Congrats!

Congrats!

🚨 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...

Civil war is not just a human trait

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/s...

This explains a lot. As far as academics talking to a lay public, you're in a league of your own in consistently finding humorous ways to cut through BS and deliver insightful commentary. That's a skill for sure

2026 APCG Award Nominations The 2026 APCG Award nominations are now open and due May 1st! Nominate scholars for Best Dissertation, Best Graduate Student Paper, Distinguished Africanist, Best Article and Best Book.

The call for 2026 APCG Award Nominations is live! The deadline for nominations is May 1st.

Nominate scholars for Best Dissertation, Best Graduate Student Paper, Distinguished Africanist, Best Article and Best Book!

www.afpol.org/blog/2026-ap...

Congrats!!!!

My book - “Purges” - has a release date (August 15) and a front cover. I started work on this as my PhD dissertation at the end of 2017 - excited for it to finally be coming out!

www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

I agree, writing is thinking. But what does this really mean? Are there parts of the writing process that are not fostering thinking? Must the process be unmediated? If you engage in a back-and-forth with an LLM in trying to get words to more closely match your ideas, is that not thinking?

A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator YouTube video by Forbrukerrådet - Norwegian Consumer Council

A 4 minute comedy skit worth your time

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Up...

Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ...

Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups?

Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com:

tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf

Congrats!!!

Academics, don't just critique. Show your displeasure by putting an axe through tables at your next seminar. You too will be featured in a music video. Eternal fame awaits you

I love that he has an axe readily at hand. He just carries it around all day in case the need arises

We are happy to release the Paths to Power Dashboard. It is the perfect tool for politics nerds!

You can find it here: ptp.isv.sv.uio.no/ptp/

It allows you to explore governments from 1966-2021 using the PtP and WhoGov datasets. See examples below.

The app has been programmed by Stuart Bramwell.

🚨Job alert! 🚨

I'm advertising a PhD position (66%) in Comparative Politics at HU Berlin. Ideal candidates combine a research interest in autocratic politics, conflict, and/or political violence with strong quantitative methods skills.

⏳ 4 (+2) years | 🗓 DL 16.01; Start March/April 26

More info:

The visual for the 11% car reduction was clever

the analogy I use with friends and family all the time is the jump from collegiate to professional sports. as soon as I explain it that way, it clicks in their brains what the academic job market is like.

I am hiring a post-doctoral fellow (2 years) to work on all things political finance in Africa. There are no teaching obligations, and lots of opportunities for fieldwork. A PhD in Political Science is a requirement. Please spread the word! Happy to answer questions - send them to my LSE email.

Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code.

In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle.

This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything.

You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

🚨Jobs!🚨

3-year PostDoc positions (aka Research Officers) at @lsegovernment.bsky.social to work with me on the local consequences of border change. Please reach out for questions and apply by Jan 4th to join the team and department: I’d love to hear from you!

Job ad: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

For anyone interested in the visualisation workshop materials I mention in this thread, you can find them here:

github.com/ddekadt/MY58...

Satellite image of a commercial development along a stroad. On the left there's a big box store that says "Property taxes: $102,485, Parcel Size: 17,766 meter square. On the right there's two apartment buildings that read "Property taxes: $626,002, Parcel Size: 10,930 meter square"

Minimum parking requirements create financially insolvent land use patterns.

The two apartment buildings on the right generate six times more in property taxes than the big box store on the left, while occupying almost half the space!

#BlackFridayParking

Why is knowledge getting so expensive? | Jeffrey Edmunds | TEDxPSU YouTube video by TEDx Talks

Excellent presentation. Worth a watch even if you're not an academic

youtu.be/PygUK16aQgk?...

What Next: TBD Tech, power, and the future with Lizzie O’Leary.

Just listened to an episode about this:

What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future: How Meta Profits Off Fraud

Episode webpage: slate.com/podcasts/wha...

Aditya published a new article...🧐...let me see what new creative research design he's implementing... Never fails

Congrats!

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

Giving coaches these crazy contracts, but then complain about paying players....🤔

Has Tanzania Reached Its Breaking Point? | Journal of Democracy President Hassan promised Tanzanians freedom, transparency, and reform. Instead, she has delivered repression, violence, and arrests as she bars anyone who dares challenge her.

Great analysis of the situation in Tanzania by Dan Paget

Awesome! Makes me think how many other distributions could be represented in this way.

🤔...I guess the binomial could be with the Galton board by assuming balls on either side of the mean to be yes/no