“Since the announcement of their hunger strike on 20 October till 10 December 2025, the hunger strike by jailed Palestine Action activists was mentioned a total of 12 times in the British mainstream newspapers.” That is so damning and grim.

There is growing interest in HPE about social conflict in the run-up to the French Revolution. In a new article at Data & Corpus, I describe the Jean Nicolas Database, a database of 8,516 rebellions in France (1661-1789) 👉Article: doi.org/10.46298/dc.... 👉Database: doi.org/10.7910/DVN/... 🧵1/6

I think it’s fairly common that somebody raises concerns about selection bias (as a threat to internal validity) but then others read it as a concern about generalizability (i.e., external validity). The former is way more damning for any attempt to make sense of the data.

Selection on the cases with digitized data. Selection on the questions with easily accessible data. What does this do to knowledge production? Here is a great piece that deals with some of these issues. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Finally completed the 12 part podcast series on Fela Kuti. Well worth it. A complex human being, an amazing artist, a political visionary but also a hugely flawed man. open.spotify.com/show/320MJFB...

Another way to restart the world’s idea machine is to restore funding and grants to universities, researchers, and artists.

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

www.srf.ch/news/schweiz... Peak Swiss Lobbyism: The Swiss parliament has just decided to cut subsidies for new night trains by 10 million CHF due to "budget constraints". The day before, it was decided that Swiss vine farmers would receive even more subsidies. Guess the amount? 10 million CHF 🫠

I used MEMES as a teaching tool: Students designed memes to capture a core idea of the course readings. The ensuing class discussion often led to new perspectives on the readings, plus students had fun. The course was on State and Violence @ipz.bsky.social University of Zurich A selection:

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Every academic has one superpower: the ability to turn a five-minute task into a three-month digression

Studying the logic of state surveillance based on the universe of Italian files finds that states target educated and subaltern groups, with mobilization and radical change potential, from Gemma Dipoppa and Annalisa Pezone www.nber.org/papers/w34492

Apply to join the Transparency International EU (@transparency-eu.bsky.social) team as an Illicit Financial Flows Policy trainee, monitoring anti-corruption and anti-money laundering developments and trends at EU level. Applications due by 7 December 2025 transparency.eu/illicit-fina...

I'm delighted to announce that my paper "How terrorism affects support for democracy" doi.org/10.1007/s111... is now published in Public Choice. Thanks to all my dear colleagues and friends who supported this project in whatever way over the years.😍🥳🍀

Ugly campaigns hurt voter trust. Weak institutions make it worse. New research on negative campaigning in Africa reveals what really undermines democracy. See the data here: goodauthority.org/news/ugly-ne...

www.tagesanzeiger.ch/representati... It's really really frustrating to realize that many economists still don't know that political science exists.

The billions of research funds channeled into the pockets of Elsevier and other commercial publisher in return for very little actual value is one of academia's big inefficiencies that will eventually be replaced by more attractive Community-run alternatives

“Housing shortage – Jews to blame," letter sticker, German Reich, 1938 zwangsraeume.berlin/en/context

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

How are contemporary cleavage structures stabilized in times of declining mass social and political organizations? In this new paper with @davidattewell6.bsky.social @bjpols.bsky.social, we suggest that homogeneous social (educational) networks provide part of the answer. tinyurl.com/49cs8jwp

Papyrus or vellum perhaps? Looking forward to the next “call for parchments”

Attacks on trans rights are often framed as efforts to "protect women." But the reality is that such attacks only protect the patriarchy. Because enforcing a strict sex-based gender binary makes it easier to tilt that binary into a hierarchy where women are subordinate to men.

New paper: LLMs are increasingly used to label data in political science. But how reliable are these annotations, and what are the consequences for scientific findings? What are best practices? Some new findings from a large empirical evaluation. Paper: eddieyang.net/research/llm_annotation.pdf

New podcast on Fela Kuti spotify.link/fWGbrRitIXb

10 years, a tenured prof (a women) told me that the solution to a peaceful (straight) relationship was for the 👩 to be with a younger 👨: "you will be more senior so no tension around the fact that you earn the same/more." This paper echoes this convo: econpapers.repec.org/paper/izaiza... (1/2)

This was a predictable outcome. Israel armed & supported clan-based militias in Gaza. Some of these groups had previously been stealing humanitarian aid. Now, Hamas can go after them as collaborators & use that narrative to go after others who oppose them. Civilians will be caught in the crossfire.

"Many of the CEOs I spoke with didn’t care about democracy per se. For them, democracy wasn’t a moral good. It was a source of volatility. What they wanted was stability... " But "The evidence is overwhelming: countries that weaken democracy do not gain more stability and security, they lose it."

New SI "Cleavage Politics in Western Democracies" @wepsocial.bsky.social! If you're interested in transforming social & political divides in advanced democracies, this is for you. The intro by @davidattewell6.bsky.social & me maps contributions around 3 challenges for contemp. cleavage research.

This sets me thinking if the current pattern concentration of wealth is a key contributor to authoritarianism because it means there are monopolies that are very sensitive to political pressure and few enough of them that you can blackmail them one by one

This is a paper I really care about. I feel the core message is very important for social scientists in general, and political scientists in particular. "Quantitative Research in Political Science is Greatly Underpowered." (with A+ co-authors)

📖 New Etched in Marble: Mark Blyth on Why AI Won’t Save Your Writing The Brown University political economist talks irritation, PowerPoint & why the page is still the only place where real thinking happens. Read → catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/etched-in-... 🧵

Radical-right parties are often linked to the “left-behind”. But supporting them when stigma is strong is costly. So who is willing to pay that cost early on, before it’s normalized? In my new WP, I argue that breaking political norms is socially stratified. 🧵👇

The takeaway: 👉 Accommodating the radical right on immigration doesn’t win back voters. 👉 It alienates the progressive base. 👉 And it raises the salience of the very issue the radical right owns. In short: it’s electoral self-harm.

NEW - Quick. But Impactful? United Nations Quick Impact Projects and Violence against Civilians in Civil War - cup.org/4mZSEdA - @joribreslawski.bsky.social & Jacob D. Kathman #OpenAccess

Making them wear high-visibility vests over camo is such a good joke you couldn’t write it

🚀 Exciting news: The Peace Observatory is live! 👉 peaceobservatory.com The Peace Observatory is now the world’s largest repository of peace negotiation summaries. It covers 11,000+ rounds of negotiations and 3,000 agreements across 1,300+ armed conflicts worldwide (1989–2023).

Armed conflicts involve governments, rebel groups, militias, communal factions, and foreign forces — all interacting in complex ways. The result? A web of violence that can feel overwhelming to understand. That's why we launch the Conflict Networks Explorer peaceobservatory.com/conflict-networks

my lil reproducibility talk from today / I really wanted to instill the PhD students some simple first practices and ways to step up your game from there github.com/tjmahr/2025-...

If you know of recent PhDs/postdocs with interest in quant. (ideally mixed-method) research on pol violence/repression/armed actors PLEASE direct them to me! Am looking to appoint Humboldt Fellows to work with me for a year. Esp looking for ppl from Global South. No German citizens/German degree.

There have been a number of recent articles on statistical power in quantitative political science. This is something that I think deserves more attention and discussion. A short thread of the articles I have read. 🧵

I have been trying to wrap my head around this specification for a while now. If you have DV that is dependent on country, year of birth and year of interview. How can you also have country, year of interview, age, cohort and wave-survey fixed effect? Aren't they all colinear with each other?

Job alert! Join us at @unisg.ch 😊 3-year postdoc researcher position, part of the SNF project UN-POPULAR: Citizens’ Opposition to Peace Missions - Peacebuilding and social media - Causal inference and computational social science - Starting 1 Jan 2026 (or later) Apply here: lnkd.in/ekqPX7RN

Shocking, even for their standards, that the Spanish far right is in favor of deporting even legal migrants if they “fail to integrate”—and that, at the same time, the mainstream right refuses to establish a cordon sanitaire. elpais.com/espana/2025-...

📄 New Respect the Marble post: The Dopamine Trap: Why Typing Feels Good but Thinking Matters More 
👉 catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/the-dopami... 
For thinkers, writers and scholars who want to write to figure it out, not just to get it done. On why word count ≠ breakthrough. 🧵

I read this not as sociopathy but as the neoliberal devaluation of care. Care work--like cleaning up--is too labor-intensive to be highly profitable. So, if we're each supposed to maximize our profit-making potential, then those with more privilege have incentive push care work onto those with less.

Wenn man sagt man traut sich als schwuler Mann auf dem Land nicht Händchen halten, dann ist man abgehobene städtische Elite die auf die normalen Leute herabschaut. Wenn man das gleiche für Berlin-Neukölln sagt dann spricht man endlich ehrlich Misstände an. Lasst uns diesen Mist nicht mitmachen.

Empirical research is often contaminated by publication bias. Our paper in the July issue of Journal of Economic Surveys shows - after correcting for publication bias, empirical effects are typically closer to 0 and may switch signs - relative reduction in effect sizes of 45%-60%

You don’t need more ideas. You need a better question. A thread on clarity, chaos, & what a Nobel Prize winner, a mosquito net & a PhD meltdown taught me about writing (+ thinking) better. 🪨 Here’s my new Respect the Marble post: catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/you-dont-n... 🧵