Finland: where attempts at vote buying in come wrapped in blue foil. Stokes was right — but forgot to model the chocolate elasticity of voter compliance.

@sebastianraphael.bsky.social's work "From One-Party Rule to the Presidential-Military Complex: Evidence from Five Mexican Presidencies", examines the relationship between presidential goals and military mandates in Mexico, with excellent comments from Prof. Timothy Power.

Julia Lodoen's paper "In Democracy’s Shadows: How Institutions Created under Democratic Regimes Strengthen Authoritarian Repression" stimulated conversation on institutions of violent repression in Uruguay and Argentina before authoritarianism, with superb comments by Laurence Whitehead.

Luis Soto shared his original findings, "Neither Meritocracy nor Kinship for Enhanced Court Performance? The anti-nepotism reforms’ effects on the Mexican Judiciary". With
@javierpsandoval.bsky.social's great comments we discussed the inference approach and the state of judicial reform in MX.

@pablopizarro.bsky.social shared his paper "Gender, Leadership, and Experience in Prosecutorial Decisions: Evidence from Chile", with exciting results on the decisions of female prosecutors in Chile. Excellent comments from Prof. Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos stimulated conversation on theory.

With excellent comments from Professor Leigh Payne, the participants discussed the estranged citizenship that returnees and deportees may experience after returning from the United States to Mexico.

Fantastic first day at the Rising Scholars Workshop on Comparative Politics in Latin America! Our first paper was "Mobilizing in exile: Moving beyond reintegration and towards dignified return with evidence from Mexico", by Guadalupe Chavez, PhD Candidate at Oxford.

Call for abstracts by 31 Jan: Rising Scholars Workshop on Comparative Politics in Latin America at Nuffield College, Oxford on March 10-11! 2-day event for early career scholars to workshop their papers with senior discussants. Seeking abstracts on a wide range of CP topics. Please share widely.

Man gets his shoes shined on the way home from the market. Centro, Cuahtémoc, CDMX.

National Guard gets his boots shined in Belén de las Flores, Álvaro Obregón, CDMX.

Did ontological individualism emerge from a climate of McCarthyism and a need to escape "ideology"? Another great example of how ideas are shaped by the context of their origins in time. Squirm-worthy hypothesis for rational choice theorists and economists?

...and the award for most beautiful figures goes to...
Tsebelis (1995).

I stopped reading and let the geometric hypnosis set in.