Jonas W. Schmid

Four three-year postdoctoral positions in the project Slow-Motion Democracy - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at Department of Political Science, Aarhus University

Four (!) three-year postdoc positions available at @au.dk: international.au.dk/about/profil...

Join an incredible team & help understand the psychological & political implications of the clash between high-speed society & slow-speed democracy.

Please share! @tboeggild.bsky.social can help with Qs

YouTube video by This account has been terminated who is america dick cheney deleted scene

In memoriam: youtu.be/KJ1LJvOxo6Q

China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show Sheffield Hallam University apologises to Professor Laura Murphy for restricting her academic freedom.

This is as bleak as it gets:

‘China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show’ www.bbc.com/news/article...

something under discussed is the fact that white house renovations are currently being spearheaded by someone with famously bad interior design taste

The U.S. government right now really hitting that sweet spot of blatant corruption of 1990s Central Asia, the weirdo personality cult of Gaddafi, the bad plastic surgery of Berlusconi’s Italy, the religious zeal of the Taliban, and the thuggish brutality of a right-wing Cold War dictatorship.

Now that's a Hecker of a design!

Paths to Power (PtP) is out in @bjpols.bsky.social! It is a database with data on cabinet members' social profile globally from 1966-2021.

This is a great team effort with @chknutsen.bsky.social, @peterla.bsky.social, @inalkristiansen.bsky.social. But many more helped us along the way 🙏

A short 🧵

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

In 1916 the BMJ published an article about the work done by James Shearer, an American physician working in the British Army as a sergeant (because he had no British qualification). He had described a "delineator" which was better than x rays for portraying gunshot wounds. This caused a sensation and a lot of interest — but on investigation the work was found to have been invented. The BMJ published a retraction, but Shearer was tried by court martial and sentenced to death by firing squad.

Next time an institution tells you how seriously it takes research misconduct, ask them if it's *this* seriously. www.bmj.com/content/297/...

Despite the grim topic, this is a very good paper: monuments that signal white supremacy can substitute performative violence and thus reduce it.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Excellent work from my SU colleague Einar Bäckström on the temporal dynamics of the winner loser gap in democracy satisfaction using a regression discontinuity in time design across 21 European countries.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Very possibly no political official in history has made so much corrupt money at a pace like this. Mobutu and Marcos looted a greater share of their countries’ wealth over decades but in absolute terms and in speed, Trump shamelessly puts them to shame.

Most impactful murder since Cain killed Abel.

Man, I can't believe the guy who inspired this event 4.5 years ago is declaring war on large swathes of his fellow Americans. I mean, who could have ever guessed it would come to this?

It's easy to see this speech as just weirdly performative, but there's a lot more—and a lot worse—going on here.

The meeting & speeches are part of a larger project aimed at promoting the military leadership’s partisan alignment with the administration.

How? 1/

So many echoes from this article for US politics....

🚀 StanDat Database Update & Move!

The database has moved and been upgraded:

solveig.shinyapps.io/standat/

I don't agree with this because I think the wannabe god king being seen to try and fail matters.

Yesterday I posted about how I used comet browser to take a Qualtrics survey almost undetected. Last night, I ran a pilot (N=400) on @joinprolific.bsky.social . I found that almost 10% of "respondents" identified as AI when directly asked.

Dass die AfD nicht wegen ihrer politischen Forderungen gewählt wird, ist ein gefährlich bequemer Selbstbetrug der demokratischen Mitte.

(Quelle: aktuelles ZDF-Politbarometer)

at one point Albania was on the brink of civil war after the collapse of pyramid schemes that had sucked up roughly half of GDP, and now that is only the *second* stupidest thing the country has done.

The key problem with what Ezra Klein says here is that he fails – or is unwilling – to grapple with the fundamental reality of the political conflict: The movement that dominates today’s Right fully rejects the very idea of “living here with each other” as equals. That’s their defining position.

Paying respects to Charlie Kirk by going on podcasts and saying that Charlie Kirk wouldn't have died if he hadn't had fentanyl in his system

@pward89.bsky.social and I were delighted to win the Best Article Award from APSA’s Democracy and Autocracy section for our @worldpolitics.bsky.social article “Elite Management Before Autocratic Leader Succession: Evidence from North Korea.” muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

Are LLM Agents Behaviorally Coherent? Latent Profiles for Social Simulation The impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have fueled the notion that synthetic agents can serve as substitutes for real participants in human-subject research. In an effort to evalu...

Paper alert 📣

Rapid advances in AI has some believe that LLM agents can replace real participants in human-subject research. If true, this would be huge!

Following a growing body of research, we delve deeper into this topic and examine the merits of this claim.

🧵...

arxiv.org/abs/2509.03736

NOW OUT ON FIRSTVIEW!!

#Blame #Shifting in #Autocracies following Large-Scale Disasters: Evidence from #Turkey

By @edwardgoldring.bsky.social, @jonaswschmid.bsky.social & Fulya Apaydin

doi.org/10.1017/S153...

Great to finally see this published! Check out "Blame Shifting in Autocracies following Large-Scale Disasters: Evidence from Turkey", now open-access in Perspectives on Politics: cup.org/4ggTyAv

Or read this brief thread for a summary: bsky.app/profile/jona...

Very happy to see this one finally out. Check our thread for a brief summary of the article: bsky.app/profile/jona...

Image of a smoky industrial landscape with the text "Perspectives on Politics" and the hashtag "OpenAccess" overlaid on a blue banner.

#OpenAccess from @poppublicsphere.bsky.social -

Blame Shifting in Autocracies following Large-Scale Disasters: Evidence from Turkey - cup.org/4ggTyAv

- @edwardgoldring.bsky.social, Jonas Willibald Schmid & Fulya Apaydin

#FirstView