Equally insane is the complete lack of both condemnation from political elites and spontaneous mass protests from citizens. Indeed, grand corruption is already a fully normalised feature of authoritarian rule in the United States.

1/ Excited to report we have a new paper out @nature.com today! The bottom line: training data for LLMs does not just fall from the sky - it is created in the context of existing social political institutions - and that has consequences for LLM output. nature.com/articles/s41...

New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over the media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies spanning 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓

My new paper with Margarita Zavadskaya is out in @poppublicsphere.bsky.social! Since 2022, the Kremlin has turned pseudo fact checking into a key propaganda strategy. But how does it affect citizens? We run an experiment to answer this Q (10/): doi.org/10.1017/S153...

Senior professors with good funding and armies of research assistants should share what they delegate to their RAs without giving them authorial credit. This will help us without such resources understand the ethical boundaries of using Claude Code and other LLMs for our own work.

Are top public officials rewarded for good performance? In our new paper "Governing for growth?" (doi.org/10.1177/1065...). @jacobnyrup.bsky.social and I study how economic performance affects the political survival of finance ministers to show that this depends on the regime they work in. Thread ⬇️

PRIO is hiring a new Executive Assistant, This is a role that sits at the heart of our leadership, and is involved with most aspects of management. You will work closely with me - not sure if that is a boon or a curse - but there is room to shape how the role evolves www.prio.org/about/career...

"Trumpmenbaşy" LOL. Excellent

Delighted to share a short blog post on the dark logic of visual "strongman" propaganda — drawing on survey experiments in Venezuela, Türkiye and the US!

The best indication so far the WHCD Trump shooting wasn't staged? No evidence yet of huge insider bets just before it happened on Polymarket or Kalshi :-)

We are excited to have won @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social's joint prize for Specialist Group of the Year! If you are a researcher studying autocracies, come join this great community!

New version of my R package {democracyData} available: github.com/xmarquez/dem...

Scheidel's "Great Leveler" argued equality has historically come from violence. Can peaceful redistribution do the same? In our lab experiment, redistribution doesn't reduce punishment — it shifts it from 'punish the rich' to 'punish free-riders.' 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Very happy that my article "Electoral autocracies, hybrid regimes, and multiparty autocracies: same, same but different?" won the Frank Cass Prize for the best young scholar article in @democratization.bsky.social in 2025! Read it here or check the thread below: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Why I don't expect liberal democracy to go away any time soon: My article on the resilience of liberal democracy, published in @jeppjournal.bsky.social. Perfectly timed to the day after Orbáns defeat and a small spike in "democracy-optimism". There are, I argue, good reasons for such optimism.

With Hungary’s crucial election a few days away, its National Election Office has published a list of accredited international observers (n. 859). Having spent nearly a decade researching the behavior of international observers, I decided to take a closer look 😊 www.valasztas.hu/en/internati...

Three days left to apply for our mini-conference on political elites - deadline is April 1st! It will be held August 20-21st, 2026 in Oslo. We promise good food (maybe brown cheese), beautiful scenery, & great work on political elites Call for papers w. submission link here: bit.ly/whogovminico...

Foreign influencers help authoritarian regimes: while they may not sway domestic audiences already saturated with propaganda, they can reshape the perceptions of more credulous foreign publics journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

📢 We are hiring: Combined Postdoc position at V-Dem Institute and GLD! Applications are open for a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Cross-National Survey Methodology in Political Science. Application: web103.reachmee.com/ext/I005/103... 🧵1(4) #Polisky #PoliSciSky #PoliticalScienceJobs #PostDoc

The gap that's opened up between the military capacity of the United States (unmatched in human history) and its political and diplomatic capacity (none) is frightening

The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)

Updated data and new insight: a new version of WTH’s authoritarian regime type dataset www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

There is still one month left to apply to the WhoGov Mini-Conference on Political Elites. The deadline is the 1st of April. It takes place in Oslo, August 20-21st, 2026. We welcome research on political elites broadly understood. Call is found here : bit.ly/whogovminico...

I just learned that Ayatollah Khamenei and Ayatollah Khomenei are not the same person. Here's my plan for regime change in Iran....(1/23)

📚 2 PhD positions in International Relations at @stockholm-uni.bsky.social! The positions are linked to my ERC-project about local change and public support for protectionism #academicsky #polisky Deadline April 10, 2026, apply here! 👇 su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... - su.varbi.com/what:job/job...

Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ... Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups? Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com: tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf

Beijing watching a completely mentally unstable U.S. President reorient all U.S. foreign policy to coerce Brussels:

In announcing the final makeup of the board, Trump highlighted how Putin will be joined by other distinguished individuals, including Genghis Khan King Leopold II Caligula Pol Pot Lucky Luciano Curtis LeMay Tony Blair Sauron Hernán Cortés Count Dracula Benito Mussolini Henry Kissinger Thanos

Welcome to our Spring 2026 season! To join any or all, remember to join our mailing list: mailchi.mp/fe045331c9c7...

America is afflicted by a rare combination: early-stage authoritarianism, but with a late-stage dictator. Think El Salvador today ruled by a crazy Papa Doc Duvalier. While chaos is the defining feature of this struggle, pro-democratic forces can still prevail… www.thebulwark.com/p/crazy-or-c...

Donald the Dove

Come join us 15-16 June 2026 in London! The CfP for our 4th Annual Conference, co-organized with @qmul-sse-cgd.bsky.social, is open until 1 Feb! We invite scholars of authoritarianism at all career stages to apply here: forms.gle/5eQ1NHMtK5GS... For more information: tinyurl.com/2ap6attd

Seeing people do "here's the savvy take on how and why the US should acquire Greenland" and just feeling so *embarrassed* for them. Have some dignity. You don't need to be an apologist for the world's dumbest autocrat, you're not somehow sophisticated for seeing The Smart Play on imperial vainglory.

Come join the best (mini) conference on political elites in Oslo!!!

Join us for the 3rd(!) round of our workshop/mini-conference! We promise great research, fun people, and rumor has it that you will also get a chance to eat the best Chinese food in all of Norway if you attend!

We are happy to announce the call for papers for the third WhoGov Mini-Conference on Political Elites! It will be held on August 20-21st, 2026 in Oslo. We welcome research on political elites broadly understood and not just papers using WhoGov. You can find the call here: bit.ly/whogovminico...

📄 New paper out in @poppublicsphere.bsky.social with my amazing co-author @plutscher.bsky.social ! 💡 Ever wondered if authoritarian strongman messaging also works in democracies? We find that, yes, it did under Trump during the BLM protests in the U.S. in 2020. polisky csssky socsky commsky

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

First time I’ve seen a post complaining about (((Norwegians)))

Today I published a replication outlining concerns with "Instrumentally Inclusive" by Turnbull-Dugarte and López Ortega (2024, APSR). I document seemingly idiosyncratic and ad hoc choices made by the authors that create a pattern of statistically significant results consistent with their theory.

Wie lässt sich das brutale Vorgehen von Trump's ICE Agenten erklären? Und warum erinnert es so sehr an Diktaturen und ihre Geheimpolizei? Unser neues Buch liefert Antworten - wie wir heute in der @zeit.de erklären. Buch: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Four (!) three-year postdoc positions available at @au.dk: international.au.dk/about/profil... Join an incredible team & help understand the psychological & political implications of the clash between high-speed society & slow-speed democracy. Please share! @tboeggild.bsky.social can help with Qs

In memoriam: youtu.be/KJ1LJvOxo6Q

This is as bleak as it gets: ‘China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show’ www.bbc.com/news/article...

something under discussed is the fact that white house renovations are currently being spearheaded by someone with famously bad interior design taste

The U.S. government right now really hitting that sweet spot of blatant corruption of 1990s Central Asia, the weirdo personality cult of Gaddafi, the bad plastic surgery of Berlusconi’s Italy, the religious zeal of the Taliban, and the thuggish brutality of a right-wing Cold War dictatorship.

Paths to Power (PtP) is out in @bjpols.bsky.social! It is a database with data on cabinet members' social profile globally from 1966-2021. This is a great team effort with @chknutsen.bsky.social, @peterla.bsky.social, @inalkristiansen.bsky.social. But many more helped us along the way 🙏 A short 🧵

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

Next time an institution tells you how seriously it takes research misconduct, ask them if it's *this* seriously. www.bmj.com/content/297/...