Imagine interviewing a victim of torture and independently confirming the details of his torture and then being told you can’t broadcast it because the people who ordered the torture wouldn’t give their side of the story.

The thing about censorship — I say this as someone with experience living under authoritarianism — is that it’s rarely overt. The state cracks down when people flirt with the line & then folks maintain it. This 60 minutes cancellation of the episode on CECOT sent chills down my spine.

Clear evidence that at universities conservatives don't face higher obstacles than liberals to establish student groups + invite outside speakers. "These results fail to offer support for the view that conservative students encounter more difficulty in efforts to access campus resources."

Got some figures from the @lachlanmcnamee.bsky.social Salma Mousa & @kylepeyton.bsky.social DEI analysis from 4.67 million employment records at US public universities (1993-2024) Compact article gets it backwards. Unis diversified *leadership* not faculty.

Our neighbours at @tcdpoliticalsci.bsky.social are hiring 3 (!) tenure-track faculty members: – Assistant Professor in Political Economy – Assistant Professor in International Politics – Assistant Professor in Political Science Deadline: 15 Jan 2026 More details: jobs.tcd.ie @tcddublin.bsky.social

Why do citizens who say they support democracy tolerate leaders who dismantle it? Delighted to share my paper “Framing Democracy: How Elite Discourse Shapes Citizens' Understandings of Democracy and Enables Backsliding” is forthcoming in World Politics...(1/5, link at the end)

Join and help to lead the Constitution Unit! @uclspp.bsky.social is looking for a Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics who will also join our senior team and contribute to our research and impact activities. Applicants must have, or be near to finishing, a PhD. Apply 👇

In late 2020 a Chinese man called Guan Heng travelled to Xinjiang with our BuzzFeed map of detention facilities to provide ground truth for our work - he provided the first corroborating evidence for many sites. He escaped to the US - then ICE detained him. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

So, El Fasher looks like one of the worst single event atrocities to happen this century so far, but the evidence has come in such a trickle it seems to only now be getting verified

Closing date for British Academy/Cara/Leverhulme Researchers at Risk applications is 14 January 2026. 'Grants are available to support research project activities for eligible researchers in all disciplines except medical and health sciences.' 1/2

PhD opportunity at the University of Oxford. The Morelli scholarship funds a doctoral student to work with me on on democratic backsliding, strategies of democratic defense and regeneration, or the rise of illiberalism. Deadline Jan 9. More information at users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0073/

Assistant Professor in Political Science Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin - School of Social Sciences and Philosophy - Department of Political Science #skystorians 🗃️www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPU775/a...

Indiana’s Senate has voted AGAINST the GOP gerrymander that’d have locked in a 9-0 map. This keeps the 7-2 map in place, saving two Democratic seats heading into 2026. The vote failed big, 19/31. The MAJORITY of the GOP senators opposed it!

Their closing message to Indiana: change your maps to artificially benefit the President's political party or 'roads will not be paved' as punishment. They are openly saying this. Who would want to live in a country that works like that?

Had missed this detail: Paramount’s David Ellison talked to Trump at the Kennedy Center Awards on Sunday and sat next to FCC Chair Brendan Carr www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.

If you are looking for high-quality discussions at an affordable conference, the next @apsgworkshop.bsky.social might just be the place for you! Abstract submissions open until 1 February!

Study after study shows campaign ads barely move the needle. So where does money’s real power come from? I ranked the five ways money corrupts politics—from least to most corrosive. What I’ve learned from 15 years of tracking political money:

It starts with knowing the truth. Don’t allow yourselves to be gaslit into believing this is a real question.

Democrats can retaliate against these GOP gerrymanders with new maps in Illinois, Maryland, Oregon, & Virginia. They could flip 7 GOP seats to make up for this & new GOP maps in Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, & possibly soon Indiana. Imposing costs is the only way to deter the GOP from doing this

Simply amazing that the Supreme Court declared an end to legal race discrimination in the affirmative action case two years ago and now allows overt racism in both immigration arrests and redistricting. Using race to help minorities? Bad. Using it to discriminate against them? Very, very good.

Well look at that!

I am reeling from the difference between how political parties, voters and the press reacted to the election commission of India’s handling of voter rolls in state elections versus this. What’s happening in the U.S. is truly jarring

PhD opportunity at the University of Oxford. The Morelli scholarship funds a doctoral student to work with me on on democratic backsliding, strategies of democratic defense and regeneration, or the rise of illiberalism. Deadline Jan 9. More information at users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0073/

this guy is betting on a future with accountability for today’s crimes, so we should too

🚨 Job Alert! Postdoc in POLITICAL TEXT ANALYSIS in the MULTIREP project You do quant text analysis? You are interested in political representation? Enjoy working in teams? Would like to live in a great city? Consider joining us in Vienna! ⏱️ Apply by 15/12/2025 wratil.eu/files/MULTIR... 1/4 🧵

The Trump admin is using the National Guard shooting as pretense to justify a racist immigration policy that it has wanted to implement all along and well before this shooting, that will not make Americans safer, and that will leave some of the world's most vulnerable in limbo.

NEWS --> BBC confirms to me that they did edit a line out of historian @rutgerbregman.com's speech. It called Trump "the most openly corrupt president in US history." BBC also confirms this was done on the advice of lawyers. So Trump's threats worked. New piece: newrepublic.com/article/2036...

It’s especially ironic because the lecture is exactly about the ‘paralyzing cowardice’ of today’s elites. About universities, corporations and media networks bending the knee to authoritarianism. /4

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

@brendannyhan.bsky.social is right: young people are reluctant to come to the defense of institutions that have excluded them, ignored them, and crushed their movements www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/o...

In this paper we use data from Argentina to contribute to the debate about the dangers of polarisation. We explore if partisans rely on regime stereotypes to stigmatise rivals; are more emotional in victory/defeat; and display conditional democratic commitments journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Postdoc call‼️ I am opening a call for a postdoctoral position within my ERC project CONSENT. Come to Madrid to be part of my research team and more broadly of the @ipp-csic.bsky.social community. Application deadline: December 10th. Call details: tinyurl.com/yfu83p9m

Cas Mudde spells out what has become largely the consensus among researchers: moving right on immigration will not weaken the far right nor strengthen social democracy. If your reaction is "but in Denmark" please at least familiarize yourself with Danish politics www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Applying the changes to settlement to refugees already here would be particularly cruel and will create so much anxiety. @stellacreasy.bsky.social is quite right when she says "the Home Secretary needs to come clean asap as there will be refugees with jobs and mortgages that could be affected.”

NEW - Dynamic Democratic Backsliding - https://cup.org/3X48Yzq "I formulate and test predictions about how different sequences of backsliding shape accountability." - Eddy S. F. Yeung #OpenAccess

The Founders were so concerned about bribery that the Constitution forbids it three separate times. Two emoluments clauses ban officials—unambiguously including the president—from accepting things of value, plus bribery is the only named impeachable offense besides treason. Unprecedentedly corrupt.

Research on this is clear: the uncertainty created by this policy will lead to people integrate less into British society. It is trading-off the reasonable policy goal of integration for the useless symbolism of immigration numbers. Bad policy to appease the far right. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

And we knew this. This wasn't speculation. We studied it, we had the talking points. We trained volunteers to explain this to people. It's not a surprise. Rich people don't flee places with good quality of life when we increase the quality of life. They might try to cheat us, but they don't leave.

2/🧵 New piece with @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social in @NewRepublic: We analyzed 60,000+ respondents in the 2024 Cooperative Election Study. Gen Z has the lowest racial resentment of any generation. The generational shift overwhelms the education divide that supposedly defines modern politics.

This is why Dems should run on creating mechanisms of accountability especially on corruption.

A month ago I looked at what I called Labour's midlife crisis- an obsession with chasing socially conservative Reform-curious voters and ignoring groups of disaffected voters with social attitudes much closer to Labour voters. But some people thought there was method in their madness. Was there? 1/n

Kind of wild that while food assistance was withheld from millions of families, one Trump-supporting billionaire (Ellison) saw his net worth grow more this year than the entire SNAP budget. And the YTD gains of the other four richest men would’ve fully covered salaries for all 2M federal employees.

Let's just say--I doubt the Senator had to lean very hard.

This is really something. Trump/GOP efforts to rig midterms running into serious trouble

"But the true message—the prospective message—is that pardons will be available to everyone who joins him in election subversion in 2026 and 2028. This wave of preemptive pardons is a permission slip, an encouragement for election subversion in the future." open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

On this Veterans Day, more than any before, let us remember the valiant service of Black, Hispanic, Navajo, Japanese and other non-white Americans who fought bravely for the ideals of a country that failed to live up to them, and whose legacy a racist GOP is desperately trying to erase.

NEWS: The UK is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. edition.cnn.com/2025/11/11/p...

“Israeli soldiers have described a free-for-all in Gaza and a breakdown in norms and legal constraints, with civilians killed at the whim of individual officers.” The stories will get worse over time as censorship erodes. But we knew and didn’t stop it. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...