New Working Paper 🚨

I am introducing the new dataset on Parliamentary Elites in Authoritarian Regimes (PEAR). It includes information on the composition of parliaments in 819 legislative terms in 130 autocracies from 1945 - based on over 200k individual-level observations.

tinyurl.com/48h68hmh

📺In China, "Topical Debate Programs" bring officials, experts & citizens together to air concerns.

➡️J Chen, Y Wang, M Zhang & X Zhou show these programs boost trust in local government and deliberation can matter even with controlled agendas www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView

Many thanks, Felix! I hope everything is going well.

Excited for this! If you work on democracy or representation in multilevel Europe, sign up via your MyECPR account! @ecpr.bsky.social

We want to thank the @fwf-at.bsky.social, @erc.europa.eu, and @ecprsgir.bsky.social @ecpr.bsky.social for their support. We thank all paper givers and other participants for their time and effort. We hope that this workshop will leave a mark on all papers presented. Thank you for joining us! 🧵3/4

We had 12 papers, collectively authored by researchers from around 20 universities at different career stages and from across the globe. We were also very fortunate to welcome a stellar group of participants without papers. Clearly, LLMs are on many political scientists’ minds these days. 🧵2/4

Last Friday (Sept. 19), @andduer.bsky.social, @mcortinaescudero.bsky.social, @yavuzmehmet.bsky.social and I had the great pleasure of hosting an excellent workshop at @unisalzburg.bsky.social on how to use Large Language Models #LLMs to boost International Relations research. A short 🧵1/4

New post for POP 📢

𝗣𝗼𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗺: 𝗔𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 is a great resource for teaching and learning 🔥

It was a pleasure to publish this article written by the editors of this amazing project @robert-a-huber.bsky.social & @cerpintaxt.bsky.social  

us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/po...

In light of recent crackdowns against the opposition in Turkey, I hope these findings will be informative not only to social scientists but also to democrats in Turkey and around the world.

With this study, I show that crises change how and to what extent authoritarian regimes use ideological legitimation claims to justify their rule, challenging static understandings of ideology in much of the literature.

✔️ In the short run, authoritarian regimes increase their use of ideological legitimation claims after a crisis.
✔️ In the long run, they deploy ideological claims more strategically against regime outsiders—such as opposition parties—to demonize them.

Using the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey for causal identification, I analyze a novel dataset of Erdoğan’s speeches (2014–2022) with topic models, dictionaries, and word embeddings, combined with interrupted time-series analysis. The findings show:

Excited to announce the publication of my article in Comparative Political Studies on how crises shape the ideological legitimation strategies of authoritarian regimes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....