Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Abby Wood

Jens Wäckerle @jwaeckerle.bsky.social · 8h

New data for legislative scholars! Committee Membership Dataset with @bcastanho.bsky.social, @dmpullan.bsky.social and Firuze Taner:

Committee assignments for all MPs (Wikidata IDs!) in 14 countries
Harmonized roles/policy areas

Data: doi.org/10.7802/2940
Working paper: tinyurl.com/vf54r78p

⬇️

GESIS-Suche

doi.org

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 1d

Possible link to use of state force and money in politics here. These data are likely gettable — foreclosure notices and ICE raid locations from a combo of public records requests, court records, news stories. Money in politics data from OpenSecrets. Have at it, grad students/postdocs.

flipinidaho @flipinidaho.bsky.social · 1d

southsideweekly.com/federal-agen...

The building is in a 27 million dollar foreclosure filed by Wells Fargo. The next day, Wells Fargo filed an emergency motion for receivership. The fascist regime kindly emptied the building for donor Wells Fargo.

Federal Agents Storm South Shore Building, Detaining Families and Children

Families were woken by flashbangs and helicopters as hundreds of federal agents raided their homes. Days later, neighbors are still searching for the missing.

southsideweekly.com

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Rachel Porter @rachelporter.bsky.social · 1d

These postdoctoral positions are made possible by an incredible $55 million gift from Francis & Kathleen Rooney to support Notre Dame’s new institute focused on democracy research and education

🔗 al.nd.edu/news/latest-...

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Joey Fishkin @fishkin.bsky.social · 3d

I thought I'd put the administration's proposed "compact" with universities in context, so I wrote the blog post below.

It's especially for journalists covering this story!

Many details about how the compact itself works and why the administration has retreated to this strategy.

Balkinization: The Art of Replacing the Law with the Deal

A group blog on constitutional law, theory, and politics

balkin.blogspot.com

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Alex Garlick @garlicksauce.bsky.social · 7d

For public policy scholars: JPIPE published our article that uses machine learning to code the universe of congressional and state legislative data since 2009 by the Comparative Agenda Project policy codes. That's 1.68 million bills. OPEN-ACCESS here: www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 5d

Oh, you were feeling bad for him on a whole different level than I thought you were!

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 5d

I looked him up yesterday. I think he could be sincere.

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 5d

Right. The fractured regulatory space and the fact that they’d need dozens of agency adjudications per university — with all the appeals! — to accomplish this stuff is why they offered the compact. They need universities to help them centralize process under DOJ.

(I think, anyway.)

Joey Fishkin @fishkin.bsky.social · 5d

It is not so easy for the government to just revoke the 501(c)(3) status of a university, or to block student loans from going to the school, etc., for arbitrary and 1st Amendment-violating reasons.

But what if there's a "compact" that explicitly says, we the university agree you can do this to us?

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 6d

For anyone else who has been trying to find the actual language of the so-called “compact,” here it is.

www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/u...

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Kathleen Searles @kesearles.bsky.social · 7d

that is always a silver lining, i cant wait to hear more! (& for folks reading the replies that need help or have colleagues that need help > expertvoicestogether.org for person-to-person crisis support and researchersupport.org for resources geared towards institutions)

Learn more about Expert Voices Together (EVT) and our approach to customized support.

expertvoicestogether.org

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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 12d

New: After a long wait, the GRFP solicitation is live! Deadlines have been extended to early November, so applicants have a bit over a month to submit. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

www.nsf.gov

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 13d

Me, tomorrow:

Mirya R. Holman @mirya.bsky.social · 13d

I guess this rapture thing isn't happening so I did one of my overdue reviews

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 17d

When this broke, I was coming back from a conference where I presented a paper on the public harms from gov’t ethics violations. Bribery is pretty harmful, it seems!

I haven’t studied the public harms from dropped ethics investigations yet. 🫠

Dave Itzkoff @ditzkoff.bsky.social · 17d

it was literally in a bag

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/u...

Tom Homan, who was later named President Trump’s border czar, was recorded in September 2024 accepting a bag with $50,000 in cash in an undercover F.B.I. investigation, according to people familiar with the case, which was later shut down by Trump administration officials.

The cash payment, which was made inside a bag from the food chain Cava, grew out of a long-running counterintelligence investigation that had not been targeting Mr. Homan, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the case.

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 17d

TIL that you and Pam Herd are not just coauthors but spouses!

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Heidi Kitrosser @heidikitrosser.bsky.social · 20d

Nothing is more central to a free society than the right to criticize one’s government. Nothing.

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 21d

TIL that we have an amusement park law prof!

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 21d

So relatable.

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State Democracy Research Initiative @uwlawdemocracy.bsky.social · Sep 4

Join us for the next installment in our Election Matters panel series on "Money, Politics, and the First Amendment." This event will explore the impacts of increasingly expensive elections and the tension between campaign finance regulation and free speech. Register here: go.wisc.edu/190re6

Election Matters 2025 Flyer - Money, Politics and the First Amendment
Friday, October 3, 3-4:15 pm in room 2260 of the UW Law School
Live Stream Option Available
featuring Barry Burden, Benjamin Ginsberg, Saurav Ghosh, Raymond La Raja, and Abby Wood
register and learn more at go.wisc.edu/190re6

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Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 28d

Do your mental health a favor and turn this on for today. You really don't want to watch this. It is awful.

southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 28d

settings > content & media > autoplay video & gifs = off

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 28d

Hey, you’re too busy to see this, and I’m not there in person to tell you, but I think you are terrific and am relieved and grateful to have you in a staff role for APSA. I hope the meeting goes well and that you get time with friends, new and old, between all the tasks.

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · 28d

A dear friend’s awesome kid is one of these finalists. So I just spent a delightful morning listening to what kids in America are thinking and talking about. I am so proud of all of them and glad I got to listen in on their lives.

NPR @npr.org · 29d

For the 2025 NPR Student Podcast Challenge, we've listened to nearly 2,000 entries from around the U.S., and narrowed them down to 11 middle school and 10 high school finalists.

Here they are: The best student podcasts in America

For the 2025 NPR Student Podcast Challenge, we've listened to nearly 2,000 entries from around the U.S., and narrowed them down to 11 middle school and 10 high school finalists.

n.pr

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Abby Wood @yesthatabbywood.bsky.social · Sep 4

Ooooh thanks for circulating.

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Erica Chenoweth @chenoweth.bsky.social · Aug 13

Here is the chart showing the growth of reported protest over time, 2025 vs. 2017, referenced in the piece below.

Line chart showing a steep blue line indicating the growth of the number of protests in 2015 over time, compared with a green line showing a more modest growth of the number of protests in 2017.

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Erica Chenoweth @chenoweth.bsky.social · Aug 13

My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Soha Hammam, & Chris Shay) has finalized our participation estimates for No Kings Day on 6/14. Here are five key takeaways🧵:

New data shows No Kings was one of the largest days of protest in US history

The historic number of No Kings protesters and their expansive geographic spread are signs of a growing and durable pro-democracy movement.

wagingnonviolence.org

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