Kris-Stella Trump

I laughed. But also, completely seriously, can anyone point me to things written on Duverger vs. recent polls out of the UK?

@dpzollinger.bsky.social and I are thrilled "Cleavage Politics in Western Democracies" is out as an SI at @wepsocial.bsky.social!

Its papers explore the foundations of the cleavage pitting new left against radical right parties, and how it compares to the classic cleavages of Lipset & Rokkan:

🧵⬇️

Really excited that after several years of working on it, revising, and getting lots of rejections, our paper (w/ Rune Stubager & Mads Thau) on citizens’ responses to group appeals is *finally* out @ejprjournal.bsky.social

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

A 🧵 on our findings...

This one neat trick can help you teach US politics during an institutional collapse:

Tell the truth.

That's it. Just tell it like it is. Be radical.

You know what's quaint? Walking into a classroom of 20-yr olds, who have known nothing but the Trump era in politics, and explaining to them that ten years ago we Elders had a Big Debate™ about whether Trump support was *really* about racial attitudes.

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win (h/t @miriamposner.com)

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Did the Bright Lines survey (yes absolutely a humblebrag) and the rate at which the questions and scenarios are getting darker with each subsequent survey could be its own research project.

I offer up “Borgen” as a tv series that political scientists appreciate for getting politics right.

Warnings From Weimar Why bargaining with authoritarians fails.

A new piece I wrote appearing in FOREIGN AFFAIRS today

www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/warn...

Rituals of Childhood Back in April, in Ireland, my nephew Luke made his first communion alongside his school classmates. I did much the same thing myself in much the same place about forty years ago. My brother tells me that the preparation nowadays is a little more humane than the version we enjoyed. But there is as much anticipation beforehand, and no less excitement on the day. Luke’s little suit lacked the stylish navy-blue velvet panels mine sported in 1980, but in essence the event was the same in its purpose, its form, and in most of its details. A first communion inducts a child into one of the sacraments of the Church, having them take a step towards adulthood in expectation of the regular re-enactment of the event throughout the rest of their lives.

It is the darkest irony that re-sharing @kjhealy.co's "Rituals of Childhood", which analyzes mass shootings as an institutionalized Killing Day, has itself become an seasonal fall ritual. kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...

if we made immigration work how people think it works that would be the biggest liberalization of immigration in American history

I am preparing to teach the first class of "Introduction to Public Opinion" while also perusing the headlines this morning, and the sense of futility in what I am doing is hard to combat.

Probably my most enduring political belief: you shall not think that some other person or group is fundamentally different from you. This belief is the worst combination of easy to fall into and corrosive in every way.

To mark the beginning of fall term:

This is what I thought too... Liberal Currents already exists?

I think this is right.

For an example of how to call things out in plain terms, here is how Rolling Stone put it recently:

"Trump and his administration’s justification for his D.C. operation [...] appears entirely pretextual."

It can be done.

www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

In "A Gentleman in Moscow" there is a character who is supposedly ethnically Estonian, named Stanislav. I could suspend disbelief for everything up until that point, and after that nothing about the story quite landed.

Genuine question: does anyone know of social science research that explores the potential route from "absence of universal health care" -> "culture of individual responsibility for staying healthy" + "vibrant alternative medicine culture" -> "pseudo-Darwinian rejection of modern medicine"?

I did not anticipate that, by trying to support press that is not afraid to call out the government in plain terms, I would become a paid subscriber to Wired and Rolling Stone. But here we are.

In authoritarian crackdowns, it’s important to randomly ensnare some people whom one would think would be safe, so that everyone is at least a little bit afraid that something could happen to them. The regime scales up its power of intimidation over a much larger group than those directly affected.

Took my family to DC and they were charging $6 for a latte there so you can’t convince me crime isn’t up.

And also! I read enough sci-fi as a kid to enjoy the idea of artificial intelligence. Truly I like the idea of robots! But that intelligence needs to have direct inputs from the world around us, otherwise it cannot be anything like us. This is my hill.

Anyway, I am a political science prof so this opinion is over-determined, but I want more people to take college-level courses on what human beings are actually like, before they set about changing the world.

When you pause to look at how we use language, almost everything is derived from nature. Things a lot of people like are "hot" or "cool". Thoughts "linger". Ideas "burst into" our minds "out of nowhere". We verify math by counting the actual apples, not by predicting the most likely answer.

We are not predictive text machines. We have bodies. Our senses interact with and make sense of the world. Language exists to communicate about the world. AI does not have this. How are you going to teach Helen Keller about the world if she does not have a hand you can hold under running water?

Look, the reason AI hype guys think AI is, or could be, just like human intelligence is not because they don't understand how AI works. It's because they don't understand how humans work. (1/more)

Please share this thread. It is important that political scientists, in Europe and across the world, understand why EPSS exists and why we are encouraging people to attend our inaugural conference, in Belfast next June.

Feels like a good time to share this call for papers. Can't wait for EPSS 2026!

Republican Mike Flood’s comments being drowned out by chants of “tax the rich” at his town hall