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... 🧵

Can government policies moderate political backlash to structural change? Yes, the effect operates through material benefits and social recognition. 🚨New WP by @retobuergisser.bsky.social, @siljahausermann.bsky.social, @thmskrr.bsky.social and @susanadptavares.bsky.social 🚨 shorturl.at/zFbZE

The left-behind-the-Alps phenomenon strikes again: Chega, the Portuguese far-right populist party, gets 46% of the vote among Swiss emigrants (against 29% across Europe and 23% in Portugal). No idea if this happens with other migrant communities across Europe

Manufacturing for thee, but not for me

it seriously is an AI/tech-brain thing to think of reading as a sort of decontextualized, totally purposeless activity that can be abstracted from the audience (even abstracted from the author) to the point that the text can be repeatably summarized with no intention or purpose associated with it

Started to add Skillpower Sessions — a short set of focused notes with practical strategies for writing — to my Respect the Marble posts. Thank you to my students @dirckdekleer.bsky.social & @bogatyrev.bsky.social for suggesting this! Here is the first one: substack.com/@catherineeu...

92 years ago today, the Nazis raided the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexuality, where the first study of trans people was conducted, and burned all of its contents. Fitting that today is also the day SCOTUS greenlights the project of the eradication of trans people from society in the US.

There were another 1000 protests against the Trump administration this past week. At nearly any prior moment in U.S. history, this would be viewed as a staggering degree of unrest. Some thoughts on protest numbers in an age of growing authoritarianism: lakauffman.substack.com/p/thinking-a...

Spain, where I’m on leave, had a blackout this week. No screens. No Wi-Fi. So I grabbed a pen. Turns out, ideas don’t live in notifications, they live in notebooks. ✍️ Full post: catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/why-ideas-... Short thread on ink, attention, & art of slow thinking 🧠📝

Not the time to read our new book, UN Peacekeeping and the Politics of Authoritarianism? Here's the argument on a nutshell!

Brush up before Easter dinner. theconversation.com/how-to-have-...

Das ist auf jeder Ebene journalistisches Totalversagen, an Naivität nicht zu überbieten. Wie zum Himmel konnte das SRF eine derartige Nazi-Propaganda Show ohne Widerspruch durchwinken? Schrecklich.

2) Abandoning identity politics Contrary to public beliefs, the centre-left has all but abandoned identity politics. Having become parties of incremental centrism and problem managers they have given up on shaping identities in the knowledge economy. What would a progressive working class identity

You can find recording of our websinar on the inmpact of foreign aid suspension at pdri-devlab.upenn.edu/announcement...

I sincerely think that universities should suspend their productivity standards for scientists and ask them instead to hold town halls in schools, public libraries, museums, shopping malls, and anywhere else and communicate what is being lost with the collapse of the research ecosystem.

Badenoch is to end the UK's bipartisan consensus on climate policy. She is ditching a rare achievement of the Tories' time in government, the 2019 law to make the Paris Agreement's net zero target legally binding. Here are three reasons why Badenoch is wrong: .../1 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

On Wednesday, March 19 @12 ET @pdri-devlab.bsky.social will host a webinar Panel titled "The Impacts of U.S. Foreign Aid Suspension: Perspectives from Abroad." For more details and registration, see upenn.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Just ashamed of European academic institutions reacting to the authoritarian clampdown against our US colleagues with "look, we have nice jobs here". Do you think this is the kind of solidarity needed from us? What are you actually doing to strengthen academic freedom and to help those affected?

Don't let anyone tell you that there is no protest happening. Our latest Crowd Counting Consortium data update is now available. February saw thousands of events. 50501 days of action, immigration-related protests & Tesla takeovers were key spikes in activity. dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm....

It took me too long to leave X, but boycott Musk's activities is a duty. If you are still there, let's shift the conversation elsewhere.