Solveig Bjørkholt

Disputation Solveig Bjørkholt - Institutt for statsvitenskap (ISV) Master in Political Science Solveig Bjørkholt will be defending her dissertation at the Department of Political Science: The Politics of International Standardization

On November 7, 2025, Solveig Bjørkholt @sunny369.bsky.social will defend her PhD thesis “The Politics of International Standardization”. The defense is open to anyone interested. For time and place, see 👇
www.sv.uio.no/isv/forsknin...

What’s new:

1️⃣ Extended time series

🔹 Standards → previously up to 2023, now extended until 2025

🔹 TC-membership → previously up to 2023, now extended until 2025

🔹 Certifications → previously up to 2020, now extended until 2023

2️⃣ Integration with ISO Open Data

Standards: merged with ISO Deliverables Metadata, expanded coverage (70,861 → 78,312), new Versions dataset, improved _iso variables.

Historical: TC creation dataset fully rebuilt from ISO Technical Committees Metadata, new variables and improved quality.

📊 Insights:

China still leads in P-memberships, widening the gap to Germany

Azerbaijan shows the fastest growth: 18× more P-memberships since 2020

Some TCs grew spectacularly: JTC 1/SC 42 (AI) from 14 → 46 P-members, TC 331 (Biodiversity) from 11 → 44

🚀 StanDat Database Update & Move!

The database has moved and been upgraded:

solveig.shinyapps.io/standat/

The title page of a paper listing the title: "Blame Shifting in Autocracies Following Large-scale Disasters: Evidence from Turkey"; the authors: Edward Goldring, Jonas Willibald Schmid, and Fulya Apaydin; and the abstract: "Large-scale disasters, particularly when handled poorly, often spark popular outrage and threaten an autocrat’s hold on power. Autocrats frequently employ blame shifting strategies to redirect public anger and weather these storms. We examine whether blame shifting after a large-scale disaster helps or hurts an autocrat’s popularity through a mixed-methods research design in the electoral autocracy of Turkey in April-July 2023, following the February 2023 earthquakes. An online survey experiment (n=3,839) identifies the effects of blaming the aftermath of the earthquake on the opposition, a force majeure, private construction companies, or a govern- ment minister, while focus groups explore the mechanisms behind these effects. We find that blaming the opposition or a force majeure leads to a backlash, especially among those more able to critically evaluate information. Focus groups reveal that these backlash effects are driven by voters’ dismay at electoral opportunism and the incumbent’s polarizing language following a large-scale disaster."; and the note that the paper is forthcoming in Perspectives on Politics.

After large-scale disasters autocrats often shift the blame on others to save their popularity. Our 🚨new paper🚨, just accepted at Perspectives on Politics, shows that this tactic is prone to backfire. With @edwardgoldring.bsky.social & @fapaydin.bsky.social . shorturl.at/v6wIV%E2%AC%...

📢 New article
👥 @sunny369.bsky.social, Solveig Bjørkholt
🔎 Presenting the StanDat database on international standards: Improving data accessibility on marginal topics..
📖Open Access in Political Science Research and Methods
🔗 doi.org/10.1017/psrm...

Electoral autocracies, hybrid regimes, and multiparty autocracies: same, same but different? There is a wide range of labels, such as electoral autocracy, hybrid regimes, or multiparty autocracy, and corresponding empirical measures to describe and measure political regimes that combine au...

Ever felt uneasy about how concepts & measures of "grey zone" autocracies are used interchangeably across the literature? Then check out my 🚨new paper🚨 in @democratization.bsky.social and get some substance to back up your gut feeling: tinyurl.com/ypdm2kna Or at least read the main points below ⬇️

Database: shiny.uio.no/standat/

With this article, I would also like to demonstrate how powerful a tool web scraping can be. I hope many of us moving forward will make their scraped datasets public (if ethically viable). They are important resources, especially for topics that have scarcity of quantitative data available.

Many of us are familiar with some ISO standards, like the ISO country codes. There are thousands of such documents specifying details on all from the dimensions of screws to good environmental management. How are these standards negotiated? What impact do they have on international collaboration?

Here I present a database containing various information on ISO standards -- the StanDat database! Why is that useful, you may ask. Well, standards are the invisible lubricant of much international cooperation.

Article

Happy to announce that my first article is finally in print in Political Science and Research Methods (PSRM).

The drama is in the ink:Conflict in written parliamentary questions Opposition is a core component of any democracy, yet it is scarcely studied. Leaning on research prescribing blurred lines between government and opposition in parliamentary democracies, we use word ....

New paper, coauthored with @sunny369.bsky.social, out in LSQ. We find very low levels of conflict between government and opposition in the Norwegian Parliament through sentiment analysis of WPQs.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

What a book! What a refreshing perspective on life and what to do with it, i.e; time management! This book made me sigh with relief. Lower the standards, make do with the present, accept finitude, and be there for the average four thousand weeks of a human life.

Excited about our new Code Café for BA and MA students learning to code in R! Friday afternoons, conveniently located at the student bar, Diskuterbar!
www.uib.no/sampol/16557...