Jonathan S Doucette

Robustness is better assessed with a few thoughtful models than with billions of regressions | PNAS Robustness is better assessed with a few thoughtful models than with billions of regressions

Great piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

HPE candidates on the job market Job market season is here.

Looking for rising stars in Historical Political Economy? 🌍📚
Check out this year’s job market candidates: www.broadstreet.blog/p/hpe-candid...

Sometimes individual leaders can leave an imprint that persists long after their tenure. In a new paper with Jørgen Møller, we show how Pope Gregory VII used his network to spread urban political autonomy across Europe www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...

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The article was greatly inspired by @essobecker.bsky.social r.bsky.social Yuan Hsiao, Steven Pfaff and @jaredcrubin.com's article on Luther journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

We use Gregory's letters to capture his influence network. Next, we demonstrate that letter-receiving towns introduced self-government earlier and to a larger extent than towns outside of Gregory's network

We argue that Gregory, as part of his papal revolution, built alliances with pious townsmen across Italy, Germany, France and the Low Countries to push his reform program. To impose reforms on unreformed lord-bishops, townsmen had to take political power and institute self-government.

Sometimes individual leaders can leave an imprint that persists long after their tenure. In a new paper with Jørgen Møller, we show how Pope Gregory VII used his network to spread urban political autonomy across Europe www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...

A must read, especially for anyone who thinks that making little concessions and keeping your head down will work:

The same is true for most cross-national studies www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

If you need to escape from current politics for a while, my co-author, Jørgen Møller, discusses our book "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, 1000-1500" on the New Books podcast: newbooksnetwork.com/the-catholic...

There have been a number of recent articles on statistical power in quantitative political science. This is something that I think deserves more attention and discussion. A short thread of the articles I have read. 🧵

🚨🚨 Accepted yesterday! 🚨🚨

@lenkabustikova.bsky.social and I introduce the concept of "Confessional Illiberalism" and distinguish it from two other forms of illiberalism, reactionary and prejudicial illiberalism.

We also compare the concept to other '-isms' to tidy the backsliding literature.

The family became afflicted with the disease of dynasties: inheritance by babies and buffoon, or both
That would normally be the death nail for a noble House, but not this time. The Estates of Württemberg stepped in to protect the state, deposed buffoons and ruledon behalf of the babies. (2/3)

Thrilled that my article has just been published at @apsrjournal.bsky.social! 🎉 The article argues that low statistical power is a major impediment to acquiring cumulative knowledge on questions concerning cross-national differences: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Measuring electoral democracy with observables Most cross-national indices of democracy rely centrally on coder judgments, which are susceptible to bias and error, and require expensive and time consuming coding by experts. We present an approach to measurement based on observables that aim to preserve the nuanced quality of subjectively coded democracy indices. Our observable-to-subjective score mapping is free of idiosyncratic coder errors arising from misinformation, slack, or biases. It is less susceptible to systematic bias that may arise from coders’ inferences about a country’s regime, for example, from the ideology of the ruler. The data collection procedure and mode of analysis are fully transparent and replicable, and the procedure is based on random forests and is cheap to produce, easy to update, and offers coverage for all polities with sovereign or semisovereign status, surpassing the sample of any existing index. We show that this expansive coverage makes a big difference to our understanding of some causal questions.

A few years ago, @danweitzel.net, John Gerring, @skaaning.bsky.social and I were curious how well one could predict subjective democracy measures using easy(ish) to code observables. Turns out, *quite* well, even out of sample. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Opinion | My Father Founded Singapore. He Would Be Troubled by What It’s Become. (Gift Article) The nation’s current leaders are not living up to my father’s high standards of governance, and Singapore is suffering as a result.

Power corrupts. It’s time for Singapore to become a democracy.

Itineraries of 25 Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, 919 to 1519

Itinerant rule, rule exercised through traveling, was a common, yet insufficiently researched pre-modern form of governance. Studying the determinants of ruler itineraries in the Holy Roman Empire AD 919-1519, we argue that rulers focused on monitoring `marginal' elites. Powerful rulers could count on family members and thus targeted unrelated local elites. Weak emperors had to monitor their less loyal relatives and left unrelated nobles unvisited. We reconstruct emperors' itineraries from 72'665 dated and geolocated documents and measure territorial control by their relatives. Exploiting the weakening of imperial power through the Great Interregnum (1250-1273), we find that strong, pre-1250 emperors frequented areas controlled by their relatives relatively less. In contrast, family control increased visits post-1273. Causal identification rests on the discontinuous reduction of emperors' power through the Great Interregnum and differences in family relations between subsequent emperors. The results show strategic itinerant rule as an important but understudied form of governance.

🚨 Very excited that our paper on *Rulers on the Road* has been cond. accepted at the AJPS @ajpseditor.bsky.social. We analyze emperors' strategies of itinerant rule in the Holy Roman Empire 919-1519. Fun working with @claranw.bsky.social, @andrejkokkonen.bsky.social & Jørgen Møller shorturl.at/Spm7z

That might be more of a feature of city-states (in a relative stateless environment) than democracy per say. Warfare was also frequent in medieval communes (see, e.g., Epstein 2000 "The rise and fall of Italien city-states")

Herbert P. Kitschelt is the winner of the 2025 Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. 🏆

He is awarded the prize for " having increased knowledge of the functioning of democratic party systems with exquisite theoretical acuity and impressive empirical breadth and depth."

Hvordan kunne valgresultatet fra norske kommunevalg bare forsvinne? Her er den utrolige historien.

Les om den utrolige historien om hvordan vi har klart å rekonstruere de tapte norske kommunevalgene før 1937 www.forskning.no/politikk-sta...

Stort tillykke!

Dont know that current events aren't similarly negative with regards to democracy

Based on similar "laws", no democratic breakdown can happen after 60 years of competitive elections or at the level of economic development attained by the US..

How do challenger parties—those without prior governing experience—gain access to executive power? In our paper out now in @thejop.bsky.social, @mvinaes.bsky.social, @jacobnyrup.bsky.social, and I explore whether simply holding legislative office helps them join government. Brief 🧵👇
1/10

Cool paper!

Here's @adamprz.bsky.social, telling it like it is... I could not agree more.

Still baffled that the majority of voters in one of the world's oldest and richest democracies voted for an autocrat and likely economic decline

Still baffled that the majority of voters in one of the world's oldest and richest democracies voted for an autocrat and likely economic decline

This is one (of many) interesting paper on religiosity and support for the Nazy Party (By @essobecker.bsky.social and Hans-Joachim Voth): cepr.org/publications...

I also wonder whether a non-exceptionel factor is relatively weak parties in the US? Or perhaps it is simply presidentialism?