I personally think this is a "harder problem" than we care to admit. So, are you a (social) scientist struggling with this situation? A break between what you _want_ to study (a causal process) and what you feel you _can_ credibly study (a correlation)? Here are some readings that might help. 👇

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

We have just advertised a Full Prof position in the Political and Social Sciences department at the EUI (@eui-sps.bsky.social). Here are the details. Please spread the word, and get in touch if you have any questions. www.eui.eu/Documents/Se...

Barcelona this week! Today at @politiquesupf.bsky.social (IPA) I’m presenting joint work with Alejandro López Peceño and @eliasdinas.bsky.social on how Civil War refugees mobilized the left in postwar France. Next Thursday @ IBEI JCPOP: career incentives vs. ideology in Fascist Italy’s surveillance.

Forthcoming in the AER: "Gender Differences in Economics Seminars" by Pascaline Dupas, Amy Handlan, Alicia Sasser Modestino, Muriel Niederle, Mateo Seré, Haoyu Sheng, Justin Wolfers, and Seminar Dynamics Collective. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Regrettably relevant research today Disguised Repression: Targeting Opponents with Nonpolitical Crimes to Undermine Dissent www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Colleagues have backed up the point with data and infographics. The answer is no: political violence in the US is if anything declining, not rising. The far right commits more than the far left, but both are rare, and fewer than 10% of Americans endorse violence for political goals.

"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...

🧪 We ran a preregistered endorsement experiment with 4,000+ Spaniards. We tested whether VOX voters support funding for cultural orgs, including the Francisco Franco Foundation (which glorifies the dictatorship).

Please share this thread. It is important that political scientists, in Europe and across the world, understand why EPSS exists and why we are encouraging people to attend our inaugural conference, in Belfast next June.

Been a busy year in the data mines.📊 Just published my mid-year roundup: 29 data visualizations on the state of US democracy, tracking everything from judicial resistance to billionaire influence to why Dems have a mobilization crisis, not a moderation problem. All charts free to use:

"This paper finds that Jews are included in “the people” when this is ideologically conducive to the parties, when it can appear to justify Islamophobia and anti-immigration sentiment, and when antisemitism can be used to argue that “the elite” are ignorant and incompetent"

Currently in FirstView: In “The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem in Political Science,” @dwlee.bsky.social, @melissazrogers.bsky.social‬, and Hillel David Soifer discuss the MAUP and how the size of spatial units and the location of their borders affect empirical results.

On the one hand, a complex sense of how race, ethnicity, nationalism, migration, bias, displacement, intermarriage and acculturation forge an identity and, on the other, puzzlement that decades of this history doesn’t fit cleanly in a five-item box.

July 4th, 2025

New WP w/ @riazsascha.bsky.social: via >42 million placebo tests, we show type I error inflation in Unexpected Event during Survey Designs (UESD), propose an adjustment, implement via new R package uesdRobust, and demonstrate utility by replicating two top UESD studies. osf.io/preprints/os... 1/9

What shapes repression levels? We argue that bureaucrats' incentives play a major role. Come to the presentation of the work with Lorenzo Vicari and Andrea Xamo at #EPSA2025 today. 🗓️ Friday 11:20-13:00 📍 Room -1.A.03 | Panel P7-S164

This is fantastic. Very excited by this development in European Political Science. Please come and join us. Get involved. Sign up to the listserv. Etc

El Gobierno catalán anuncia préstamos a jóvenes para pagar la entrada de su primera vivienda (incentivar la demanda). Cuando hicieron una política similar en Reino Unido (help-to-buy): ❌Aumentaron 8% precios. ❌No aumentó la oferta. ❌Los promotores se apropiaron de toda la ayuda.

Re-upping this, as I've had a few conversations since, and think we're on to something about how the Right coordinates a coalition against the Left. On Riker, and breaking coalitions by adding cross-cutting issues, I recommend The Art of Political Manipulation: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

📣 New episode! What happens when there are multiple rules of law - when state law overlaps with religious and customary law? What does this mean for marriages, child custody, and even murder? Egor Lazarev discusses his research on postwar Chechnya: www.scopeconditionspodcast.com/episodes/epi...

We have been discussing amongst ourselves how AJPS should handle the issue of artificial intelligence (AI) in the creation and review of journal submissions. These are important issues we feel we must address. Read the AJPS AI Policy for authors and reviewers here: ajps.org/2025/06/17/a...

Based on crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don't have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. That's nearly 2% of the U.S. pop! Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels

Thanks guys! This data shows what we conjectured in the late afternoon of June 9 - it was always gonna be a hard fight to get to the 50%+1, but the citizenship in particular made for a super hard fight. A note: parties’ positions were *a bit* split, so party cues may have mattered indeed. 1/3

First substack with @simonhix.bsky.social — was it a good idea to join labour and citizenship questions in the same referendum? Illustrated with scatterplots and (arguably) aesthetic maps!

Shout it from the rooftops

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We have a great lineup of papers for the Junior Workshop in HPE. A limited number of spots are available for scholars interested in attending the workshop. Fill this form if you want to join us next June 25 at UC3M forms.gle/DckGoQDfniTU... @tinepaulsen.bsky.social @franvillamil.bsky.social

🚨 “Good Description” with @annagbusse.bsky.social 🚨 What sets 'good' description apart from 'mere' description? We develop a framework for evaluating descriptive research, whether we are doing it as scholars or assessing it as readers. Two main contributions... 🔗📄 tinyurl.com/gooddesc

Trump is dropping a new DiD paper to address negative weights in TWFE.

As we commemorate the 80th #VEDay, we reflect on the lasting impact of the Italian antifascist resistance. Read our new piece on @theconversation.com , where we dive into findings from our @cpsjournal.bsky.social article and ongoing research on its local political legacies 👇

Protests are about visibility. You show both your opponent and your allies that you are here and you are not alone.

Several countries have recently managed to stop and even reverse the erosion of their democratic institutions. In each case, people resisted growing authoritarianism. This shows that when democracy deteriorates, its fate is not sealed, and democratic institutions can be reclaimed.

Published Today in PSRM: Based on a novel “Multiple Unexpected Events during Survey Design” (MUESD), I contextualize previous findings suggesting that Europeans become more empathetic toward migrants when exposed to migrant suffering. www.cambridge.org/core/journal... A Summary Thread: 1/15

Chart of cumulative protests reported from Jan 22 - Feb 28, 2017 vs 2025:

Fascism places emotion over reason. Words become just tools to achieve the vision of the Leader. In our post-truth world, this takes the special form of the inversion of meaning: fascists call other people "fascists" and antisemites call other people "antisemites" snyder.substack.com/p/antisemiti...

How do local expressions of dissent become global? 🌎🪧 In the first paper of my PhD—just accepted in the American Journal of Sociology (!!!)—I show how historical emigration patterns can inadvertently create latent global infrastructures for diffusion. 🔗 tinyurl.com/44s2wkvp 🧵 (1/7)

Very happy that my paper has just been published at @apsrjournal.bsky.social! Do insurgents help or hurt genocide targets? Contrary to common belief, I find that insurgent presence reduced Jewish victimisation during the Holocaust in France. Here's what I discovered 👇 1/6

From our new issue: "Muddying the Waters: How Perceived Foreign Interference Affects Public Opinion on Protest Movements” Political Theorizing" by Wilfred Chow and Dov Levin. #APSRNewIssue..

New working paper! In this research note, @bogatyrev.bsky.social, @tabouchadi.bsky.social, @heikekluever.bsky.social, @lstoetze.bsky.social, and I present the first systematic test that causally identifies the electoral consequences of state-sponsored homophobia: osf.io/preprints/os... 🧵Thread

US military personnel killed in the Europe/Atlantic theatre of war 1942-1945, that is, fighting the Nazis so they wouldn't salute a dictator like this anymore: About 250,000 (US Department of Defense, January 2025)

I am keeping a diary of daily events, as they unfold open.substack.com/pub/adamprze... It is available to everyone. I am new to Substack, so please let me know if something is wrong with the link or the file.

Proud to be one of the 350 rabbis signing this statement — an ad in the NYT today and a declaration of our values. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... For more—and to sign— go to saynotoethniccleansing.org

📢 New @wzb.bsky.social Working Paper w/ @lennartschuermann.bsky.social: “How Anti-Racist Protests Influence Pro- and Anti-Migration Voting Behavior: Evidence from National and European Elections” ❗️Main finding: Anti-racist protests can change voting behavior towards a more inclusive society 🧵1/8

For years I have been teaching a course that uses literature and movies to teach about non-democracies. The main message of particularly the movies is how “normal” life under non-democracies is for most people.

The idea here is not just predatory looting by the billionaire class, but to cut the informational, administrative and coercive capacities of the state for *future* governments. If you hollow out the state bureaucratically it is rendered useless when your opponents come to power.

The PhD programme in Political and Social Sciences at the @eui-eu.bsky.social recruits new candidates, deadline 31 January 2025. With scholarships from all over Europe, candidates can get their own national scholarship to work on their PhD thesis in Florence. Tell your master students!

📚 Are you building a dataset? Simplify the coding with your own data collection app! I've written a tutorial on how to build an app in #R #Shiny that allows you to input, save, and edit data in an interactive online environment. ➡️ www.sebastianvanbaalen.se/uploads/tuto... PolSciData Conflictsky