Melina Platas

Andy Harris, Peter van der Windt and I are hiring a research assistant, based in Abu Dhabi, for 2025-26. Please feel free to share/circulate with BA or MA students who may be interested. Advanced R/Stata + writing skills required. Happy to answer questions by email
apply.interfolio.com/164730

Were you teaching or taking the core graduate course/field seminar in comparative politics in (or around) year 2000? If so, @melinaplatas.bsky.social and I are collecting syllabi from the top 15 US departments that year. Please send what you have! Email golden@ucla.edu or paloma.abrilponcela@eui.eu

Did anyone download the historical data before the site went down? I have it for Kampala, Uganda, from the start of data collection in 2017 through Jan 2025 in case anyone needs it. Would be great to have it for other cities. This is such an own goal.

I feel Reich, Sahami, and Weinstein's book, System Error, came out ahead of its time; we missed the warning or didn't take it seriously enough. It was already obvious the Silicon Valley mindsets and models were shaping governance for the worse, now we are scrambling to catch up systemerrorbook.com

There is so much in this poll to note. Among them, that Trump voters perceive (or more accurately, report) greater discrimination against White people than against LGBT or Black people, and more discrimination against Christians than those + Muslims d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ec...

120 million people are displaced worldwide. Advocates try to promote refugee inclusion by providing information that corrects common misperceptions, and by sharing refugee narratives that try to generate empathy; do these work?

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The DHS program (dhsprogram.com), funded/managed by USAID, is not accepting new access requests. This data source has been instrumental in research on health and education around the world. It would be a travesty if these household surveys were canceled or existing data removed. See message below:

Laughable if not so offensive. If you really want to know, you'll find "The act repeals the apartheid-era Expropriation Act 63 of 1975, and aims to align expropriation law with the constitution." Perfect? No. South Africa's business? 100%. Ours? Not at all. theconversation.com/land-seizure...

Very excited about this project and also keen to hear about the process of producing it! I have aspirations to do something adjacent.... we need more documentation of just about everything. But especially interviews with those who were there while they are still here.

There were echo chambers before, but at least we were in the same house. This platform seems more conducive to meaningful discussions than Twitter at present, but I do wonder what is lost when there is no chance of encountering those whom we can't make sense of. I guess we will find out.

One day not too long from now it will seem terribly quaint that all of humanity (hyperbole, obviously, but a large chunk of the population in many if not most countries) was on a single social media platform called Facebook. I'm not sure what it means that the space is fracturing.