When was the last time you gave an in-person, closed-book exam? Mine was May 2019. I stopped because I wanted to obviate complaints about “test anxiety.”

From our FirstView articles: How Partisan Are U.S. Local Elections? Evidence from 2020 Cast Vote Records by ALEKSANDRA CONEVSKA, SHIGEO HIRANO, @shirokuriwaki.bsky.social, JEFFREY B. LEWIS, CAN MUTLU and JAMES M. SNYDER Jr. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

My latest with Christina Zuber and Edina Szöcsik, finally out in the @ejprjournal.bsky.social! We outline an emerging new paradigm in the study of parties and elections. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Question for folks who remember Vietnam. How do I interpret this list? www.usatoday.com/story/news/2...

White ethnonationalism is really unpopular.

Aging well www.city-journal.org/article/new-...

there's a new report out from YouGov using CES data to plot trends in partisanship over the past two decades. i've got a piece up today in @goodauth.bsky.social summarizing some key findings. check out both! GA piece: goodauthority.org/news/long-st... YouGov report: yougov.com/en-us/articl...

Gory detail alert -> open.substack.com/pub/jacksant...

One of the most depressing things I hear from so many students is that they sometimes download a reading for class, see how long it is, and just give up right there. I've heard students say this about readings that are 20 pp, 40 pp, 100pp...it doesn't matter. Just immediately calling it quits.

This is fun. diagnostic.millermanschool.com

"Picking Winners: How Political Organizations Influence Local Elections” by Andrea Benjamin and Alexis Miller, UAR 55(3), 2019.

The answer you get depends on when you ask. Also, neither is correct.

Am I alone in taking sudden interest in the effects of the English Civil War on the premises and design of the American Constitution?

It’s quite the development that our 250th anniversary as a nation will involve a communist far left and an ethno-nationalist far right. Good job, team.

"Continuity and Discontinuity in Legislative Representation: from Austria-Hungary to the Austrian and Czechoslovak First Republics," co-written by me, Tom Lorman & Dan Miller, in the final volume of the monumental Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918! @oeaw.bsky.social www.oeaw.ac.at/en/ihb/resea...

While our politicians scream and yell like little children about voter ID and fraud and any manner of other fake problems… …it remains a real pain in the neck to work with election returns as officially reported.

I'm thrilled that my book, Unity through Particularism: How Electoral Reforms Influence Parties and Legislative Behavior, is now available for pre-order through CUP and Amazon! Let me know if you'd like an electronic copy for your class, and I'll send it to you! www.cambridge.org/us/universit...

One of the first things reformers reach for is an opinion survey of voters' attitudes toward electoral systems. The results often end up looking something like this. thetab.com/2026/03/18/c...

I don’t know a lot about the current iteration of V-Dem. I did a bit of coding for an early version when I needed money in grad school. What I have to say should come with that caveat. When the news about the US hit, one of the given reasons was a lack of legislative constraint on the executive…

Wrote about political scientists' favorite "Well, actually..." It's our favorite for a reason. With data from New Jersey's recent election. goodauthority.org/news/good-to...

Currently in FirstView: In “Accounting for Protest Voting in the U.S. Congress,” Anthony Fowler and Jeffrey B. Lewis estimate a model of congressional voting that allows for non-ideological protest voting. This has significant implications for roll-call estimates of ideology.

I’m increasingly of the mind that students should have to optimize extracurricular activities and academic study. “To optimize” means to find an acceptable balance among two or more desiderata. For example, one might decide that the technē and connections from extracurriculars are worth an A- or B+.

This article is of the genre that causes you to breathe a sigh of relief on reading it.

More on AI. I asked the AI embedded in a YouTube page to generate a transcript of the attendant video. It couldn’t/wouldn’t despite the video having a working CC option.

"Politics transformed? Electoral competition under ranked choice voting" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Speaking to a recent McGill grad last week, I was pleased to learn that: - final exams are still 3 hours long, hand-written, and in a gymnasium - cost of attendance remains relatively low for Americans

In my new article "Electoral systems and assembly size" I follow Taagepera's famous cube root law but apply it not the 25% of the democratic world that uses single member districts but the 75% that uses PR. It's great fun! With math! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The season’s final pot of NECC is underway. I will report back with a photo of the finished product.

Limited government is in trouble. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/o...

Interesting paper using Italy for theory-building www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here’s an essay on the ‘multiparty question’ that brings in political theory. More please! theconversation.com/why-the-rise...

I went googling for my go-to document on paragraph structure and found this student-authored blog on the process of writing university-level papers. Good stuff. blogs.lse.ac.uk/studentsatls... blogs.lse.ac.uk/studentsatls...

I don’t know what “we” “should” be doing with respect to AI. What I can say is that Southeast Asia scraped my blog to death around 6 months ago and regularly sends a bot to check.

Oh, good grief. "We probably have some skills that we now need to hire back, quite frankly,” Scott Kupor, the head of the Office of Personnel Management, said... www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

After nearly a decade measuring American public support for political violence, @nathankalmoe.bsky.social and I have published a somewhat comprehensive guide to measuring these attitudes. This includes historical comparisons and responses to common critiques. doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

DCinbox Insights: Democrats Just Ran a Republican-Style Messaging Campaign Against Kristi Noem dcinboxinsights.substack.com/p/democrats-...

What about them? 💭 Rune Stubager, @chdausgaard.bsky.social, @lenamariahuber.bsky.social & Michael Lewis-Beck use survey data from Austria, Denmark & the U.S. to find out whether group sympathies matter as much as social identity when influencing #VoterBehaviour

Anno Domini 2026

Informative reading from @kevinrkosar.bsky.social on the toxic and non-toxic Congresses. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/o...

TLDR: Good news: Voters and non-voters are usually more similar than we assume. Differences between them are relatively rare. Bad news: When they do differ, low turnout can amplify these differences and elections can end up reflecting regular voters more than citizens at large. 2/2

Since this is a Democratic website, one question for Democratic leadership is about the FP bench they’re building. It would be wise to tap the group of people who got purged. I can imagine a temptation to staff it with youthful progressives instead.

There used to be a bunch of democracy-building specialists in and around federal government. We went to MA programs that sprouted up and/or thrived due to the Bush Freedom Agenda. I left that business long before it got dismantled, but many of my friends stuck around. They’ve had a bad 18 months.

It appears that the proposed reform package for Los Angeles elections will include council enlargement and the single transferable vote. www.union-bulletin.com/news/nationa...

🚨 New WP w/ @leonardocarella.bsky.social on OSF doi.org/10.31235/osf... We usually think that social identities precede preferences We show the reverse is also true: people update their social identities to match their immigration preferences Focus: class identity in 🇬🇧 + Christian identity in 🇮🇹

While you're all messing around on Bluesky: I have a new working paper on the Gallagher index, the most common measure of disproportionality. TL;DR: I show that it is constrained by the size of the party system, which can cause problems comparing elections across time and space.

NEW ISSUE from State Politics & Policy Quarterly - Volume 26 - Issue 1 - March 2026 - https://cup.org/4rM99MY All articles in this issue are #OpenAccess

Has anyone gathered data on how many DOGEd persons are now using their subject knowledge to train AI? I’m seeing ads for hourly pay and most recently a salary.