Orbán's concession sets an important precedent on conceding after losing/end of term. Hopefully others will take the cue.

This.

Finally a good day for democracy. 🇭🇺

V-Dem v.16 is now released, w. updated scores for 2025. Most countries remain stable from 2024, but some clear improvements (on diff’t democracy indices), incl. S. Korea, Sri Lanka & Mauritius. Largest declines came, by far, in the US. This figure shows 10-yr changes on the Liberal Dem. index.

how’s that going, Francis?

Is hype about AI justified? Cristobal Garibay-Petersen @lse-ei.bsky.social @mlorimer.bsky.social and @neuralisa.bsky.social argue AI discourse has gone too far, limiting the space for democratic engagement with and control of the technology @lseeuroppblog.bsky.social

#Presidenciais2026 #eleicoes2026 #Portugal

Center-left António José Seguro was elected Portugal’s next president yesterday, defeating his far-right opponent by a two-to-one margin.

🧵 New version of our paper (@bcegerod.bsky.social) is finally online: "How Many is Enough? Sample Size in Staggered Difference-in-Differences Designs" We show that even well-identified DiD studies are often underpowered; sample sizes needed are surprisingly large Paper: osf.io/preprints/os... 1/6

Excited about chairing @bogatyrev.bsky.social in the @lsegovernment.bsky.social Political Behaviour Seminar at 4pm today. Konstantin will present his paper "Shifting Ground". Come along if you are in London, or join us on Zoom: www.lse.ac.uk/government/r...

Demographic cues (eg, names, dialect) are widely used to study how LLM behavior may change depending on user demographics. Such cues are often assumed interchangeable. 🚨 We show they are not: different cues yield different model behavior for the same group and different conclusions on LLM bias. 🧵👇

Regine Paul, Vali Stan and I have analysed how deeply #AI is entangled in global politics and corporate profit-hunting. “The AI Matrix” is the result – and the digital book-version is open access: www.agendapub.com/page/detail/... (Link doesn't work? Try this one: www.regulaite.eu/images/pdf/M...)

Rejection doesn't have to be ego-shattering—and the people most likely to push through it tend to share a specific quality, Anna Holmes writes.

Y’all were laughing, but once you leave the EU you start to miss the attached bottle caps real fast.

Mafia goon: Nice house you got here...it'd be a shame if something happened to it Media outlets: Mafia goon rules out use of force. Expresses regret at the mere thought of it

Madman theory but you're actually mad.

Brilliant !

This is a great postdoc opportunity on a very interesting project on the association between discrimination and social inequality @cris-sciencespo.bsky.social www.sciencespo.fr/cris/en/news...

Portugal is having a presidential election tomorrow (Sunday). It is a fairly unusual one, which is representative of how much the political landscape has changed in the country. Here is some quick context about it, in case that is of interest: 1/9

#tugasky: não deixem de votar hoje. Todas as eleições importam e estas, num momento em que o país está a definir o panorama político no pos-bipartidarismo, não o são menos.

🚨Job alert! The ENDOW project is hiring a Research Officer in Research Database Management, to be based at @lsemethodology.bsky.social. Oversee & expand our database & contribute to research on social & economic inequality. Deadline 15 February. Share & reach out! jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Calling it “a regime-change war” fully obscures what’s actually happening right now. I doubt Trump is concerned with democratization as much as he is with waging a war to distract from problems at home, with oil extraction as a perk.

Very important work imo. We know surprisingly little about what “good” description actually looks like.

Repeat after me: replication papers are not the academic equivalent of diss tracks.

went to bed with a mass shooting, waking up with a different mass shooting

📢 📢 Call for Papers IV Yale–UB Historical Political Economy Workshop Organized by @Didacqueralt.bsky.social & @Cescamat.bsky.social 🎤 Keynote: Lisa Blaydes (Stanford) 📍 University of Barcelona 🗓 June 29–30, 2026 Submit your papers by Jan 21, 2026: shorturl.at/oZTNy #pleaseRT

PhD opportunity at the University of Oxford. The Morelli scholarship funds a doctoral student to work with me on on democratic backsliding, strategies of democratic defense and regeneration, or the rise of illiberalism. Deadline Jan 9. More information at users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0073/

Applications are open for the best Postdoctoral position I’ve had the pleasure of holding. Two years of full-time research in the amazing AxPo community. I couldn’t recommend it more!

‼️Last chance to submit your paper or panel proposal to EPSS 2026 conference in Belfast is TODAY! Don’t miss out - it will be full of great political science and fun social events! 👩‍🏫🥳 epssnet.org/belfast-2026...

New paper 🚨 “Vicarious denial: war crimes & online deliberation in Serbia” 🇷🇸 with @denisakost.bsky.social We scrape 4 news sites + reader comments and blend text-as-data (keywords; neg. binomial/logistic; BERTopic/SBERT) with critical discourse analysis to track on-topic debate & denial.

Today marks the end of my fellowship at AxPo @sciencespo.bsky.social. Grateful for the freedom to pursue my research and for the brilliant colleagues who made this journey so rewarding. In particular @oliviergodechot.bsky.social, Allison Rovny, Noam Titelman, Ulysse Lojkine, Meryem Bezzaz.

Fellow academics, I need to replace my old Mac laptop. Do you think a MacBook Air can handle R, Stata, QGIS, etc., or do I need a MacBook Pro? Many thanks for the tips!

3rd IAST-OXPO Conference in Political Economy Tomorrow, @catarinaleao.bsky.social will present her work "Past Benefits Today Keep Extremism Away. Authoritarian Privileges Withdrawal and the Emergence of Contemporary Extremism: Evidence from Post-WWII Italy". ⤵️ www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

🚨 Big News for European Political Science 🚨 We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the European Political Science Society (EPSS): a new, member-led, not-for-profit association built to support our scholarly community. 🔗 epssnet.org Here’s a thread with everything you need to know. 🧵

#EPSA2025 starts tomorrow! A dozen of our scholars have papers on political lotteries, challenges to democracy, autocratic legacies, the fate of mainstream parties, group-targeting in politics and media, climate politics, culture wars / backfire... 👉Details here: www.sciencespo.fr/centre-etude...

I look forward to meeting many of you soon in Madrid for EPSA 2025. In case that’s helpful to anyone, here are some of my personal Madrid favorites:

Looking for a last-minute #EPSA2025 Reception ticket. Happy to buy if anyone can’t make it.

According to «objective» democracy measures, we have learned nothing about the trajectory and state of democracy in the US since January. That strikes me as pretty damn absurd..

If you read just one opinion piece about the latest Portuguese election, make it this one.

I've been running online surveys in #Romania about the presidential elections. Lots of crazy stuff but the graph below took me by surprise (and I'm someone who studies communist legacies). This is the share of the second-round vote for Simion as a function of what respondents think of Ceaușescu.

You've (probably) got mail! ✉️ Heading to #EPSA2025 in Madrid? Consider signing up to our buddy/mentor scheme that the diversity committee has set up to help first-time attendees navigate Europe's biggest political science conference Questions? Send them over to @alonadolinsky.com or me 🙂

Overleaf is down. Use Word, or preserve your dignity by doing nothing.

Boa escolha de nome.

It’s so funny how MAGA thinks the Pope is ‘woke’ for his views on migration and helping the poor—when that’s literally one of the most basic tenets of Christianity. The level of dissociation is off the charts.

Amen to that

Even established authoritarian regimes consider arresting defiant judges an extreme tactic—a serious escalation usually reserved for after one-party rule is firmly entrenched. Seeing a judge arrested in the US today should alarm everyone who values democratic governance. This cannot be allowed. 🧵

My first post at the newly revived @misofact.bsky.social is a nerdy take on why it seems like experts are decrying rising autocracy in thd US, but for most folks, life goes on as usual. How much authoritarianism has the US actually seen so far in Trump-II? open.substack.com/pub/misofact...

Just posted updated version of our DID textbook! We now have drafts of all chapters, including the one on general designs! Now you can tell your friends still on X that they are DID-outdated :-) Happy easter for those of you that celebrate it. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

🚨 New paper🚨 on how AI can help us doing research (or not) with my office mate @phbono.bsky.social We test whether LLMs (ChatGPT, MistralAI) can be used to ideologically position parties in real time. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... 1/3

#VendrediLecture📚 Do citizens learn more after rejecting EU referendums? @ronjasczepanski.bsky.social new study in Journal of European Integration finds no major knowledge gain post-vote. Dive into the analysis ⤵️ www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...