Andrej Kokkonen

🌟 PHD FELLOWSHIP ALERT! 🌟

I’m hiring 1 PhD fellow for my ERC project ECONENGAGE (@ Gothenburg 🇸🇪)! Starting 09/26! Great PhD community + int'l & supportive environment + FUN city. 💰for conferences + workshops! Lots of mentoring & career development opportunities! Deadline Jan 29th. Please apply!

🚨 📖 “Nationalism and the Transformation of the State” is out with CUP! I’m so happy to conclude 6 years of research with Lars-Erik Cederman, Luc Girardin, Yannick Pengl and many others like that!
It’s open access @cambup-polsci.cambridge.org here: tinyurl.com/nastac
What’s the book all about? A 🧵

Large EU-grant to Tore Wig to study the state of science in autocracies - Department of Political Science Will scientific progress slow down if more countries in the world become autocratic? That is one of the questions political science professor Tore Wig will seek to answer with two million euros from t...

Happy to announce that I have received an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator grant for the project "Authoritarian Threats to Scientific Knowledge". AutoKnow will study how authoritarian regimes and politics affect scientific progress, contents and topics in different fields.

www.sv.uio.no/isv/english/...

Finally, great news!

How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia Cambridge Core - Political Economy - How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia

Very happy that my forthcoming @universitypress.cambridge.org Elements - "How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia: Economic Development, Regime Change, and State Formation, 800–1800." Can now be pre-ordered at www.cambridge.org/core/element...

🚨Jobs!🚨

3-year PostDoc positions (aka Research Officers) at @lsegovernment.bsky.social to work with me on the local consequences of border change. Please reach out for questions and apply by Jan 4th to join the team and department: I’d love to hear from you!

Job ad: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Congrats Luca!

One of the big puzzles in history is why the first demographic transition began in France, as early as 1789.

With Paula Gobbi and Marc Goñi, we show that a key driver was the French Revolution and its inheritance reforms.

Now forthcoming at JPE 👉 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

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📢 📢 Call for Papers

IV Yale–UB Historical Political Economy Workshop

Organized by @Didacqueralt.bsky.social & @Cescamat.bsky.social

🎤 Keynote: Lisa Blaydes (Stanford)

📍 University of Barcelona
🗓 June 29–30, 2026

Submit your papers by Jan 21, 2026:
shorturl.at/oZTNy

#pleaseRT

‼️ Two weeks left to apply for the postdoc in Political Text Analysis in the MULTIREP project 👇.

Happy to announce a 4th edition of the Workshop in Economic History in Uppsala, with the great @essobecker.bsky.social as keynote! Workshop takes places on May 28-29, 2026, in Uppsala. Apply by January 31, 2026.

Here is the Cfp: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6xdmp...

Førsteamanuensis i statsvitenskap (290803) | Universitetet i Sørøst-Norge Stillingstittel: Førsteamanuensis i statsvitenskap (290803), Arbeidsgiver: Universitetet i Sørøst-Norge, Søknadsfrist: søndag 1. februar 2026

Kjære alle,

USN lyser nå ut en 100 % fast stilling som førsteamanuensis.

Spre gjerne utlysningen til alle dere tenker kan være aktuelle. Dersom dere har spørsmål om stillingen eller om USN, er det bare å ta kontakt med meg.

🚨 Job Alert! Postdoc in POLITICAL TEXT ANALYSIS in the MULTIREP project

You do quant text analysis? You are interested in political representation? Enjoy working in teams? Would like to live in a great city? Consider joining us in Vienna!

⏱️ Apply by 15/12/2025

wratil.eu/files/MULTIR...

1/4 🧵

🌟 JOB ALERT! 🌟

I’m hiring 1 postdoc for my ERC project ECONENGAGE (@ Gothenburg 🇸🇪)! Starting ca. Aug '26! Congenial colleagues + int'l & supportive environment. 💸 for conferences + workshops! Lots of professional networking opportunities with scholars! Deadline Jan 7th. Apply! (see more below 🧵)

YouTube video by Senator Bernie Sanders In Wake of Charlie Kirk Murder, Sen. Bernie Sanders Addresses Rising Political Violence in America

The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out our public life.

A free society relies on the premise that people can speak out without fear or humiliation.

No more political violence.

Congrats Jacob!

Congrats Carl! So well deserved.

Reminder: Great job opportunities at Aarhus University!

Please help spread the word before everyone disappears for summer break! 🏖️

📣 Jobs, jobs, jobs!

Aarhus University’s Department of Political Science is hiring:

🔹 Assistant Professor
🗓 Deadline: 25 August
🔗 international.au.dk/about/profil...

🔹 Associate Professor
🗓 Deadline: 8 September
🔗 international.au.dk/about/profil...

Delighted that my paper with @felixkersting.bsky.social on agrarian inequality, authoritarianism and democracy in Prussia and Sweden has been accepted for publication in Comparative Political Studies!

Find the previous version here:

osf.io/preprints/os...

I have participated in a panel at APSA (the main political science conference) and an ECPR-workshop where historians were invited. Both worked well. In Sweden we also have a yearly conference on Swedish political history, where both historians and political scientists participate.

I really liked Lyon's review and constructive tone. I totally agree with his last paragraph.

Thank you very much for you input Duncan! It is really appreciated. The paper benefited a lot from reading your work on the HRE, although I am certain we have a lot more to learn from you and other historians. Overall, we should communicate more across disciplinary boundaries.

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/...

That sounds fascinating. Would be really interesting!

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

We’re excited to introduce the Swedish Municipal Council Database! This open-access resource contains our hand-coded data for all local politicians in Sweden's democratic local elections between 1919 and 2018. A 🧵

Co-authors 🤩 @abrarbawati.bsky.social, @josefinemagnusson.bsky.social Moa Frödin

IN NEW ISSUE: Anti-Immigrant Attitudes & Political Participation in Europe: @andrejkokkonen.bsky.social & @jonaslinde.bsky.social find a general political participation gap between pro- and anti-immigrant citizens.

OPEN ACCESS: https://buff.ly/41eWjLF

@polstudiesassoc.bsky.social

Postdoctoral fellow in political science: party competition in Europe Are you our next postdoc with a focus on using expert surveys to examine political party competition around cleavage politics? The Department of Political Science invites applications for a 2-year pos

I am looking to hire a post-doctoral researcher to work with me in a project on social cleavages and political party competition in Europe:
lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...
Happy to answer any questions, and thanks in advance for circulating the call!