Time is of the essence! We in the Government Department at the LSE are hiring and the deadline is January 4th. Come join us!

Metaphor alert

In this "new" article published in @jeppjournal.bsky.social, Atle Haugsgjerd, @rubenmathisen.bsky.social and I examine how political representation of the populist radical right (PRR) in Europe affects citizens’ satisfaction with democracy.

Hi All, Timothy Snyder and I held a Substack Live a little while ago, and ranged widely on the Russo-Ukraine war. It ended up being divided into two parts. Here is part one where we talk about views of Russia, Ukraine and war in 2022. open.substack.com/pub/phillips...

Yesterday I defended my thesis and officially became a doctor 🎓 Huge thanks to the committee @chknutsen.bsky.social @hannefjelde.bsky.social for the thoughtful questions and helpful suggestions for future work!

As we welcome white Afrikaners from South Africa and deny entry to any other refugees. There is nothing subtle about what is happening here.

Happy to announce that I have received an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator grant for the project "Authoritarian Threats to Scientific Knowledge". AutoKnow will study how authoritarian regimes and politics affect scientific progress, contents and topics in different fields. www.sv.uio.no/isv/english/...

PUBLISHED! My latest piece addresses the inactivity and passivity of the anti-Trump resistance. From my vantage point, it is not doing enough 🫣 I highlight seven lessons from those who have resisted authoritarian rule around the world. theconversation.com/has-the-trum...

From October 2025 - Paths to Power: A New Dataset on the Social Profile of Governments - https://cup.org/47i6oKQ - @jacobnyrup.bsky.social, @chknutsen.bsky.social, @peterla.bsky.social & Ina Lyftingsmo Kristiansen #OpenAccess

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:

📢 New Article 👥 Daniel Alexander Novick Goldstein @daniel-a-n-goldstein.com (ISV) & Drew Stommes 👉 Who Should Fight? Experimental Evidence on Policy Corrections to the Unequal Costs of US Wars 📗 Open Access in International Studies Quarterly 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/isq/...

In today’s Encode/Decode @chknutsen.bsky.social and @palinakolvani.bsky.social analyze how #regime type and #state #capacity shape the abilities and incentives of #political #leaders to respond to #COVID-19. Read the full article here: doi.org/10.1353/wp.2...

What happens when you combine @jacobnyrup.bsky.social fondness for turning dictators into Pepper Pig characters with my PowerPoint slides for the course I teach, Way of the Dictator. You get one of the greatest collaborations in the history of comparative authoritarianism 😆 @chknutsen.bsky.social

Spennende fast stilling på UiT Norges arktiske universitet for kvantitative samfunnsvitere (statsvitenskap, organisasjonsteori eller sosiologi). I tillegg får du muligheten til å bo i Tromsø og Nord-Norge 😁 www.jobbnorge.no/ledige-still...

Da vet vi hvordan Trump tenkte seg at den nye fredsplanen skulle bli akseptert av Ukraina: massivt press og trusler. bsky.app/profile/kevi...

This is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

This week in America:

This is what competitive authoritarianism looks like - regime ally trying to purchase media and remove critical voices

Especially when you are paying the president tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (in blatant violation of the Constitution) www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/w...

Is it a threat to free speech when the President of the United States threatens to yank the broadcast license of a channel whose reporters are asking him challenging questions? I ask because I feel like there used to be tons of pundits worried about free speech. Where'd they go?

A lot of people didn’t like the Washington Post journalist who was tortured and dismembered with a bone saw for writing critically about the man sitting next to me

People value free and fair elections, and prefer living in a country with free and fair elections but with less desirable outcomes (e.g. low levels of wealth) to living in a country without free and fair elections but with better outcomes journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00104140251392539

The methodology business cycle (Ok I'm trademarking that for a future paper 🤣)

🚨 New article out! “Right-Wing Terror, Media Backlash, and Voting Preferences for the Far Right” in @bjpols.bsky.social 👉 doi.org/10.1017/S000... We (Alex De Juan, @juvoss.bsky.social & I) examine how right-wing attacks shape support for the far-right in Germany. Short summary thread below 👇

Join us tomorrow at @uio.no for the 3rd C-REX/CIR meeting on Democracy and Extremism. Presentations by @chknutsen.bsky.social & @jacravn.bsky.social, followed by comments from parliamentary leader T. Brenna (Labour Party) & H. Nordby Lunde (former Conservative MP). www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/aktuel...

Ser frem til å innlede til dette frokostmøtet sammem med @chknutsen.bsky.social om demokratiets motstandskraft i møte med det ekstreme i regi av @crexuio.bsky.social og CIR forskergruppen ved @statsvitenskap.bsky.social www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/aktuel...

Hereby confirming that I’ve also been honored 😀 Thanks again for the great collaboration, @adridelrio.bsky.social and @plutscher.bsky.social !

Now I also got it @adridelrio.bsky.social @chknutsen.bsky.social :-) Thanks @apsa.bsky.social for mentioning our #education dataset: Paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... Data: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

Check out or new article — published today in @poppublicsphere.bsky.social — where we discuss and provide guidelines for the construction and use of datasets. We draw on our lessons from three major data collection efforts on education policies and systems 👇

Donald Trumps plan to subvert the midterms is underway From David Graham, on the cover of the next edition of @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Thanks @apsa.bsky.social for the mention to my coauthored #education dataset with @chknutsen.bsky.social and @plutscher.bsky.social in @cpsjournal.bsky.social. Paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... Data: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

It just got 10% dumber. Not a joke: Trump just imposed an additional 10 percent tariff on Canada because he still doesn't understand that Reagan was a vehement free trader. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

the federal government is waging war on citizens living in areas that didnt vote for donald trump, its insane

New version (0.6.0) of my #rstats package {democracyData} xmarquez.github.io/democracyData/ with @freedomhouse.bsky.social data to 2024, as well as several other sources, plus minor improvements all around

The Inspector General system is basically broken now. Most IGs have been fired, most positions remain vacant. Those who remain or would take the job pose no risk to holding the regime accountable. Congress added more barriers to Trump firing IGs after his first term. He just ignored them.

The self-censorship continues... "I was the editor of Governing, a magazine and website covering state and local governments. But after facing increasing internal censorship pressures — largely to avoid critical coverage of President Donald Trump — I refused to go along, and I resigned."

48 chapters on various aspects of Norwegian politics. Including one by @sirianned.bsky.social and myself on the historical development and current state of Norwegian democracy: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Very proud to have been a part of this project and to see my first co-authored article out in the world! Read @jacobnyrup.bsky.social excellent thread for more info on the data! 🥳

Super excited to finally see this project out in the wild! What a journey it's been! Looking forward to see how people will use this awesome data. See thread below for more details from @jacobnyrup.bsky.social.

Check out the data paper (open access) and the publicly available data: We hope that many people will use it in their research and for other purposes.

Great project, great people, great department! (From a completely unbiased member of the same department)

We are already thinking about the next steps. We are currently building a website presenting the data. Here, we will add interactive visualizations and useful information.

We also see where British cabinet members attended university. Unsurprisingly, Oxford and Cambridge graduates dominate.

We also show how the data can be used to give new insights in different fields. Do democracies or autocracies have the best educated cabinet members? Turns out that leaders are better educated in democracies, but cabinet members have about the same level of education across regimes.

However, we were by no means able to do this ourselves, so @peterla.bsky.social and @inalkristiansen.bsky.social joined the project. Moreover, we got help from an army of RAs and scholars spread across 6 continents, speaking +15 languages. We are enormously grateful to everyone who helped!

What if we google all the cabinet members in WhoGov and note down what they did before joining government? (This was before LLMs, not sure they are too helpful with this but that is a discussion for later day). Luckily, @chknutsen.bsky.social had secured funding from the Research Council of Norway

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 🧵

‘Fredsprisen til María Corina Machado er … mer enn en personlig anerkjennelse. Den er en påminnelse om at demokratiets fremtid hviler på dem som våger å protestere … .’ @mariannedahl.bsky.social i @aftenposten.no www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kro...