📄 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!

Great start to the WhoGov elite workshop with @seibertlukas.bsky.social discussing how transparency affects MPs' side jobs and @siggi-econ.bsky.social showing that Norwegian parties and voters do a good job at filtering out candidates with criminal backgrounds.

We are really excited to welcome so many excellent scholars to Oslo for our WhoGov workshop/mini conference on political elites on September 1-2. If you are in or around Oslo and want to join for a session or a day, please reach out. You can find the program here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wp9m6...

📢🗣️...Are you a graduate students about to go on the market? Or perhaps you're just interested in research presentations. If so, check out my free two-day workshop: The Research Presentation as Storytelling

Now that Werner Herzog is canonically part of the Star Wars universe, I feel like they should make in-universe pro-Imperial documentaries by his character about all the Gulp Shittos and Weird Little Guys. “But I saw in the ewok’s eyes only bored hunger and the cruel indifference of nature.”

EPSA have announced that they will hold a conference in July 2026. 😵‍💫 We understand that there might be some confusion about EPSS and EPSA. 👉🏽 So we thought we would clarify some things. A short 🧵

Zambian politics have been quite dramatic in the last 20 years (timeline below). With that kind of competition, you’d expect MPs to fight to gain an edge in every arena, especially MPs elected on a thin margin. However, I find the opposite in Zambia’s parliament: doi.org/10.1080/1357...

Haha, bold proposal from a Norwegian Business School professor! "Norway should seize this historic opportunity by using the Oil Fund to buy Harvard, construct a state-of-the-art facility near Oslo, and relocate much of its faculty and students to Norway." www.dn.no/innlegg/norw...

10,000 Tariff Grandpa, as they say in China

Our July's newsletter is out! If you are not getting it yet, subscribe here: mailchi.mp/fe045331c9c7... To share your news in our August newsletter fill this form: forms.gle/wMqEnjAgJyxq...

The Dictators' Club: How Regional Organizations Sustain Authoritarian Rule by @debremaria.bsky.social via Oxford University Press (2025) #SummerReading

I only want this if articles can express a tortured identity crisis brought on by hundreds of rewrites.