Happy New Year/Buon Anno/Athbhliain Faoi Mhaise Daoibh! If you're an academic, may your year be filled with journal acceptances, grant victories, and the least amount of interaction possible with deans.

Christmas Eve dinner. Oysters, Moreton Bay bugs (like lobster, but nicer), and calamari. Washed down with a fine Pinot Grigio from Victoria. Happy Christmas/Buon Natale!

Every time I'm in a restaurant I remember Kevin McAleer's reply to a waiter who told him the Soup Of The Day. "Where there any other contenders?" "Um, no?" "A hollow victory, then".

An old favourite - “I never truly feel the Christmas spirit until I see the "Tony Blair being held back from attacking you in the pub" card”

Very cool article

This is such a great article - one of those ones you read and go "why hadn't anyone thought of that before?" The method here is just beautiful - using old telephone directories - and is well worth a read. Would be great to add to political science methods courses for how to think outside the box.

As Duncan says, this article was a lot of fun. There's so much to it - the funky method, in-depth case studies, the nuancing of a well-established party organisation theory, spatial regressions, maps...

🎁 Christmas has come early for @ammassarisofia.bsky.social & me with the publication of our article "The geography of the party on the ground: Local branches in Italy and Sweden in the late twentieth century" in @politicalgeography.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Like any PhD, mine has its share of challenges and mountains to climb. But I’ve never once felt without support or guidance from my amazing supervisory team!

Last week, our excellent PhD researcher @fravittonetto.bsky.social published this piece on @ecprtheloop.bsky.social: theloop.ecpr.eu/populist-pub...

I'm still jet-lagged from South America so getting on a plane was the last thing I wanted to do, but...once I arrived, it was good to be in Melbourne at the AusPSA conference and catch up with old friends. And today I had the pleasure of presenting in front of living Australian legend Antony Green!

Also coming very soon (i.e. in 4 hours), I'll be speaking on this AusPSA panel on populism, with a star cast of @ammassarisofia.bsky.social, Rachel Busbridge, @benmoffitt.bsky.social (and me). If I can somehow manage to have a nap before then, I'll be the happiest person in Melbourne.

A rare benefit of being awake in the middle of the night (day 10 of jetlag!): you get to see this drop into your mailbox. Coming soon, by @ammassarisofia.bsky.social & me, in Political Geography.

Having won this last year, there are few people I'd be happier to see take the title than Ben Moffitt - a truly world-class researcher and a nice guy too!

In @aunz.theconversation.com today, @jholloway.bsky.social, Michelle Evans, & I discuss the key findings from our recent @poppublicsphere.bsky.social article on prospective Indigenous candidates: theconversation.com/indigenous-p...

I didn't have “walking back from the supermarket into the middle of Kaiser’s rally” on my agenda for this evening in Santiago…

It was a pleasure to give a seminar at the Universidad Privada Boliviana in Cochabamba last Friday about our research (w/ @duncanmcdonnell.com) on the transnationalisation of the populist right. Thanks to Oscar Gracia Landaeta, Andrés Laguna-Tapia & Claudia Muriel for being excellent hosts 💕

🎆 NEW OA ARTICLE ALERT 🎆 'Populism, visual technologies, and the self-mediation of ‘the people’ from the 2002 Venezuelan coup to the 2021 US Capitol riots' in @risjnl.bsky.social How do populist publics visually represent themselves & how have shifts in visual technologies altered this process?

Thrilled that my first (ever!) and first single-authored article is out in @ausjpolsci.bsky.social 🎉 PRR parties have built a shared transnational discourse on issues like immigration & culture wars. But do their digital publics also take part in this discursive transnationalisation? A 🧵

Tomorrow at UPB in Cochabamba: our final presentation of what has been an excellent South American fieldwork and seminars trip. I'm looking forward to meeting the faculty and students, seeing a new city, and being at a lower altitude than La Paz for a couple of days.

It was a pleasure to present today at PUCP in Lima with @ammassarisofia.bsky.social about our research on the transnationalisation of the populist radical right. Great audience participation & such impressive students too. Now we have a couple of much needed days off and then move on to Bolivia!

Coming up tomorrow, at PUCP in Lima:

Jeez it's good when you see great work from great people getting funded (part 1). Big congrats to some of the best in Australian political science - @duncanmcdonnell.com, @ammassarisofia.bsky.social & Ferran - on this big and important grant!

I'm thrilled to see @ammassarisofia.bsky.social, Ferran Martinez i Coma & I have won over $825,000 in funding from the Australian Research Council for our Discovery Project "Generation-Z engagement with political parties". (When you're recovering from drinking Lima tap water, this helps a lot).

Coming up next Thursday at noon in Lima: @ammassarisofia.bsky.social & I will be presenting our research on the transnational populist right at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. I'm looking forward to good discussions and the local ceviche. (states of emergency etc. permitting, of course).

La Bombonera yesterday evening. I’ve been to lots of big games, including all 4 Italian derbies, but I’ve never seen a curva like that. Constant singing for 90 minutes, even when Boca conceded goals. Just amazing.

Our very talented PhD researcher @fravittonetto.bsky.social has just published his first article. His supervisors are immensely proud! In the thread below, Francesco goes through some of his main findings. There's much more to come from this project and this rising star!

What @ammassarisofia.bsky.social says ⬇️ Really impressive set-up & group of people at Torcuato Di Tella. And they're right across the road from the Estadio Monumental!

Buenos días Buenos Aires. (view of Recoleta cemetery from the apartment balcony)

I had a lot of fun yesterday evening presenting on the transnational populist radical right with @ammassarisofia.bsky.social at the University of São Paulo. It has been so heartening on this trip to meet engaged graduate researchers who not only come to seminars, but ask really smart questions too!

NOW OUT ON FIRSTVIEW!! The Inverted Hierarchy: How #Public #Bias Can #Favor #Potential #Indigenous #Candidates By @jholloway.bsky.social, @duncanmcdonnell.com & Michelle Evans doi.org/10.1017/S153...

After an excellent couple of weeks of fieldwork and seminars in Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, the South American tour continues on Thursday at 5.30 pm with this seminar by @ammassarisofia.bsky.social & me at the University of São Paulo.

It was great to present our research (w/ @duncanmcdonnell.com ) on the transnationalisation of the PRR at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. It was also a pleasure to chat with their very talented graduate students afterwards, and to stroll around the beautiful campus.

Is DIEM25 the first political party to have more academic articles about it than it has had voters? (before anyone gets offended, I do think some of those articles are very interesting!)

Post-seminar briefing in Little Africa, Rio.

This weekend’s pre-seminar preparation in Rio is an Ipanema beach homage to Anthony Bourdain.

I'm so pleased to see our new article out in Perspectives on Politics. Since I moved to Australia, I've heard many people say "you'll never publish in a top US journal with Australia as your only case" (and they weren't wrong to think that). But yesterday, we did. Thread by Josh about it below:

In Brasilia today & tomorrow to do interviews in this stunning parliament.

It was a pleasure to present with @ammassarisofia.bsky.social to the faculty and very smart students from IESP in Rio today. And the view when we came out into the Botafogo afternoon sun wasn’t bad either.

It was a pleasure to present with @ammassarisofia.bsky.social to the faculty and very smart students from IESP in Rio today. And the view when we came out into the Botafogo afternoon sun wasn’t bad either.

How do you prepare the day before a seminar in Rio?

Looking forward to kicking off our South America seminar tour in Rio de Janeiro next week 🇧🇷 Many thanks to IESP for hosting us!

Next Monday, 29 September, Sofia Ammassari & I will be presenting new research on the transnationalization of the populist radical right at IESP in Rio de Janeiro. It's the first of a bunch of seminars we'll be doing in South America over the next 6 weeks.

My colleague Ferran Martinez i Coma has a three year, full-time postdoc available for his Australian Research Council project "Resilient Elections: How to Strengthen Our Democracies." Great project ✔️ Awesome supervisor ✔️ Excellent department ✔️ Lovely City ✔️ jobs.smartrecruiters.com/GriffithUniv...

For a moment, I was reading this and thinking it looked interesting. Then I realised I wrote it. Anyway, it's interesting if you're into youth wings, party organisation, young people & politics etc.

Celebrating the end of “winter” in Brisbane.

I have been wanting to write this footnote for a long time.

Interesting comparison between Bluesky & LinkedIn (which, overcoming my long-standing dislike of it, I finally joined last week). The post below on Bluesky (where I have over 3,000 followers) got 7 reposts & 19 likes. The same basic post on LinkedIn (where I have 80-90 followers) got more of each.

3-year, full-time post-doc position with my ‪@griffith.edu.au‬ friend & colleague, Ferran Martinez i Coma. Ferran is one of the key people who has made our department the top comparative politics research cluster in Australia. Please apply, share, etc. jobs.smartrecruiters.com/GriffithUniv...

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.