Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

Does being high-skilled protect you from ethnic bias when applying for a UK visa? In a new pre-registered experiment to be published in International Migration Review, I find that high occupational status doesn't shield immigrants from ethnic prejudice — it may activate it.

My latest article is online now at American Sociological Review: “Kinship Interlocks.” It’s about how some elite families manage to stay rich and powerful for many generations while others don’t. 🧵 (1/16)

The Strait of Hormuz is open for transit

Does being high-skilled protect you from ethnic bias when applying for a UK visa? In a new pre-registered experiment to be published in International Migration Review, I find that high occupational status doesn't shield immigrants from ethnic prejudice — it may activate it.

Matthew Goodwin, who only speaks one language, seems to assume that kids who speak another language at home are also incapable of speaking English?

Have to admit I enjoyed reading this somehow.

In my time "going woke" was just called "acknowledging what everybody knows is true"?

Preparing to teach another class in Dutch and am reminded of this evaluation I got at KCL.

Do we understand the politics of this kind of cost-shock inflation (and the policies that might help address it)? I think not so much: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Actually that joke did have its origins in a Guardian piece. A profile of Anthony Burgess, which I dictated down the phone and in which I referred to him as an 'expatriate man of letters'. The Guardian rendered this as 'ex-patriot' and he threatened to sue.

If you are looking for a fun, interesting, and collegial conference where not everything is the same old stuff, @sasemeeting.bsky.social is it. I had a terrific time in Limerick 2024 with great talks by tons of amazing folks. This year, Bordeaux looks great too. sase.org/events/2026-...

failed at unblocking our kitchen sink, imagine if I had to unblock the strait of hormuz

Fascinates me how this guy is considered to be some sort of oracle of wisdom because he is a billionaire.

Very happy that this article with Samir Negash and Lorenzo Piccoli has just been accepted at the European Political Science Review. In it we show that "welfare chauvinism" is much more nuanced than many assume.

J'ai été étonné de réaliser que beaucoup de nos amis français pensent qu'en Suisse Romande, nous disons "octante" pour "quatre-vingts". Nous disons en fait 'huitante'. 'Octante' est essentiellement un mythe. dis-voir.ch/2024/11/16/h...

"Whether someone has paid taxes and social contributions turns out to be the single largest predictor of perceived deservingness in the entire study—larger than legal status or country of origin. ... Even an undocumented migrant who has paid taxes is rated more deserving than a citizen who has not."

Looking forward to the era of AI social science: the data is AI-generated, the paper is written by AI, the paper is reviewed by AI, and summarized for students and researchers by AI.

Very happy that this article with Samir Negash and Lorenzo Piccoli has just been accepted at the European Political Science Review. In it we show that "welfare chauvinism" is much more nuanced than many assume.

Percentage of votes for André Ventura (radical right) and AJ Seguro (centre-left) in the 2nd round of the 2026 Portuguese presidential elections. Parishes plotted by share of population with tertiary education.

Percentage of votes for André Ventura (radical right) and AJ Seguro (centre-left) in the 2nd round of the 2026 Portuguese presidential elections. Parishes plotted by share of population with tertiary education.

Como emigrante que "não vale nada" e filho de emigrantes, claro que esperava que o desprezo que sempre notei ia aparecer com esses resultados, mas é importante dizer que 97,5% dos emigrantes *não* votaram no Ventura.

In the Portuguese presidential election, very clear victory of the centre-left candidate Segura against the radical right Ventura.

Here's an interesting difference in the vote of the Portuguese diaspora in my country of birth (Switzerland) and the country where I live in yesterday's presidential election: in Switzerland the right-wing populist candidate gets 63% (!) of the vote while he comes only third in the Netherlands: 10%

🇵🇹#Portugal, presidential election exit poll (1st round): Seguro (PS): 30-35 % Ventura (CH): 20-24 % Cotrim (IL): 17-21 % Gouveia E Melo (-): 11-14 % Marques Mendes (PSD): 8-11 % Filipe (CDU): 1-3 % Martins (BE): 1-3 % Pinto (L): 0-1 % ... RTP, #Presidenciais2026

I'm sure every Greenlander is dying to trade free healthcare for the right to carry AR-15s around.

Look, if I had promised my working-class racist constituency lots of money *but* I didn't want to take it from my billionaire friends, perhaps I would also try to seize it elsewhere by imperialist means.

So Maduro, a ruling head of state, is charged of "possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices" www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Can I tell my NYC mayor story again today? Ok, fine.

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. 🇳🇱