with a steady stream of works for television and radio, and with screenplays including an adaptation of John le Carré’s The Russia House, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and a joint credit for the Oscar-winning screenplay of Shakespeare in Love.”

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

I am excited to travel to Amsterdam this week for a great workshop on Political Identities in Europe @acesuva.bsky.social. I will present my paper (in progress) on language reform and identity changes in Navarre (Spain). aces.uva.nl/content/even...

I jump into the moderation debate. I agree with @adambonica.bsky.social and @gelliottmorris.com on the methodology, but I want to draw attention to a bigger issue. The collapse of candidate effects generally. leedrutman.substack.com/p/the-modera...

📢 Two weeks left to apply for a (2-year) research fellowship @iast.fr A fantastic opportunity to work full-time on your own research, in an interdisciplinary environment, and in a lovely city in the South of France. Deadline: November 15, 2025 How to apply: www.iast.fr/research-fel...

The question now is whether what happened in Madagascar will be repeated elsewhere on the continent. Young people in Africa have been increasingly vocal, calling for major reforms amid growing unrest. The continent has the world's youngest population. https://cnn.it/4nevWhP