Title page of our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception,” with Lauren Davenport (Stanford) and Hunter Rendleman (UC Berkeley), dated April 14, 2026. Abstract: What makes someone Black in American society today? From Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity to Joe Biden’s claim that hesitant Black voters “ain’t Black,” American politics frequently brings questions of racial authenticity and belonging to the surface. Yet political science often approaches race as a fixed attribute rather than a social construction. Here, we seek to understand how Americans define blackness in social and political life. Using a conjoint experiment with a racially diverse sample that includes Black, white, and mixed race Black-white respondents, we evaluate how ascribed and acquired traits influence perceptions of blackness. The results show that inherited characteristics—particularly parentage and skin tone, which are the strongest determinants of racial classification—play a central role, while sociopolitical cues such as partisanship, neighborhood context, and spousal race also influence racial classification. Using a continuous measure, we also show that respondents make graded assessments of blackness rather than purely binary classifications, with some individuals perceived as more Black than others. Black respondents are more likely than white respondents to classify a broader set of profiles as Black, consistent with a more inclusive understanding of racial membership, yet they also place greater emphasis on shared political identity. These findings clarify how racial categories are socially constructed and why that construction carries real political and social consequences.

Our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception” (w/ Lauren Davenport & @hrendleman.bsky.social), has been conditionally accepted at Perspectives on Politics!

Sharing abstract below. Long time coming, but we are really proud of this paper.

More soon!

To Work for Us, AI Must Not Think for Us Dani Rodrik thinks the technology’s undeniable usefulness presents a new, under-appreciated danger.

The greatest threat from AI is not that it will displace human work but that it will displace human thought. My latest. www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a...

Thrilled to share that our new article is out in @cjps-rcsp.bsky.social!

Place Consciousness and Voting in Canada — with @sborwein.bsky.social & Jack Lucas

We find that place consciousness shapes vote choice in nuanced ways across Canada's urban–rural cleavage.

cup.org/4snKTk1

Magyar’s speech is powered. From a contact in the audience: “He’s basically just asked all the puppets, all the supreme justices, all the heads of media, all the heads of the ministries to leave their jobs tomorrow and not wait to be fired.”

Good news for Europe. So far this year, Meloni lost a referendum to weaken Italy's judiciary, Germany's state election in Baden-Württemberg saw the Greens remain largest party, in France's municipal elections, Le Pen failed to win Paris, Marseille, or Lyon. Today, Hungary freed itself from Orban.

Kremlin Hotline: How Hungary Coordinates With Russia Blocking Ukraine From the EU - VSquare.org Péter Szijjártó offered Sergey Lavrov to send EU documents through the Hungarian Embassy in Moscow. Leaked audio reveals a strikingly deferential, submissive attitude from Szijjártó toward Lavrov.

💥 New leaked calls — transcripts and audio: Sergey Lavrov encourages Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó to blackmail the EU Council over Ukraine, then asks him to pass along EU documents. It’s hard to say which part is worse.

The. EU. Is. Not. A. Peace. Project.

If it was the first big push in European project w/dn't have been a common army. It is, in fact, a great power project. A US-backed effort to create a "third force" to keep the Russians out, enable the Germans to be built back up, and to allow the US to leave.

Iran has accepted terms of ceasefire, per NYT www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04...

Armageddon is terrible, but our only other option was diversity trainings at work.

@nature.com has published three groundbreaking papers on reproducibility, analytical robustness, and replicability across the social sciences. Sincere thanks are due to the many folks who contributed to these projects. It’s painstaking work, and a great service to social science.

So it’s doing its job

screenshot of the article heading at https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/geopolitics/2026/03/the-world-energy-shock-is-coming

The economic fallout from the Strait of Hormuz isn't a hypothetical — it's already there. Most people in Europe and the US just can't feel it yet. A threat on our new @newstatesman1913.bsky.social article: what's heading our way, and why the burden won't be shared equally. 1/

yongeTOmorrow Welcome! yongeTOmorrow Public Event #1 April 21, 2026

Project Overview Yonge Street is an iconic destination in the heart of downtown Toronto. The yongeTOmorrow project will increase pedestrian space and improve the way people move through and experience Yonge Street. The project is now in the design stage and includes: Road Design and Reconstruction Watermain Replacement Streetscape Enhancements Operational Plan map of yonge between college and queen

Road Design: Alignment Cross-Sections • Roadway: two lanes totaling 6.6 metres wide • Furnishing and Planting Zone: ~2.7 metres wide • Pedestrian Clearway: ~4.0 metre pedestrian clearway • Cycle Track: between College Street and Gerrard Street • Addition of signalized pedestrian crossing between McGill Street and College Park

Streetscaping: Design Segments The Green Gateway, Innovation, and Performance/Retail Segments can be enhanced by adding streetscaping features such as street furniture, public art, and greenery, examples below: Green Gateway By adding more trees create green corridors that link existing park spaces throughout the area. This provides comfortable places for people to gather and spend time along this busy, high-density roadway. Innovation Improved connections between Yonge Street and TMU provide opportunities for collaboration and programming. Performance / Retail Yonge Street is strengthened as a cultural hub, with flexible spaces for public art and small performances that can adapt to events and bring people together.

Concerning new documents out for YongeTOmorrow that seems much less focused on pedestrianization.

The project originally envisioned having portions of Yonge between College and Queen be at least partially pedestrianized.

www.toronto.ca/wp-content/u...

Re: Means Testing. When City College of New York was wondering about charging tuition to cover costs in the 70s they found it would cost more in admin and red tape then not charging but were told to do it anyway to teach students a lesson about responsibility

Some works people around can find useful for a rebuttal.

I cannot help but face awkwardness when Anglo-sphere PoliSci pundits overwhelmingly disregard populism as an evil wholesale.

Veiled Power: How Rosenwald Teachers Quietly Shaped the Civil Rights Movement Omar Wasow∗ Jacob M. Grumbach∗ April 1, 2026 Abstract What precipitates the collapse of seemingly durable social orders like Jim Crow? During the 1920s, approximately 5,000 “Rosenwald Schools” were built across the rural South through a partnership between philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and Black communities who raised matching funds, donated land, and petitioned local governments. Local elites saw vocational training that would preserve the racial order. We argue Black educators used this accommodationist cover to build veiled capacity: organizational infrastructure for collective action behind a veil of compliance. Counties with more Rosenwald Schools show greater civil rights protest in the 1960s. Mediation analysis reveals that pre-existing social capital predicted protest through Rosenwald teacher placements, not enrollment. Instrumental variable models suggest the effect is not driven by community selection. Moving from no Rosenwald teachers to the 75th percentile predicts 45% more protest. The political effects of education may depend less on what elites intend than on what educators build where elites cannot see.

Excited to share new paper w/ @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social: "Veiled Power: How Rosenwald Teachers Quietly Shaped the Civil Rights Movement"

The puzzle: did ~5,000 segregated schools built in rural South emphasizing “manual labor” strengthen or weaken Jim Crow? 🧵 omarwasow.com/wasow_grumba...

It would have been a good moment for there to be more common European debt on the market. Oh well, at least those Finnish taxpayers will be pleased that investors are putting money into China instead.

Europe must prepare for ‘long-lasting’ energy shock, EU warns [FREE TO READ] Energy commissioner says bloc is assessing ‘all possibilities’ including fuel rationing and releasing more oil from strategic reserves

“This will be a long crisis . . . energy prices will be higher for a very long time,” Dan Jørgensen told @financialtimes.com, warning that for more “critical” fuels “we expect it to be even worse in the weeks to come”

The EU is “preparing for the worst scenarios,” he said

as.ft.com/r/e4e37b2b-8...

Not getting involved but playing "which -ism is worse" is a terminal case of poli-sci-brain.

Bluesky v Rumble mentions in official congressional e-newsletters.

As I see it, it's not "echo chambers", it’s nearly entirely separate media ecosystems.

Does anyone know how the military and police have historically voted in Argentina? It’s for a friend.

Backlash against asylum seekers in Austria In 2015, Austria took in almost 90,000 asylum seekers – the third-highest number in Europe that year. The government housed asylum seekers in areas with little experience in welcoming refugees. These…

🌀

📍 Backlash against asylum seekers in Austria 🏔️

@markuswagner.bsky.social & @lukrudolph.bsky.social show that hosting refugees in local communities sparked stronger anti‑asylum, anti‑immigrant and anti‑Muslim attitudes with political consequences too. 📊🗳️

Folks, I spend every fucking minute of my time doing the review with the manuscript. I don't need LLMs to save me time on peer reviews. I need them to do my cooking and fold my laundry.

Man sieht auch absolut keinen Rechtsruck unter Arbeiter:innen, wenn man Rechts-Links-Positionierungen anschaut. Der Teil der Arbeiterklasse, der vorher schon rechts war, hat in der AfD eine Partei gefunden. Linke Arbeiter wurden dagegen vergessen und demobilisiert.

Gewalt gegen Frauen, Sexismus, Misogynie sind nicht das Resultat der "Manosphere" oder irgendwelcher anderer kurzfristiger Phänomene. Sie sind das Ergebnis tiefsitzender patriarchaler Strukturen die Einstellungen, Normen und Handlungen bis tief hinein in die sogenannte Mitte der Gesellschaft prägen.

In the end, the radical right has the consolation prize of Nice. We would be In a total different scenario if Marsella also flipped to Rassemblement National/National Rally.

The Ratchet In 2015, state legislatures across the United States considered 75 anti-LGBTQ bills, of which 27 targeted gender identity.1 In 2025, that total reached 1,059—with 851 of the current-session bills targ...

I analyzed over 10 years of anti-trans legislation. Over 330 bills have passed, with ~300 of them in just the last 5 years. There is no precedent in American history for so many bills to target one particular minority group like this in such a short timeframe.

www.thedissident.news/the-ratchet/

Sorry, but this stuff drives me absolutely crazy. I’m sorry economists & journalists are just discovering the field of international political economy. But we’ve been studying & publishing about this stuff for 50 years now. There’s no new age of anything & “geoeconomics” has been around forever.

Am 14. März ist Jürgen Habermas gestorben. Allenthalben ist nun vom „Ende einer Epoche“ die Rede. In seinem Nachruf argumentiert Axel Honneth, dass nicht die Rolle des politischen Intellektuellen auf dem Spiel steht, sondern das Fortleben der Kritischen Theorie.

www.soziopolis.de/juergen-habe...