Happy and thankful that our WP "Debating threats to authoritarian rule: Inclusion and Discrimination in the Legislative Council of Northern Rhodesia" has won the David Olson Award 2025! rc08.ipsa.org/post/2025/09... 1/4

My department is hiring a PhD student in Political Science with an orientation towards Politics & AI. This is part of WASP-HS, an interdisciplinary research cluster on AI’s impact on people and society. Come and be my colleague! Submission date: 15 Nov. 2025 su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

This seems important in a world where so many countries are turning against immigration: "A structural estimation of a model of endogenous growth and migrations suggests the increased immigration to the US since 1965 may have increased innovation and wages by 5%."

And if you want to learn more about how people make a career in dictatorship, pre-order the authors' (Christian Gläßel and @ascharpf.bsky.social) new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship": global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Umeå University's Department of Political Science is hiring 1-2 PhD students. The working conditions in Sweden for PhD students are excellent, and Umeå is a beautiful city! www.umu.se/en/work-with...

🚀 StanDat Database Update & Move! The database has moved and been upgraded: solveig.shinyapps.io/standat/

Dozens of people were killed in El Fasher, Sudan, on Friday when paramilitary forces fired a missile into a mosque during morning prayers, local medics and aid workers said. At least 84 bodies were recovered from the wreckage, including several women and children.

How am I meant to code this for WhoGov and Paths to Power?

"We cannot put the press in unreliable hands. It must be in the hands of the most faithful, most trustworthy, most politically steadfast people devoted to our cause." - Nikita S. Khrushchev, 1957 www.nytimes.com/1957/09/29/a...

David Frum on Jimmy Kimmel: "This is not cancel culture because it's not culture. It's state repression. It's an order from the government. Here is the script, you must read, if you do not read it, you will be taken off the air."

Selling out democracy when they could easily win the fight

Having written about the "autocrat's playbook" for many years now, I argue in this piece that Trump is fundamentally different to the likes of Chávez, Erdoğan, Fujimori, Modi, Orbán, Ortega, and Putin. His "mad king" persona means that he wrecks just about everything he touches...

My first attempt at a blog is now live. Check out my substack here: open.substack.com/pub/jamiewit...

Join us next week! @javierpadilla.bsky.social (@thegraduatecenter.bsky.social) will be presenting his work on how oligarchic cleavages shape liberalization and democratization and @alucardi1.bsky.social (@itam-mx.bsky.social) and @emisimison.bsky.social (@qmpoliticsir.bsky.social) will discuss.

Utrolig spennende og å få 12 millioner kroner til å forske på partienes rolle i å etablere den norske velferdsstaten ved hjelp av omfattende historisk datamatrialet og naturlig eksperimenter. Les mer her: www.usn.no/forskning/fo...

📢 New paper alert: How does war shape democratic values? Conflict exposure and democratic values: Evidence from wartime Ukraine by @kristinmbakke.bsky.social, Marianne Dahl & Kit Rickard. 📖 Published in the @jpeaceresearch.bsky.social special issue on Political Violence in Democracies. 👇🧵

Self-care is overrated—helping others has the biggest benefits for everyone involved A new 2-week intervention finds that helping others improves well-being more than "self-kindness", with benefits for depressed mood, anxiety, and loneliness due to social connection psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Author copies for Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics by me & @cooleyoneurasia.bsky.social arrived today! If you re-post this by Sept 30 we'll put you in a drawing & send the winner a free signed copy anywhere they happen to be on the planet.

korean reporting is nightmarish on the conditions Korean workers were contained in

Long ago, in a study of the democratic attitudes in Germany, Dalton raised the possibility of “Fragebogendemokraten” (questionnaire democrats): people who hesitate to express their sincere dislike for “democracy” in surveys, providing instead the “socially desirable” response (1)

Who could have predicted that this wouldn't go well?

“Every political movement in history, including the most bloodthirsty, has condemned political violence by its opponents. The only real test is whether you also oppose political violence by your allies. This is a test Trump has repeatedly failed.”

On October 13th Master of Science in Political Science Palina Kolvani will be defending her dissertation at the Department of Political Science: "The State of Numbers: Political Economy of Official Statistics"

My article "Film-Making the Nation Great Again" with @draege.bsky.social is out in Perspectives! Poli sci work on authoritarianism and populism largely overlooks audiovisual strategies. Our multi-modal study uses a new dataset of 11,000+ regime YouTube videos in Turkey. doi.org/10.1017/S153...

Norwegian democracy is boring. They all congratulate each other, no one storms the parliament, and the results are in so you can be in bed well before midnight. Is it even a 21st century democracy?

Norway’s center-left Labor Party looks likely to win the country’s parliamentary election, with the center-right Conservative Party on track for one of its weakest performances in decades.

NOW OUT ON FIRSTVIEW!! #Blame #Shifting in #Autocracies following Large-Scale Disasters: Evidence from #Turkey By @edwardgoldring.bsky.social, @jonaswschmid.bsky.social & Fulya Apaydin doi.org/10.1017/S153...

🇩🇪 ONP Doctoral Research Fellow @jamiewithorne.bsky.social will be with our friends down in Hamburg, Germany for the next three months! Jamie is a visiting research fellow at IFSH. Read more: ifsh.de/en/staff/wit...

I’m very happy to share that the first paper of my PhD, «From the streets to the ballots: Protests, polls and Polarization in Hong Kong» has been published online in @democratization.bsky.social It is open access, and you can read it here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

So when you fire all the competent people with qualifications and replace them with incompetent dilettantes this happens

One of the most remarkable things of the last 9 months is how many Americans seem to believe the President is all powerful and Congress has no say. Actually Congress has been ineffective by choice. It has immense power if it had the courage to use it.

🚨🚨 We’re hiring! 🚨🚨 We have 3 lines open in CP, IR and IPE — all tenure-track. We offer competitive salaries, a 2:1 teaching load, in a friendly (and fully in English) environment, at one of Europe’s most sought-after cities.

I am honored to have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant towards my project "Governing elites since the dawn of modern democracy" (GETGOV). It allows me to continue to advance this research agenda; the goal is to build a database on governing elites from 1789 and up to today + much more. #ERCStG

These are a group of men that stays in power by systematically repressing, killing, and torturing their own people, while redistributing the country's wealth to themselves and their friends. We create a false dichotomy, when we frame it as "the West" versus them. It is them versus their own people.

Kim Jong Un’s first trip to China in six years marked a watershed moment: the DPRK leader joined Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at Beijing’s victory parade, signaling North Korea’s place in an emerging nuclear bloc opposed to the U.S.-led order. www.nknews.org/pro/once-a-...

Returning from vacation and looking for a late summer read? @ivobantel.bsky.social and I got you covered! In our new @wepsocial.bsky.social paper, we assess how mainstream parties rhetorically create an affect-based "common front" against the radical right. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

And thank you so much to @statsvitenskap.bsky.social and @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social for the support towards the workshop. It is fantastic to be at a university which supports these kinds of events!

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this year's WhoGov workshop on Political Elites! It is amazing to see so much great research presented on political elites and meet so many great people. And thank you to @inalkristiansen.bsky.social and @jonaswschmid.bsky.social for co-organizing the event

More excellent research at the WhoGov workshop with a keynote by @szakonyi.bsky.social, and presentations by @miguelpereira.bsky.social @rsenninger.bsky.social @jbvalgermo.bsky.social @fiva.no @martesaga.bsky.social @haakongjerlw.bsky.social @mnagawa.bsky.social @antonkronborg.bsky.social and more

Great to have @szakonyi.bsky.social present his new book project in the keynote speech at the WhoGov 2025 workshop at @statsvitenskap.bsky.social ! The last two days have been full of exciting presentations on elite research by a great group of researchers!

📊 New dataset and paper alert! We’re proud to launch the Opposition Movements and Groups (OMG) Dataset, 1789–2019: a global dataset covering 1,452 mass mobilization movements. It was just published in Comparative Political Studies. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Below follows a 🧵

We just released version 3.1 of WhoGov, a global dataset on members of government from 1966-2023. The update fixes the mistakes that came to our attention while creating the Paths to Power dataset + mistakes users have notified us of More additions and updates to WhoGov are on their way, including:

Lowering recruitment standards in police organizations is standard authoritarian practice. It makes it easier to hire people who will do the regimes bidding "no matter what it is". They have worse outside options and are hired for their loyalty, not their competence.

Are regimes with higher nr's of core supporters more durable? Are regimes with more diverse coalitions of supporters more durable? In this (published today) @cpsjournal.bsky.social article, @sirianned.bsky.social , @magnusrasmussen.bsky.social , and @torewig.bsky.social I answer "Yes" to both Qs.

📢 New article 🌟 👥 Vilde Lunnan Djuve @vldjuve.bsky.social & Carl Henrik Knutsen @chknutsen.bsky.social 🔎 Citizen Action and Elite Responses: Opposition Mass Movements and Regime Change From Within, 1900–2019 📖 Open access in Journal of Conflict Resolution doi.org/10.1177/0022...

We are really excited to welcome so many excellent scholars to Oslo for our WhoGov workshop/mini conference on political elites on September 1-2. If you are in or around Oslo and want to join for a session or a day, please reach out. You can find the program here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wp9m6...

📢 New article 👥 Hallvard Hodne Sandven 🔎 Is residence at the core of subjection? 📖 Open access In Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP) 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Pengegavene i årets stortingsvalg kommer fra både privatpersoner, bedrifter og organisasjoner. Høyresiden får mest fra bedrifter mens venstresiden får mest fra fagbevegelsen. (Tall per 15. august, 2024+2025)

Before my PhD, I worked mostly in arts and media. Regimes invest lots in AV media, but Pol Sci largely doesn't engage it. So I was thrilled to see images in the proofs for Film-Making the Nation Great Again with @draege.bsky.social. We analyze autocrats' AV instrumentalizations of history.