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/...

Despite the grim topic, this is a very good paper: monuments that signal white supremacy can substitute performative violence and thus reduce it. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Excellent work from my SU colleague Einar Bäckström on the temporal dynamics of the winner loser gap in democracy satisfaction using a regression discontinuity in time design across 21 European countries. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Very possibly no political official in history has made so much corrupt money at a pace like this. Mobutu and Marcos looted a greater share of their countries’ wealth over decades but in absolute terms and in speed, Trump shamelessly puts them to shame.

Man, I can't believe the guy who inspired this event 4.5 years ago is declaring war on large swathes of his fellow Americans. I mean, who could have ever guessed it would come to this?

It's easy to see this speech as just weirdly performative, but there's a lot more—and a lot worse—going on here. The meeting & speeches are part of a larger project aimed at promoting the military leadership’s partisan alignment with the administration. How? 1/

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

🚀 StanDat Database Update & Move! The database has moved and been upgraded: solveig.shinyapps.io/standat/

I don't agree with this because I think the wannabe god king being seen to try and fail matters.

Yesterday I posted about how I used comet browser to take a Qualtrics survey almost undetected. Last night, I ran a pilot (N=400) on @joinprolific.bsky.social . I found that almost 10% of "respondents" identified as AI when directly asked.

Dass die AfD nicht wegen ihrer politischen Forderungen gewählt wird, ist ein gefährlich bequemer Selbstbetrug der demokratischen Mitte. (Quelle: aktuelles ZDF-Politbarometer)

at one point Albania was on the brink of civil war after the collapse of pyramid schemes that had sucked up roughly half of GDP, and now that is only the *second* stupidest thing the country has done.

The key problem with what Ezra Klein says here is that he fails – or is unwilling – to grapple with the fundamental reality of the political conflict: The movement that dominates today’s Right fully rejects the very idea of “living here with each other” as equals. That’s their defining position.

Paying respects to Charlie Kirk by going on podcasts and saying that Charlie Kirk wouldn't have died if he hadn't had fentanyl in his system

@pward89.bsky.social and I were delighted to win the Best Article Award from APSA’s Democracy and Autocracy section for our @worldpolitics.bsky.social article “Elite Management Before Autocratic Leader Succession: Evidence from North Korea.” muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

Paper alert 📣 Rapid advances in AI has some believe that LLM agents can replace real participants in human-subject research. If true, this would be huge! Following a growing body of research, we delve deeper into this topic and examine the merits of this claim. 🧵... arxiv.org/abs/2509.03736

NOW OUT ON FIRSTVIEW!! #Blame #Shifting in #Autocracies following Large-Scale Disasters: Evidence from #Turkey By @edwardgoldring.bsky.social, @jonaswschmid.bsky.social & Fulya Apaydin doi.org/10.1017/S153...

Great to finally see this published! Check out "Blame Shifting in Autocracies following Large-Scale Disasters: Evidence from Turkey", now open-access in Perspectives on Politics: cup.org/4ggTyAv Or read this brief thread for a summary: bsky.app/profile/jona...

#OpenAccess from @poppublicsphere.bsky.social - Blame Shifting in Autocracies following Large-Scale Disasters: Evidence from Turkey - cup.org/4ggTyAv - @edwardgoldring.bsky.social, Jonas Willibald Schmid & Fulya Apaydin #FirstView

In the 1990s, people in the Indonesian Cabinet used to call the president SGS, for “Super Genius Soeharto”

"Sweeteners can harm cognitive health equivalent to 1.6 years of ageing, study finds" Or does it? Let's take a look at this "study"... www.theguardian.com/food/2025/se...

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this year's WhoGov workshop on Political Elites! It is amazing to see so much great research presented on political elites and meet so many great people. And thank you to @inalkristiansen.bsky.social and @jonaswschmid.bsky.social for co-organizing the event

Melvyn Bragg has been one of the last standard-bearers for a really important, and unfashionable, idea: that good conversation, between people who really know their stuff, on complex or difficult subjects, can be fantastic radio - and that the national broadcaster should do this. I hope it endures.

Great to have @szakonyi.bsky.social present his new book project in the keynote speech at the WhoGov 2025 workshop at @statsvitenskap.bsky.social ! The last two days have been full of exciting presentations on elite research by a great group of researchers!

More excellent research at the WhoGov workshop with a keynote by @szakonyi.bsky.social, and presentations by @miguelpereira.bsky.social @rsenninger.bsky.social @jbvalgermo.bsky.social @fiva.no @martesaga.bsky.social @haakongjerlw.bsky.social @mnagawa.bsky.social @antonkronborg.bsky.social and more

Really enjoyed presenting at the WhoGov workshop in Oslo today - such an impressive group of scholars and fascinating research on political elites!