New study by Rob Oldham (robertloldham.com) on minority parties in state legislatures uncovers that bipartisan policymaking occurs outside of institutional necessity. Despite the ravages of partisan tribalism, state parties cooperate to pass high-quality, durable policy.

Big thanks 2 Lena Huber, Anna Kurella & MZES Uni Mannheim for an impressive workshop on Party Competition. Unanimous agreement: parties matter + this was a 🔝organized program. 👏👏to this great group of scholars!

Democratic Backsliding - a special section from PS: Political Science & Politics - cup.org/3tHkxS2 Where not #OpenAccess, this collection is free to read until the end of March 2024

🇺🇸Americans' understandings of "liberal" and "conservative" are weakly aligned with conventional definitions. Such understandings also differ along partisan, racial, and gender lines. ▶️By Eddy Yeung & Kai Quek cambridge.org/core/journals/… #FirstView #OpenAccess

Budapest is the only region in Europe where European identity is stronger than both national and regional identity.

I think: 1. RCTs are an incredibly important social scientific tool. 2. We have over-indexed on RCTs (vs. obs. work) in the last 15 years. 3. RCTs are not going to solve "poverty". 4. Social scientists need to be MUCH more careful and honest about messing with people's lives.

But what about the number of hours worked in a lifetime? For all the memes about North vs South Europe there are remarkable few big regional trends. And yes, so much for the German work ethic!

<3 my AI generated images

Full day at #PSA24, and particularly happy to see a packed room for our PSA Italian Politics panel, with papers by Marianna Griffini Laura Montecchio Matthew E Bergman Michele Crepaz and yours truly. Many thanks to co-convenors Mattia Zulianello & laura polverari and to Jakub Wondreys for chairing!

"You can talk 'til you're blue in the face...."

La Regina

"Austria’s opposition social democrats have promised to fund newspaper subscriptions for people under 30, in a bid to combat disinformation and what they say is the “Orbanisation” of Austrian politics." SPO calls it "an investment in democracy." ft.com/content/985b4e…

I just can’t get past Labour winning 65% of seats off 34% of the vote. Absolutely wild mismatch between the headline result and, well, everything else. Britain is now a multi-party system, and first-past-the-post can’t cope.

Save for later: I have to give credit where it is due. To quickly adjust the DPI of an image as required by publications, I'd suggest convert.town/image-dpi *yes that means you can soon expect more publication news from me

The last ECPR_POVB panel for #ecprgc24 starts at 16:15 with papers by: J. Reichelt Matthew E Bergman Maximilian Etzel Nikandros Ioannidis Chair: L. Zwittlinger, Discussant: @Zringlerova

Teachers strikes in the U.S. increase teacher compensation by 8% and lower pupil-teacher-ratios by .5 students with minimal long-term impact on student achievement (possible short-term effect on math), finds Melissa Arnold Lyon (Mimi) Matthew Steinberg Matthew A. Kraft nber.org/papers/w32862

It's a little banal, but kids do worse in school when it's uncomfortably warm and this effect can be ameliorated with air conditioning. The big trap with education interventions is it's hard to find things that scale, but AC definitely scales. nber.org/papers/w24639

🍻Does alcohol availability influence support for radical right-wing parties? 🍻 In my latest paper, I explore whether a decreasing number of places with alcohol-serving permits affects support for the radical right in Sweden. OA here: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Why cheer for a statistic which is increasing for the US because low productivity workers have dropped out from the labor force?