People need to understand that Minnesota did not have Democrats and Republicans when I was growing up. We had a Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party and an Independent Republican (IR) Party. While DFL is still very much in effect, Republicans dropped “Independent” during the Clinton admin (1995).

📻 Another great podcast from Politically In/sane with my brilliant colleague @pavisuri.bsky.social on the role of cast, rank and identity in politics Listen along: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...

On panelView, and why we should always look at our data first.. yiqingxu.substack.com/p/plot-your-...

I am very excited to be returning to LSE and joining @lsepublicpolicy.bsky.social. Eager to help develop this already fantastic policy school, co-teach with @alicirone.bsky.social, and launch a new course on "Designing Democracy”.

I don’t know what to say. This seems pretty bleak

Living in the UK with its oversized media market I almost never hear these 4 points. It’s a constant doom loop about the structural constraints on economy after Brexit & drumbeat of Reform gains on immigration. Current Labour could be more imaginative on economy but still has to contend with media

I wish I didn’t know as much about the end of Reconstruction as I do. If you understood what is being unleashed now, how it will touch every aspect of our civic life, and how difficult it will be to undo it, you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.

The victim blaming is out of control

A supremely fucked up thing would be if Democrats take the Senate but not the House because the Senate has become more reflective of the electorate

I feel a lot of David Attenborough's hard work with nature preservation is to cover for how much of a mess his brother made of that dinosaur theme park.

TVK refusing AIADMK, aligning with INC, the left, a Dalit party and a Muslim party to form a 120 coalition has left me truly surprised and genuinely hopeful about this shocking new entrant into politics in Tamil Nadu.

So many Labour councillors lost their seats. People who - independent of party affiliation - had often worked tirelessly for years to improve things in their communities. Voted out not for their mistakes, but the strategic failure and awful politics of their leadership. How must this make them feel?

The most reasoned and reasonable thing I’ve read so far on the locals. By my Nuffield colleagues @profjanegreen.bsky.social and @martamiori.bsky.social

What's more, if you look at this and think Reform are inevitably going to win the next General Election, you are reading a lot into a fairly small gap

Out: The Europeanisation of British politics In: The Indianisation of British politics

British politics is resembling the rest of Europe: • Multi-party competition has replaced two-party dominance • Challengers are on the rise, esp. the populist right • Political realignment centres on identity politics (incl Brexit) But FPTP is poorly suited to this fragmentation

I have been refreshing the UK elections results page repeatedly. But if anyone can point me to posts on how to think about these results? Is this better/worse/as expected for each of the major parties? Any actual surprises?

Publishing this paper was an adventure. Reviewer at a top 3 worried that studying relative & continuous constructions of race might “normalize” them, arguing that a premier journal shouldn’t send such a “problematic social cue.” Our job is to probe societal understandings, even uncomfortable ones.

We will know much more about inter- and inter-bloc switching over the course of the day. But ultimately if you are losing in both directions it’s because people think you are crap. Pivoting one way or another won’t help you if the total consensus is you’ve stuffed it.

Using single wards to show patterns of vote flows (between blocs) seems very risky to me. Turnout is incredibly low in local elections. It was between 20 and 30% in many wards in the last election. 1000-1500 votes cast. Few people changing their vote or staying at home will look like huge changes

So far Labour is doing less badly in London than elsewhere, holding many councils. Two-party politics seems to be holding better in the capital than elsewhere

Breaking News: Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a state budget deal that included funding to expand child care and a tax on multimillion-dollar second homes in New York City.

Unironically this was perfect comms strategy.

Vijay’s TVK has shaken Tamil Nadu politics, breaking the DMK-AIADMK duopoly. What worked for the actor-turned-politician? One answer may lie in demography: a leader and candidate pool closer to voters’ age profile than the older establishment alliances. We […] [Original post on journa.host]

Lib Dems fuming that they don't even get a mention in the burn list.

Another day, another election where the first past the post system wreaks institutionalized parties and propels outsiders into power. A seismic shift in Tamil politics- after nearly four decades of stable two party rule a new comer has emerged. Tamil Nadu what a day.

What could possibly explain this. Hard to say. The New York Times truly cannot figure it out.

We’re in the worst energy crisis since the 70s. Jet fuel prices are spiking. Flights are getting cut. Here’s a modest proposal: Emergency luxury fuel surcharge $1,000/gal for private jets. Buy fuel abroad? Pay by the mile to land. You want to burn through an energy crisis in style, pay for it.🧵

LSE, Goldsmiths, UCL

Pundits say Dems are underperforming in the midterms because Trump approval is -20 yet Dems are "only" +5-8 on the GB. But that misunderstands the disapprove-but-not-Dem group. It’s mostly closeted GOP partisans, not moderates waiting for Ds to pivot right www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-05-01...

To understand what the Supreme Court is doing, you have to recognize that this is how authoritarians in Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela consolidated power. Scholars call it autocratic legalism. The Court isn’t complicit. It’s an active participant. Roberts is following a script.

Given the argument that ended the VRA, I think it’s time liberals did some self reflection about the now decades long obsession with partisan polarization as the problem, as opposed to authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, and racism

The unbelievable hubris of a generation in the Democratic Party- woefully out of step and refusing to adapt or shift priors

Highlights from the MPSA "Town Hall" on US democratic collapse, featuring leading scholars in political science. 🧵 (1) Moderator, @nazita.bsky.social , starts off with a plain description of democratic decline in the US with an impressive list of illiberal activity and rapid decline. 1/

The special issue of @cpsjournal.bsky.social “Back from the Brink: Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies”, co-edited by myself and Isabela Mares, was just published. The issue includes 8 articles, many of which set new research agendas. A🧵w/overview 1/10 journals.sagepub.com/toc/CPS/curr...

Agree with every word... www.ft.com/content/ba3b...

See Douthat is free to make up any absurd definition of democracy, elections, and corruption that he likes. The problem for the rest of us is that he gets to say these things through an established and respected outlet like the NYT.

Also I don’t want to point out the obvious- but of course it was a *doctored image* because Trump isn’t really the messiah healing a dying Epstein with the avengers hovering around him.

It is crazymaking to listen to the right claim Orban's loss means he was never an authoritarian when people in Hungary feared that opposing him would immiserate their families www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/o...

Truth is, Orbán is just the latest in long list of authoritarians to be defeated by anti-corruption politics. A Democratic landslide is possible if they can credibly take up the anti-corruption mantle. But that can’t happen if voters see them as corrupt and beholden to wealthy donors.

Ding dong, the mafia state is out! Magyar has his work cut out for him: much of the damage in Poland is still there, and that regime only lasted 5 years. But in the meantime, this is a fantastic result, and so overwhelming that Orbán conceded without the expected legal challenges, etc!

Reuters says Tisza has at least 135 seats: 133 is the constitutional supermajority! Live by highly disproportional electoral systems (which Orbán made even more disproportional with the extra compensation votes awarded to winners), die by highly disproportional electoral systems.

OK, where should JD go next?

Now Tisza is at 135, surpassing supermajority

Do architecture and urban planning affect political behavior? Happy to share a paper that @tesaliarizzo.bsky.social and I have coming out at the APSR which uses computer vision to investigate how the built environment shapes inequalities in civic participation in Mexico: osf.io/preprints/so.... 🧵1/5

call me a liberal nationalist but I feel proud to export an American culture of space exploration, multicultural immigrant cuisine, the Black American music tradition, football basketball baseball, NY Jewish comedy, land grant universities, and social libertarianism

When the first dimension of politics is race and the end goal of political competition is not redistribution but maximal social integration. Sounds pretty good actually.

loving this thread. Another gap here is institutional architecture of Dem Party. Popularists want to keep the institutional configurations while tinkering with policy, but you cannot compete with a radicalized GOP with a 1990/2000s Dem party. Political selection & party-voter linkages need change.

something strange and horrible and somehow fitting that we should have a very real threat of madman civilizational destruction at the very moment when we also have humans on the dark side of the moon taking pictures that show how small, precious, and beautiful our world and existence is

Armageddon is terrible, but boring competent governing doesn’t sell, plus Biden didn’t give interviews, and so making up stuff about the economy was our only option!