Not exactly a Xmas merrymaking post, but I wrote something on the changing environment for international academics in the Netherlands and how it has changed over the last 10 years: open.substack.com/pub/alexandr...

✨ MaxCPE is back! ✨ Don’t miss this week's webinar on Wednesday, 17th Dec, at 1pm CEST. Alexandre Afonso (@alexandreafonso.bsky.social) will present his co-authored paper on public opinion towards immigrants & Martin Ruhs will join us to discuss. ✉️ Drop an email to [email protected] to sign up

🚨 MAX-CPE is back! Our online series on Comparative Political Economy offers monthly workshops on topics ranging from financial nationalism to tax havens and geofinance. Coming up December 17, 2025: “Making Global Migration More Acceptable?” by @alexandreafonso.bsky.social s.gwdg.de/vcF6uF

(1/10) 🚨Preprint alert!🚨 In this article, I challenge claims of a generational rise of conservative men. In the media and recent academic publications, the so-called ‘youth gender gap’ has been interpreted as a generational phenomenon. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

This is the BBC headline on yesterday's coup in Guinea Bissau. However reports in the Portuguese press (GB was a Portuguese colony) imply that the detention of the president is a smokescreen and he may have orchestrated the coup himself?

Looking forward to our next PEPP talk with @huysmans.bsky.social, December 2 in the Hague cc. @mileskellerman.bsky.social

Looking forward to our next PEPP talk with @huysmans.bsky.social, December 2 in the Hague cc. @mileskellerman.bsky.social

Happy to inform you that because of the cloudflare outage I cannot mark exams

The Danish Social Democrats are currently on course for their worst election result since at least the Second World War, despite their brand of far-right accommodationism being touted as a blueprint for other centre-left parties.

Difference is stark.

"But Switzerland's boring": this looks like a really cool article based on qualitative interviews with ultra rich people on whether they'd move for tax reasons academic.oup.com/ser/advance-... cc. @gabrielzucman.bsky.social

The central argument in this excellent paper & thread is that the open-access turn has neglected profit; indeed, it turbo-charged publishers’ margins. As political economists who know a thing or two about profit and power we should speak up a lot more. As it says below: What we’re doing is crazy.

Perhaps some of the Netherlands' housing problems would not be so acute if everyone didn't want to live in a max. 2 or 3-storey terraced house like the Brits, but rather in a flat in a larger building (say 5-6 floors), like the Germans or the Swiss?

Just discovered the existence of this 💥🚨Portuguese martial art💥🚨🥷 called Jogo do Pau.

this is insane. www.kivitv.com/canyon-count...

Visualized here. Hot tip for journalists: the real question isn’t why Wilders lost, but why the far right has consolidated — despite Wilders's ineffectiveness in government.

I have just written a Substack piece with some scenarios of what would have happened in the recent Dutch election if there had been 4% electoral threshold (with apologies to my Dutch friends for banging on about this!) substack.com/home/post/p-...

Nice that you are all energised by the dynamism of a young, good looking progressive centrist. Now let me introduce you to the approval rating of Emmanuel Macron.

An interesting argument I have heard in the coverage of the Dutch election is that Wilders may not be unhappy about having a smaller representation in parliament, because he did not like having a large ragtag group of inexperienced and unreliable MPs that he could not control.

Not that it matters a great deal, but Wilders's PVV has taken over as biggest party ahead of D66 in the latest count. Difference is 3000 votes, both have 26 seats.

🗳️ First exit polls from the Netherlands: Wilders’ PVV appears to shrink from 37 to 25 seats. Make no mistake — the far right remains strong. Support hasn’t disappeared; it’s shifted across parties. The Dutch political landscape is more fragmented than ever — and the far right is no exception. 🇳🇱

Only about half of the voters who voted Wilders in 2023 voted for him again.

Also, the Netherlands may soon have its first gay PM in Rob Jetten, leader of D66.

Discuss.

Good to remind people today that the Netherlands has an über-proportional electoral system with only one electoral district: it means that you only need 0,67% (100%/150 seats) of the national vote to get a seat. It makes it possible for even very small parties to get seats.

🚨💥Exit poll for Dutch parliamentary election of today: serious chance that the liberal Democrats of D66 come first ahead of Wilders. Sort of a surprise given previous polls

Is there any regulatory reason why these slogans have to be so bland or vacuous ("vote for us", "together forward",...) or are all these parties (24, 15 of which hold seats) just exhausted and not even trying?

But we in the Netherlands *absolutely* need 3 Christian parties, 3 radical-right parties, a party of the farmers, and a party for the animals!

1st article from my dissertation is out in Perspectives today!! two takeaways: a) knowledge economy 'winners' may not be subject to status loss but they sure care about status preservation & b) this is consequential for their attitudes re: immigration & diversity. Thnx 2 all along this journey!!

Big coup for Uni. Zurich and Switzerland, one of the few European countries that can compete with US academic salaries.

ik snap helemaal waarom journalisten willen dat iedereen "in gesprek" gaat, want het is in hun eigen belang om er een show van te maken

The communism of capital strikes again!

The description of Nuno Espirito Santo as the only "black coach" in the Premier League shows how much race is a social construct. I wonder if anyone identified him as black when he was young and had hair? www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

As the Netherlands grapples with the "anglicisation" of its universities, it's worth looking to Flanders for a potential cautionary tale. This piece in De Tijd shows how a well-intentioned policy to protect Dutch in higher education can become absurd www.tijd.be/politiek-eco...

• Children of PhD-educated parents are 28 times more likely to become professors than those whose parents only completed compulsory school. • Children of professors are 11 times more likely to join the faculty than everyone else.

This is fascinating.

🚨 New paper: Who climbs the Ivory Tower? 🏛️ Together with Nicolai Borgen and Astrid Sandsør (@astridsandsor.bsky.social), we find that the chances of becoming a professor differ enormously by family background. Here’s what we find 👇 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

A Majority of supporters in all German parties considers that Israel is committing a genocide in #Gaza.

As the Netherlands grapples with the "anglicisation" of its universities, it's worth looking to Flanders for a potential cautionary tale. This piece in De Tijd shows how a well-intentioned policy to protect Dutch in higher education can become absurd www.tijd.be/politiek-eco...

just discovered this abomination. i mean what? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna...

📣 New call for postdoctoral researchers! We are seeking candidates with a doctorate in the social sciences for our research areas Political Economy (Prof. Dr. Lucio Baccaro) and Economic Sociology (Prof. Dr. Jens Beckert). Please share widely! s.gwdg.de/ySJx5p

Is there a reason I ask that the Times are using a picture of asylum seekers in a boat to describe rules for migrants who came on legal routes such as skilled worker visas for doctors?

🚨 New paper in @thejop.bsky.social Why do politicians often misperceive what citizens' policy positions are? @simonotjes.bsky.social and I study ~10,000 estimates of public opinion by politicians in Denmark & the Netherlands to uncover the sources of these (mis)perceptions Thread 🧵1/10

New VI from @ipsosintheuk.bsky.social comes with many historic lows for Labour this #LabourConference2025 1) 22% Labour vote share is the lowest we've recorded for them since June 2009, at the time when Britain was still grappling with the fallout from the financial crash.

So many echoes from this article for US politics....

FWIW I'm a convert to ID cards, largely because it removes discrimination against migrants and has the potential to make existing "papers, please" checks about *identity* and not *right to live here*. Subtle but important, to my mind. But...

One of the remarks often made, over decades, by the Islamophobe Geert Wilders (whose 'government' it is) is that Dutch society can't tolerate immigrants because of anti-gay bigotry

Uganda has passed one of the harshest anti-gay laws in the world and is described as a living hell for lgbtq+ people. Meanwhile, the Netherlands strikes a deal with the Ugandan government to send rejected asylum seekers there.

Good to see this important research getting a wider audience. Hope Labour advisors listen and learn