Matthew Shugart

I’ve devoted much of my career to comparative presidentialism. I’ll know I’ve succeeded only if journalists stop saying things like I just heard on France24: “the French presidency may be the strongest in the world.”

If so, then why can’t he keep a cabinet in office?

8 years? Seems impossible!

I’d need the details to answer. (I can’t open the article due to not having a subscription.)

So the Doha op might have failed DUE TO OVERLY PRECISE TARGETING.

(Sorry for shouting but it’s important.)

This is a very important paper. The thread offers a nice overview.

Thanks for the call out. Interesting!

(And a nice distraction from… stuff)

Election nerds, can you help me?

Here are data from 1000s of local elections in Austria, held under list-PR with D'Hondt allocation and no fixed electoral threshold (whoever wins 1 seat is in). The graph shows the vote share of parties centered around the threshold ...

Department of Political Science - Comparative Politics University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

UC Davis is recruiting in comparative politics!

"We are especially interested in candidates working on regional and/or emerging-market powers, though the successful candidate may work in any area of Comparative Politics."

Assistant level, tenure track.

recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07299

I’m playing with ways to visualize state leg. size relative to population. Start with ratio. Tried normalization and robust scaling.

Here, we have the factor by which a state’s value differs from the median. Left: houses; right: senates.

Where is the Post in First-Past-the-Post (and Beyond)? A Logical Model of the Effective District-Wide Threshold I present a new model of the effective district-wide threshold: the vote share at which any given party has a 50/50 chance of winning its first seat in a district. To derive my model, I rely only on s...

🧵 I have a new paper online @apsa-preprints.bsky.social where I try to answer a deceptively simple question:

𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦’𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 '𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘵' 𝘪𝘯 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵-𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵-𝘵𝘩𝘦-𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘴𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘴?

Summary below 👇

preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/...

Well, the campaign is underway. The bills to put this on the ballot passed the legislature only yesterday. But the opposition hasn’t been sitting around waiting.

(My posting this is not an endorsement of any position.)

Many far-right groups in Europe today are linked to Russia in the same way many far-left groups were to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1980s. Plus ça change...

That’s unfortunate. And I seem to be having one today (for different reasons, probably). Here’s hoping for better days ahead…

(I deleted the comment because of a dumb typo and apparently it was confusing in its wording. I stand by the point I was *trying* to make!)

If only you read the comment as closely as the bio.

I think we agree. I’m suggesting the standard model ought to be to constrain the executive’s movements, not the legislators’.

They’ve been waiting for Trump all this time to seal the great deal!

So the fantasies of Russian imperialist fanatics that they’ll reclaim Alaska aren’t entirely fantasy?

All too plausible, and tremendously concerning.

Who — in the room or outside it — will stop this?

And there was never any such norm; Bork was defeated in 1986 after three nominees had been defeated within the 20 previous years.

Most of the demonization of Bork (which did happen, yes) and all of it that mattered was either absolutely true points by Dems or...

It was a good morning to be in the orchard.

But that's not all! During Trump's presidency, he took credit for a vaccine to end the pandemic, and Democrats...urged everyone to take it!

...which so upset "conservatives" that they not only turned against that vaccine, but against vaccines in general.

Oh, I once had a Twitter feud with Hazony. Fun times.

I was going to email you and ask if you’d seen it. But then I checked Bluesky! Thanks for sharing.

No regression—substantial or in—was run, but thanks for your comment anyway!

That’s the way. I just do not know the way to the way.

Ha!

On the DDR you were referring to, doesn’t it assume an accord by which the armed non-state actor has AGREED to disarm? Not going to work with Hamas and others of their ilk.

DDR? I’m so old that this means East Germany to me.

Same.

Also, I still wonder how those disempowered remnants remain disempowered. I just don’t know who will take them on if not the IDF. I WANT to be wrong in my skepticism, to be clear.