For colleagues in the London area: next week (6-7 March), we're hosting the annual LSE Behavioural Political Economy Workshop at @lsegovernment.bsky.social together with @florianfoos.bsky.social and @thchau.bsky.social. If you'd like to come, please sign up here: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/uxaAx17DHq
Has exPresident #Bolsonaro fostered a lasting issue alignment in Brazil that transcends his personal fortunes? To answer, this 🆕study draws on longitudinal public opinion data from the Brazilian Electoral Study and the Face of Democracy survey series.👇👇👇
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
🚨Job alert 🚨
I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026.
If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026.
📤 Please share widely!
www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...
Why did antisemitism rise in Germany during the Covid pandemic? And why was this increase concentrated among political centrists, rather than on the fringes?
doi.org/10.1017/S153...
@kanol.bsky.social @wzb.bsky.social @uni-hamburg.de @politikuhh.bsky.social @socfub.bsky.social
🚨 Postdoctoral Position at the University of Konstanz 🚨
We’re hiring a post-doc for our @excinequality.bsky.social project on political elites and decision-making.
4-year position | Deadline: Feb. 20 | Start: Sept 2026
Please share widely 🙏
The ad is here stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/f...
Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina Adam Scharpf Christian Gläßel Abstract: Autocrats depend on a capable secret police. Anecdotal evidence, however, often characterizes agents as surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect. To explain this puzzle, this article focuses on the career incentives underachieving individuals face in the regular security apparatus. Low-performing officials in hierarchical organizations have little chance of being promoted or filling lucrative positions. To salvage their careers, these officials are willing to undertake burdensome secret police work. Using data on all 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina (1975-83), we study biographic differences between secret police agents and the entire recruitment pool. We find that low-achieving officers were stuck within the regime hierarchy, threatened with discharge, and thus more likely to join the secret police for future benefits. The study demonstrates how state bureaucracies breed mundane career concerns that produce willing enforcers and cement violent regimes. This has implications for the understanding of autocratic consolidation and democratic breakdown.
Perennial reminder of this excellent paper about how secret police forces are swamped with underachievers
“We don’t want clever people. We want mediocrities.”
(Ungated summary here ajps.org/2019/10/08/w...)
One week left to apply - join us in Hamburg @politikuhh.bsky.social for the next years 👋
Sometimes a divided opposition is not a good sign for dictators. We explain this with @natanski.bsky.social
Photo of Trinity College Dublin taken by Stefan Müller
Our neighbours at @tcdpoliticalsci.bsky.social are hiring 3 (!) tenure-track faculty members:
– Assistant Professor in Political Economy
– Assistant Professor in International Politics
– Assistant Professor in Political Science
Deadline: 15 Jan 2026
More details: jobs.tcd.ie
@tcddublin.bsky.social
Survey experiments have become a popular methodology among social scientists. Has it been effective?
In POQ, Rauf et al. study the efficacy of 100 survey experiments. Their results show that a majority of hypotheses were not supported.
Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...
📣📣📣 GREAT, time-sensitive opportunity for senior/mid-career scholars to join us in Madrid at UC3M´s social sciences department (UC3M-ATRAE Program 2026) on an attractive pay+research funds package 📣📣📣
This does NOT happen everyday.
THREAD below if this is of interest 1/n
my totally unsolicited end-of-the-semester advice to junior scholars is to keep the nice notes that students write to you in a safe place so you can reference them when things get tough in the future.
Currently in FirstView: In “Survey Professionalism: New Evidence from Web Browsing Data,” Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, @tiagoventura.bsky.social, Tiago Ventura, @jonathannagler.bsky.social, @ericka.bric.digital, & Magdalena Wojcieszak provide evidence on survey professionalism across three samples.
"Even if the transition succeeds — if Maduro and other compromised regime figureheads depart, the military stands down, and González assumes the presidency — Venezuela is also highly unlikely to become a peaceful democracy overnight."
New paper! @william-dinneen.bsky.social @guygrossman.bsky.social Yiqing Xu and I use GPT to code 91k articles from 174 polisci journals (2003–2023)and track research designs, transparency practices, and citations. How has the credibility revolution reshaped the discipline? doi.org/10.31235/osf...
🧵
"[Political science] studies without an explicit identification strategy...constitute nearly 40% of empirical quantitative work."
Needed - larger samples, more realism about (the lack of) heterogeneous treatment effects:
-"less than a third of proposed hypotheses were supported... the largest predictor of positive exp. results was sample size"
-"moderation hypotheses were rarely significant"
academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
A critique of our (w/ @bertous.bsky.social) paper “Instrumentally inclusive” has just been published.
Our response is under review (see below on process) but we feel obliged to share our draft for balance since the comment has been released without the response.
osf.io/rn6h3/files/...
Not a drill - there's a Britain-focused lectureship (FT, permanent) available.
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPQ588/l...
I'm delighted to announce that my paper "How terrorism affects support for democracy" doi.org/10.1007/s111... is now published in Public Choice.
Thanks to all my dear colleagues and friends who supported this project in whatever way over the years.😍🥳🍀
This is a must read book!
👇🏽
Happy to share that my article with Miguel Rueda and Shuning Ge is out for early view at @bjpols.bsky.social.
We show that the level of aggregation at which electoral results are published affects election integrity.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
🚨 New LSE job in political science 🚨
We're looking for a *Full or Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy* to join the LSE School of Public Policy
Please share!
jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...
Want to present your paper to a great community of autocracy researchers next April in Oxford? Then submit your abstract to us at the Autocracy and Regime Change SG for the PSA 2026 Conference.
The deadline is this Friday, details below.
Depolarization is not "a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.... achieving lasting depolarization will likely require....moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
*PSA JOB OPPORTUNITY* 📢 Join our team as PSA #Membership, Programmes & #Events Assistant (PT 0.6,Fixed term) to support with new projects and Annual Conference. Open to all including #PhdStudents and #EarlyCareerResearchers
📆 Application deadline Friday 3 October
➡️
Whoa—my book is up for pre-order!
𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭 & 𝐌𝐋 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐢𝐧 #Rstats 𝐚𝐧𝐝 #PyData
The book presents an ultra-simple and powerful workflow to make sense of ± any model you fit
The web version will stay free forever and my proceeds go to charity.
tinyurl.com/4fk56fc8
We are hiring! 🌏 For the future Center for Multidisciplinary Area Studies (CenMAS) at @ff.unikarlova.cuni.cz, we are looking for a 👉 Research Group Leader in Comparative Area Studies.
Join us in Prague – details here: bit.ly/CenMASleader
@millanos.bsky.social @karelkouba.bsky.social
Radical right accommodation really does not work.
New paper out with this exceptionally talented team
@katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk
doi.org/10.31235/osf...
WE ARE HIRING! 2 Lecturers in Quantitative Social Science. Want a friendly interdisciplinary department in one of the world's most vibrant cities? This just might be for you.
Apply by: 10 Oct
www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
