🚨 New research paper: *Rulers on the Road*. We map emperors’ itinerant rule in the Holy Roman Empire from 719 to 1519 and shed light on how they projected power without centralized bureaucracies. Very fun project with @claranw.bsky.social @andrejkokkonen.bsky.social & Jørgen Møller shorturl.at/npKQ4

We are looking for a postdoc to join our team 😊✨ perfect for those interested in historical state formation, historical geospatial data, etc. Gothenburg has a great research environment. Get in touch if you have any questions!

🚨JOB ALERT🚨 I'm hiring two postdocs (2-3 years) for a research project on political polarization hosted at @aarhusuni.bsky.social

Application deadline August 15, starting date October 1 or later.

Please help share widely!

polisky #AcademicSky #PhDChat

international.au.dk/about/profil...

Thank you too!! Also for inviting me to join here :) :)

Absolutely :) done!

Thank you! :)

Hence, certain hierarchies and leadership roles may persist as relics of precolonial times across colonial regimes. However, persistent functional governing activity and relevance are more restricted to areas previously under indirect colonial rule. /end

The most pronounced differences in persistence between former French and British colonies are in 1) functional differentiation and 2) the importance of traditional authorities for the everyday lives of group members.

We find a robust link between past and present institutions that is almost exclusively driven by the institutions of ethnic groups in former British colonies.

We match Murdock’s famous “ethnographic atlas” data on precolonial jurisdictional hierarchy with contemporary measures of the political complexity of ethnic groups’ traditional institutions.

Furthermore, we differentiate between two previously conflated dimensions of political complexity: political hierarchy and functional differentiation, arguing that the latter — closely related to actual governing practices — should be more susceptible to the impact of direct rule.

We argue that the reliance on indigenous institutions under (British) indirect rule should have led to some persistence, while (French) direct rule made it harder for precolonial institutions to survive.

Without such evidence on persistence, “institutional persistence” is observationally equivalent to “persistent effects” of precolonial institutions -- historical effects of institutions (e.g., leading to past development) that have persisted independent of the institutions themselves. 2/

Are political institutions persistent? A large literature on the long-term effects of precolonial African institutions assumes as much. But so far, we lacked quantitative evidence for this.

In our new PSRM paper, @carlmc.bsky.social and I investigate this... doi.org/10.1017/psrm...

polisky

Hey @profmusgrave.bsky.social could I please be added to the Polisky list? Thank you so much 🙏🤩