Somewhere Bismarck is looking down in confusion as Germany projects power by sending 4,000 pensioners, 12 buffet stations and a TUI loyalty program through the Strait of Hormuz

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!

📢 Call for Papers: first Annual Digital Publics Conference

📅 21–23 October 2026 | Digital Society Initiative, University of Zurich

👉 To submit: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/BxVnAMyxNh

❗Deadline for abstract submissions is 31 May 2026❗Acceptance notifications will be sent by early july.

Thanks Janina!!

Thank you Josef!!

Refugee labor market integration at scale: Evidence from Germany’s fast-track employment program | PNAS Governments face persistent challenges in integrating refugees into the local labor market, and many past interventions have shown limited impact. ...

🚨New Paper in PNAS: "Refugee Labor Market Integration at Scale: Evidence from Germany’s Fast-Track Employment Program"

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Ungated preprint osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/px9ew_v3

w/ J Hainmueller, D Hangartner, @niklas-harder.bsky.social & E Vallizadeh

#econtwitter #econsky

🚨 New paper in the @apsrjournal.bsky.social:
Nils-Christian Bormann and I propose to model the electoral effects of ethnic and other cleavages with a new *Covoting Regression Model*. A short on the method and our results on ethnic voting in Sub-Saharan Africa. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

Thanks so much @lotemhalevy.bsky.social! Happy to chat more, but would venture to note in case you are thinking about Austria-Hungary that *spatially pronounced* cleavages could potentially be modeled as "covoting between districts" or other small spatial units (but note ecological inference risks)

Thank you so much @sarahobolt.bsky.social !!

Thank you so much @ojrj.bsky.social !

GitHub - carl-mc/CVReg: CoVoting Regression Model and associated methods CoVoting Regression Model and associated methods. Contribute to carl-mc/CVReg development by creating an account on GitHub.

The methods used in the article are packaged in the R-package on Github, feedback on which is of course always welcome: github.com/carl-mc/CVReg

I find the paper very exciting because it offers a new way of looking at electoral cleavages, one in which we do not have to know ex ante which side of a cleavage should vote for which party. Rather than modeling individuals’ positions, the CVR instead models political convergence and divergence.

Digging into heterogeneity in coethnic covoting, we find that it is driven by covoting for ethnic parties among members of politically relevant groups. In turn, measures of individual biases & perceptions or macro institutions correlate only weakly if at all with differential coethnic covoting.

Empirically, we find that, across 28 African states, coethnics covote at a rate of around 58%, 16ppts higher than non-coethnics (42%). This estimate does not change when accounting for geographic distance, wealth differentials, and other cleavages, and remains substantial even within locations.

This formulation allows us to model the association between coethnicity (shared mother tongue) and covoting (shared party ID) while controlling for other cleavages and general country- (or group and individual-level) characteristics across survey data from different countries and/or rounds.

Remember the Herfindahl Index of party or ethnic concentration? The chance that two randomly drawn individuals share a party or ethnic ID. The Covoting Regression (CVR) runs on such pairwise comparisons, modelling P(Covoting) as a function of coethnicity and other characteristics individuals share.

The problem: So far, macro studies of electoral cleavages incur biases from ecological inference, while micro analyses can’t easily be pooled across contexts and come with selection biases from linking parties with groups. We combine the strengths of both approaches to mitigate their weaknesses.

🚨 New paper in the @apsrjournal.bsky.social:
Nils-Christian Bormann and I propose to model the electoral effects of ethnic and other cleavages with a new *Covoting Regression Model*. A short on the method and our results on ethnic voting in Sub-Saharan Africa. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

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.

Great articulation of my main worry about AI use among researchers (including myself!)

Among current students, a hugely beneficial trait will be the ability to force oneself to sometimes do hard stuff on their own to really understand it even when AI is faster.

ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

There's a Horse In The Hospital | John Mulaney | Netflix Is A Joke YouTube video by Netflix Is A Joke

John Mulaney had it right in 2019: being governed by Trump is like having a horse loose in a hospital. And that "the creepiest days are where you don't hear from the horse at all." However, we have heard a lot from the horse in recent weeks. 2/n

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhkZ...

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity

Must-read piece on the role of tech and policy
in the killing of 180 Iranian school girls by US bombs:

March, 19-21: God is a comedian A stiff drink is recommended

This is an excellent summary of the US War on Iran current situation.

I’m an existentialist and borderline absurdist and even I struggle with the current moment.

This summary is just fantastic.

Thank you Jan!

This article on medieval itinerant rulership (Ottonian, Salian, Staufen), previously available as a preprint, is now published. You can also view the itineraries themselves on a fun accompanying website carlmc.shinyapps.io/hre-itinerar...

Deliberately and explicitly targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime under the Rome Statute of the ICC.

ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treat...

This, so many times. Finding good questions that venture into the unknown is much harder than finding good answers to a given question.

what if, rather than approximate answers to the right questions, we got exact answers to the wrong question, made ever more precise, more quickly?

All ideas take time to ripe 😅

Thanks Roberto — the early conversations with you remind me of how long this took 😅…