Aditya Dasgupta

The dominant framework that political scientists have to think about parties is Downsian competition — parties just fluidly adjust to what the electorate demands. In fact, parties are more like clubs, and insiders are more than happy to sink the whole ship if it means they enjoy rents for a while..

A great review essay from Avinash Dixit on why government should not / cannot be run like a business: www.edegan.com/pdfs/Dixit%2...

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

Columbia Expels, Suspends Student Protesters The move comes during reports that the institution is nearing a deal with the Trump administration to restore hundreds of millions in federal funding.

An incredible embarrassment for an educational institution: www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Re-reading this classic, its central thesis — bureaucracies gain autonomy from politicians on the basis of their popularity/reputation — does not seem to hold up very well in the current era. Agencies with stellar reputations (Post Office, NASA, NIH, etc) have been carved up just the same?

I pledge that I will not provide any service to Columbia University. I will not speak at conferences held at or organized by Columbia. I will not publish with Columbia publications or provide peer reviews for them. I will not provide outside tenure evaluations for Columbia departments. I will not contribute in any way to the institution until everyone who is responsible for this week’s shameful decision has resigned, retired, or been fired, and until Columbia repudiates their catastrophic choice.

I wonder if the Columbia leadership realizes (or cares) how much blowback there might be from *within* the academy.

This post, from a Cornell Law professor, is worth reading:

3d.laboratorium.net/2025-07-25-c...

Gaza has reached IPC Phase 5, which is the worst level of food insecurity & is associated with high amounts of death & permanent disability. For people experiencing this level of malnutrition, even if it ended today, many of the consequences (eg personal outcomes like disabilities) are irreversible.

A really great paper on market power providing evidence that competition between agricultural middle-men results in better prices for farmers. The setting is rural India, but the principle is of course generally relevant: pages.jh.edu/schatt20/pap...

Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." -- a saying surprisingly universal in its relevance to things that organizations/governments do

On Data and Democracy (Mid-Year Roundup): Charting the Assault on American Democracy and A Path Forward A narrative of a democracy in the balance, told through 29 data visualizations.

Been a busy year in the data mines.📊 Just published my mid-year roundup: 29 data visualizations on the state of US democracy, tracking everything from judicial resistance to billionaire influence to why Dems have a mobilization crisis, not a moderation problem.

All charts free to use:

Interesting (also methodologically)

I'd like to believe this. But based on how I've seen markets react to catastrophic institutional erosion recently, I'm not convinced that firing the Fed Chair wouldn't just produce a bit of short term volatility in the stock market before returning to normal/rising ever higher...

I’m persuaded — loop magnified by researchers who churn out papers and throw them at the wall and see what sticks, benefitting from errors in the screening process. the “volume” model is effective but creates a huge negative externality for the field , but it self replicates because of its success

Survey invitations often describe the topic of the survey. A simple, classic example of how this biases results: survey recruitment materials about bird watching led to higher estimates of the % of people who engage in bird-watching. doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

if Kafka's "The Trial" were written today, it would take the form of mandatory corporate trainings 😤

A recent paper for reference: www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

interesting claim that political centralization (in ancient Egypt) wasn’t driven by centralized irrigation as often thought by social scientists (Wittfogel hypothesis also revived by recent empirical work). I do think we lean toward ecological determinism because it makes for clean identification..

Important — I’ve observed that some of the other event study/ pre trend analogs in the new DiD packaged can also prove a little tricky to interpret see e.g. economics.stackexchange.com/questions/54...

no I have not — will check it out!

Looks cool, especially the “and change” part in addition to the usual persistence storyline…

it was in fact the cavaliers who had hats a bit like this..! could also be some kind of puritan hat tho not sure what the dangly things are (a satirical representation of hair?)

Been doing some archival research on the English civil war — amusing to come across what looks like a bored secretary’s doodle from 1645? From the order book of the “committee on plundered ministers” (which evicted ministers suspected of royalist sympathies) so may be some kind of religious hat…

Motivated by thinking a bit recently on whether political scientists really need a regression in every paper (I think we need many fewer)

The Higgs Discovery Did Not Take Place Some noncontroversial blogging during midterm break

Two interesting posts on statistic al testingand what counts as a discovery in physics to read side by side: i) www.argmin.net/p/the-higgs-...; ii) theoryandpractice.org/2024/10/Yes,...

only when using rnorm() 😅

I get what you’re saying — but it’s a bit hilarious to imagine that the referenced research is inconvenient for environmentalism / has political implications in favor of coral reef destruction..😅

Indeed— and sometimes you need a convenient heuristic measure..!

Congrats!

I would like to imagine there is room for actual leadership/political imagination here to do something different though. Maybe an enterprising university president can provide an example…. But it remains to be seen…

That makes sense as a framework to understand it. There may just be too many constituents/audiences for presidents to do anything but react conservatively rather than plan/coordinate proactively