1/ New article out in @socquarterly.bsky.social: “What is Left After the Protest Wave? Tracing Generational Patterns of Political Engagement in the Wake of Chile’s Student Movement” www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

It's not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It's that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he's been operating as a headquarters and funding source...

even the most tenacious autocrats have a difficult time denying a landslide result against them

Today I was uploading data to the Texas Data Repository and kept running into site issues. Turns out the server is getting hammered by AI bot "swarms." The data coordinator shared this article with me. Library/cultural heritage sites are completely overwhelmed. www.libraryjournal.com/story/ai-bot...

You have more in common with the people of Iran than you do with anyone in this administration, any member of the technocracy, anyone who is profiting from this war, or any billionaire. When you see Iranians forming human chains outside key infrastructure sites, you should feel a sense of kinship.

NOW: B52 bombers are literally in the air on their way to Iran and hundreds of thousands of Iranians are in the streets waving flags and surrounding bridges & power plants. Difficult to imagine this has any precedent in modern warfare. (🎥 Al Jazeera)

Well I'm full of opportunities to circulate today! We're hiring a post-doc at UT in political behavior/democratic representation. Deadline is April 10 (quick turn around!) Tell your friends, job posting here: utaustin.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UTstaff/job/...

Version 6 of the Comparative Constitutions Project's Chronology of Constitutional Events is out now! 📊 It covers all events through 2025 — 81 new observations and 20,600+ country-years of events since 1789, free to download. Prepared by yours truly. comparativeconstitutionsproject.org/download-data/

I made charts that show the population at 568 locations where ICE has detained someone overnight. adamjsawyer.com/detentioncha...

Our paper "Expanding Your Vocabulary" has been accepted at @sscratsage.bsky.social! It's a co-authored piece from the Comparative Constitutions Project on the Segments-As-Topic method, combining NLP with domain expertise for topic discovery. Pre-print/tool access: mattjmartin.com/research/art...

Our paper "Expanding Your Vocabulary" has been accepted at @sscratsage.bsky.social! It's a co-authored piece from the Comparative Constitutions Project on the Segments-As-Topic method, combining NLP with domain expertise for topic discovery. Pre-print/tool access: mattjmartin.com/research/art...

I attribute a not insignificant part of my academic "voice" (both in writing and instruction) to watching too many album reviews on YouTube in my early 20s (through today...).

It should come as no surprise that some of the most clear-eyed and forward-thinking critiques of GenAI are coming from qualitative scholars across fields. We must actively seek out these perspectives, as they are often drowned out by the hype-cycle, intentionally or not.

Article reviews may be one of my favorite parts of my job, despite how broken peer review is. Giving feedback, seeing what others are working on, and contributing to the community are fulfilling. It's also a low-stakes chance to sharpen my voice. It doesn't hurt when the manuscript is good, too.

I made a map

Less than 48hrs ago, Anthropic leaked Claude Code's source code via an npm source map, and someone already unpacked how the whole thing works. Pretty cool to open up the black box. ccunpacked.dev

Friends, Native people are, indeed, Native to this land. But they were not Native to the United States. We all need to, somehow, collectively unpack the presumption that the U.S. is (and has ever been) the only instantiation of "this land." There were, and are, many other governments here.

The Intercept is at JFK International Airport today reminding you to #TurnOffYourPhone before going through security to keep federal authorities from getting into your devices. More tips from our digital security expert: interc.pt/4v2qKTs

APSA's DDRIG made possible my fieldwork interviews in Chile and Cuba, for which I will always be grateful. And they have an amazing team behind the program. Apply now!

Illiberal democracies often rely on formally democratic institutions like courts to maintain a false image of the state as protective of democratic freedoms.

Just so you understand, this is as if you prepared for argument in front of a panel that included Cookie Monster, and Cookie Monster asked you a question about cookies, and you had not thought about cookies in advance.

This paper is now out for review! We've also posted a revised version with improved model specifications and additional robustness checks. You can check it out on my website here: mattjmartin.com/research/wor...

Writing (reasoning, self-doubt, struggle therein) is a form of self-actualization. When we sacrifice process for outcome, becoming is compromised. Responsible use of GenAI (say, stress-testing arguments) must preserve the useful friction between means and ends. That's a far cry from where we are.

objectively the funniest critique an american could level at another country

First time seeing one of my articles in print — a pretty surreal feeling. Out now in @polityalsberuf.bsky.social.

On this day in 1947, Black anarchist and community organizer Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin is born. anticolonialhistory.com/event/161/

La Guardia Costera de Estados Unidos está permitiendo que un petrolero ruso cargado de crudo llegue a Cuba, suministrando energía crucial al país isleño tras meses de bloqueo efectivo del petróleo por parte del gobierno de Donald Trump, según un funcionario estadounidense informado sobre el tema.

The Metro was one of my favorite parts about living in DC. The one time in my life that I did not own a car, and boy, do I miss it. Car dependency is a curse.

call me old-fashioned, but i think that the name at the top of an article should signify the person who actually wrote the article

NEW: Wikipedia has banned AI-generated content.

2025 was my last (half year) of graduate school. I owed $1,500 in federal taxes. For 2024, it was $2,800. I sure won't miss that part of the experience.

The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba is fast exhausting the country’s supply of fuel, causing daily blackouts and food shortages. It is also upending the island’s universal health care system, which is struggling to provide even basic medical care. nyti.ms/4bTFJ9p

WATCH: In the first 7 months of Trump’s second term, authorities detained the parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children — a number that, if the pace has held up, will have roughly doubled by now. That’s an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen kids a day with a parent pulled into detention.

chat i'm going to ask a somewhat prickly question: what do you (fellow political scientists) want out of your professional association right now (knowing that this is a sample of Very Online People and folks with wildly differing opinions)

The romanticization of the Cuban Revolution—and the corrupt, repressive, and socialist-in-name-only regime it ultimately produced—is one of the internationalist Left's greatest failures.

The current government of right-wing Argentine President Javier Milei has slashed funding for human rights groups investigating crimes that occurred during the dictatorship.

NEW: Bernie Sanders will introduce a bill Wednesday that aims to put a national moratorium on data center construction “until legislation is enacted that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence.” From @mollytaft.com in @wired.com: www.wired.com/story/new-be...

Holy. Shit. OUP tells me the delay in paperback order today is because the first run already sold out! 🙏 to everyone who bought, I am so grateful. 🥹 The paper will be back in stock mid-April, ebook availability is being fixed. I spent 16 years writing this thing hoping someone, anyone would read.

Today I explained in class that citing isn’t merely checking a box, but is a critical path for understanding a writer’s thinking and argument. I think that lesson has been lost, and it’s better to figure it out in undergrad than law school/grad school.

GOOD NEWS out of New Jersey: Both the Senate and Assembly passed a three bills aimed to protect immigrant communities! 🎉 These bills ban anonymous ICE agents, protect our private data, and codify the Immigrant Trust Directive. Our state is saying loud and clear, 🗣️ Fear has no place here!

The little vest grabbing thing they all do... we've gotta get a name for that and make it as socially acceptable as jacking off in public as soon as possible.

Traduje al español mi último artículo, "De la opinión ciudadana a la legitimación de las élites" para poder hablar directamente con los ciudadanos de Chile y Cuba quienes tan generosamente me brindaron su tiempo y sus perspectivas durante esta investigación. mattjmartin.com/research/art...

Homan on ICE at airports: "ICE can check identification before people enter the screening area"

Please god not another round of discourse around "untrained" ICE agents (airport edition)

It is hard to see this as anything but another pro-gov't "delegation" of socialist influencers. How will they ensure aid ends up directly in Cuban hands? Will they make any mention of the dictatorship? Will they refuse to meet with state officials who repress the people? No such info is available.

My article "Deportation by Design" is now in print in @polityalsberuf.bsky.social. The history of how a bipartisan coalition in Congress rode the War on Drugs to build the foundations of today's crime-based deportation system. 🔗 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Hey! That's me! You can read my latest article, based on interviews with constitution-makers in Chile and Cuba, out now in Comparative Politics.

An absurd premise, sure, but two points hold: (1) unregulated AI will aggravate neoliberal atomization of society, further complicating political intersubjectivity; and (2) a moratorium on data centers could be a clear, popular demand around which coalitions organize. www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3At...

Fetterman was the deciding vote on advancing Mullin’s DHS Secretary nomination. With the GOP committee chair Rand Paul voting no, Fetterman could have single-handedly thrown sand in the gears of the agency of ICE, mass deportation, rights violations, and concentration camps. He chose the opposite.