Daniel Tavana

papers for panel

OK Sunday 8 am is not the best panel time. I get it.

BUT tomorrow I'm presenting idealstan alongside 3 other banger papers on ideal points & measurement modeling.

You want to know the latest & greatest in quantitative measurement, this is it.

West 120 @ 8 am 🫡

#apsa2025

It was my great pleasure to celebrate @natalie-letsa.bsky.social's "The Autocratic Voter: Partisanship and Political Socialization under Dictatorship" today at @apsa.bsky.social. Buy, read, and cite this incredibly important book!

www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

For those in Vancouver, the Democracy and Autocracy Section will be holding our business meeting tomorrow (9/11) from 6:30-7:30pm at the Convention Center (West) Room 115. Our reception will be right after from 7:30-9:30pm at Steamworks Brewpub (375 Water Street). Come join us!

The Department of Political Science at Penn State is hiring in CP/IR, for a position focused on non-democratic politics. Link to apply: psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/PSU_Ac...

Vicente Valentim, Elias Dinas, & I came together to do this paper because we have all long shared an intution: mainstream center-right rhetoric shapes democratic norms. The hard part? Showing it empirically. We make some headway in this new paper. Grateful to @bjpols.bsky.social for publishing.

I really want to believe that American public opinion still matters. It makes me feel better that most Americans don’t support these policies. But other non-democracies demonstrate that once institutions have been politically weaponized, public opinion matters significantly less.

"Political brokers use social networks to identify & target reciprocal non-copartisans for vote buying. Parties recruit brokers central in networks to sway persuadable voters."

From @rduartegonzalez.bsky.social, Finan, @hlarreguy.bsky.social and Schechter:

www.restud.com/brokering-vo...

#Econsky

I had the fortune to help organize, speak at, and participate in, the second Open Scholarship Bootcamp at Penn State. The sessions emphasize resources that are helpful to maintaining open scientific workflows. Materials are openly available here! penn-state-open-science.github.io/bootcamp-202...

Apply to EuroWEPS 12/13! We're organizing the next EuroWEPS workshops at Bocconi (Nov 14) and EUI (Dec 15) to discuss designs/papers focusing on causal inference. No presentations, just constructive discussions. Early career scholars are especially welcome to apply! Submission deadline is Sep 30

MENA APSA MENA Workshops

Call for applications now open! @apsamena.bsky.social Methods Workshop on Engaged Research in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) web.apsanet.org/mena/

New preprint with @cmparreira.bsky.social and Lindsay Walsh posted to @socarxiv.bsky.social: "From Protest to Parliament: Lebanon’s October Revolution and the Rise of Movement Parties." Link: osf.io/preprints/so...

Second, the dynamics we analyze provide an important alternative to existing supply-side explanations of movement party success. Existing work focuses on movement parties themselves. But our framework sheds light on the extent to which voters respond to movement parties.

Our findings contribute to key debates in the social sciences. First, we show that protest movements can impact electoral outcomes. Failed uprisings can have a substantial and impactful afterlife - even in a context where governing parties are entrenched and rule collusively.

What drives this finding? Where governing parties were weaker and less present - which we proxy with turnout in the 2009 legislative election - the effect of exposure to protest on support for opposition-aligned lists was substantially higher.

We find that the uprising resulted in a 1.9 percentage point increase in support for the opposition - a 17% increase. We rule out the possibility that the effects were driven by district-specific dynamics, pre-uprising differences, and other confounders.

We combine these data with locality-level election results from the 2018 and 2022 legislative elections in Lebanon. We use a difference-in-differences design to analyze the effects of the Revolution on support for movement parties.

Our data comes from a unique event dataset - collected by CeSSRA - that documents the precise location of all protest events that took place during the uprising. Since 2017, CeSSRA has monitored and documented protest events in each locality throughout the country.

The October Revolution began on October 17, 2019, soon after the government announced a decision to implement a series of taxes on gasoline, tobacco, and VoIP calls on messaging applications like WhatsApp. The same day, protests erupted throughout the country.

We focus on the “party-movement nexus” in Lebanon, where an oversized governing coalition consisting of several parties has governed collusively since 2005. We examine the consequences of protest outcomes in the aftermath of the 2019 “October Revolution.”

Recently, movement parties have upended support for traditional parties and contributed to forms of electoral instability in many cases. Movement parties combine growing dissatisfaction with traditional parties and anti-systemic protest - in both democracies and autocracies.

New preprint with @cmparreira.bsky.social and Lindsay Walsh posted to @socarxiv.bsky.social: "From Protest to Parliament: Lebanon’s October Revolution and the Rise of Movement Parties." Link: osf.io/preprints/so...

BJPolS abstract discussing how authoritarian regimes use legislative institutions to cope with economic and policy challenges, using the example of Kuwait's National Assembly and collaborative policy mechanisms.

From May 2025 -

Legislative Cooptation in Authoritarian Regimes: Policy Cooperation in the Kuwait National Assembly - cup.org/4iVKa4R

- @danieltavana.bsky.social & Erin York

#OpenAccess

Who Rallies Round the Flag? The Impact of the US Sanctions on Iranians’ Attitude toward the Government Abstract. While politicians often argue that economic sanctions can induce policy changes in targeted states by undermining elite and public support for th

If you’re curious the assassination of the IRGC commanders creates a rally around the flag. I suggest reading my recent coauthored article. #IRGC is not a liked in #Iran due to its participation in repression of oppositions. Some of Iranians actually celebrating it.

academic.oup.com/fpa/article/...

A scary development in world politics is that dictators tend to stick around for longer

Last month, Lebanon held its first local elections since 2016. Over the past nine years, the country has experienced a series of upheavals and crises - yet the most remarkable feature of these elections was (mostly) how much they resembled previous ones. Some key takeaways /1

The DOGE Purge: Empirical Evidence of Politically Motivated Firings And what it means for American Democracy

OPM memo: Fed job applicants must now pledge in writing to implement Trump's political agenda.

The final step in the Authoritarian playbook on the civil service:

✅ Purges disguised as "efficiency"
✅ Gut oversight agencies
✅ Weaken regulatory enforcement
➡️ Replace experts with loyalists ← UNDERWAY

*DEADLINE TOMORROW!* ⚠️

Research Assistant Position with Malik and Marble Prof. Mashail Malik (Harvard) and Dr. William Marble (Stanford) are searching for a part-time research assistant (RA) primarily for a project on the political integration of immigrants in the United S...

Please circulate!
@wpmarble
and I are looking for a part-time RA to help with various data tasks. This is a remote-work position that is ideal for recent graduates who are considering applying for a social science PhD. Apply here: forms.gle/EN3JLUiNm8m4...

New Article from our latest issue (Issue 7, 2025): "Mobilization Capacity and Violence Against Local Leaders: Anticlerical Violence During the Spanish Civil War" by Paloma Aguilar, @fdelacuesta.bsky.social, Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, and @franvillamil.bsky.social

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

In our new article, we show that groups that claim credit for attacks have shorter lifespans. Not because of government crackdowns, but likely from internal breakdowns.

These findings raise questions about how state threats shape terrorist behavior and whether the logic of deterrence really holds.