@susanadptavares.bsky.social
PhD student researching social movement organizations and protests against peace missions at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Two astronauts looking at earth. One: wait it's all just weird weighted averages? The other, pointing a gun: always has been.
07.10.2025 15:30 — 👍 31 🔁 6 💬 1 📌 0New SI "Cleavage Politics in Western
Democracies" @wepsocial.bsky.social!
If you're interested in transforming social & political divides in advanced democracies, this is for you.
The intro by @davidattewell6.bsky.social & me maps contributions around 3 challenges for contemp. cleavage research.
This sets me thinking if the current pattern concentration of wealth is a key contributor to authoritarianism because it means there are monopolies that are very sensitive to political pressure and few enough of them that you can blackmail them one by one
03.10.2025 08:03 — 👍 20 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 1This is a paper I really care about. I feel the core message is very important for social scientists in general, and political scientists in particular.
"Quantitative Research in Political Science is Greatly Underpowered."
(with A+ co-authors)
📖 New Etched in Marble: Mark Blyth on Why AI Won’t Save Your Writing
The Brown University political economist talks irritation, PowerPoint & why the page is still the only place where real thinking happens.
Read → catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/etched-in-...
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Radical-right parties are often linked to the “left-behind”. But supporting them when stigma is strong is costly. So who is willing to pay that cost early on, before it’s normalized?
In my new WP, I argue that breaking political norms is socially stratified. 🧵👇
The takeaway:
👉 Accommodating the radical right on immigration doesn’t win back voters.
👉 It alienates the progressive base.
👉 And it raises the salience of the very issue the radical right owns.
In short: it’s electoral self-harm.
BJPolS abstract of a scholarly article discussing the effectiveness of Quick Impact Projects (QIPs) by the United Nations in reducing civilian violence in conflict zones in Africa.
NEW -
Quick. But Impactful? United Nations Quick Impact Projects and Violence against Civilians in Civil War - cup.org/4mZSEdA
- @joribreslawski.bsky.social & Jacob D. Kathman
#OpenAccess
Making them wear high-visibility vests over camo is such a good joke you couldn’t write it
26.08.2025 23:41 — 👍 45845 🔁 11542 💬 1268 📌 392🚀 Exciting news: The Peace Observatory is live!
👉 peaceobservatory.com
The Peace Observatory is now the world’s largest repository of peace negotiation summaries.
It covers 11,000+ rounds of negotiations and 3,000 agreements across 1,300+ armed conflicts worldwide (1989–2023).
Armed conflicts involve governments, rebel groups, militias, communal factions, and foreign forces — all interacting in complex ways. The result? A web of violence that can feel overwhelming to understand.
That's why we launch the Conflict Networks Explorer
peaceobservatory.com/conflict-networks
my lil reproducibility talk from today / I really wanted to instill the PhD students some simple first practices and ways to step up your game from there github.com/tjmahr/2025-...
20.08.2025 23:52 — 👍 51 🔁 13 💬 3 📌 3If you know of recent PhDs/postdocs with interest in quant. (ideally mixed-method) research on pol violence/repression/armed actors PLEASE direct them to me! Am looking to appoint Humboldt Fellows to work with me for a year. Esp looking for ppl from Global South. No German citizens/German degree.
13.10.2023 11:01 — 👍 35 🔁 48 💬 2 📌 2There 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. 🧵
23.07.2025 06:58 — 👍 74 🔁 23 💬 3 📌 1
I have been trying to wrap my head around this specification for a while now.
If you have DV that is dependent on country, year of birth and year of interview.
How can you also have country, year of interview, age, cohort and wave-survey fixed effect? Aren't they all colinear with each other?
Job alert! Join us at @unisg.ch 😊
3-year postdoc researcher position, part of the SNF project UN-POPULAR: Citizens’ Opposition to Peace Missions
- Peacebuilding and social media
- Causal inference and computational social science
- Starting 1 Jan 2026 (or later)
Apply here: lnkd.in/ekqPX7RN
Shocking, even for their standards, that the Spanish far right is in favor of deporting even legal migrants if they “fail to integrate”—and that, at the same time, the mainstream right refuses to establish a cordon sanitaire.
elpais.com/espana/2025-...
📄 New Respect the Marble post:
The Dopamine Trap: Why Typing Feels Good but Thinking Matters More
👉 catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/the-dopami...
For thinkers, writers and scholars who want to write to figure it out, not just to get it done.
On why word count ≠ breakthrough.
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I read this not as sociopathy but as the neoliberal devaluation of care. Care work--like cleaning up--is too labor-intensive to be highly profitable. So, if we're each supposed to maximize our profit-making potential, then those with more privilege have incentive push care work onto those with less.
12.06.2025 11:52 — 👍 201 🔁 43 💬 12 📌 5Wenn man sagt man traut sich als schwuler Mann auf dem Land nicht Händchen halten, dann ist man abgehobene städtische Elite die auf die normalen Leute herabschaut. Wenn man das gleiche für Berlin-Neukölln sagt dann spricht man endlich ehrlich Misstände an. Lasst uns diesen Mist nicht mitmachen.
12.06.2025 08:50 — 👍 85 🔁 13 💬 1 📌 1
Empirical research is often contaminated by publication bias. Our paper in the July issue of Journal of Economic Surveys shows
- after correcting for publication bias, empirical effects are typically closer to 0 and may switch signs
- relative reduction in effect sizes of 45%-60%
You don’t need more ideas.
You need a better question.
A thread on clarity, chaos, & what a Nobel Prize winner, a mosquito net & a PhD meltdown taught me about writing (+ thinking) better.
🪨 Here’s my new Respect the Marble post: catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/you-dont-n...
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Can government policies moderate political backlash to structural change?
Yes, the effect operates through material benefits and social recognition.
🚨New WP by @retobuergisser.bsky.social, @siljahausermann.bsky.social, @thmskrr.bsky.social and @susanadptavares.bsky.social 🚨
shorturl.at/zFbZE
The left-behind-the-Alps phenomenon strikes again: Chega, the Portuguese far-right populist party, gets 46% of the vote among Swiss emigrants (against 29% across Europe and 23% in Portugal). No idea if this happens with other migrant communities across Europe
28.05.2025 19:05 — 👍 3 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0Manufacturing for thee, but not for me
28.05.2025 11:48 — 👍 49 🔁 21 💬 2 📌 1it seriously is an AI/tech-brain thing to think of reading as a sort of decontextualized, totally purposeless activity that can be abstracted from the audience (even abstracted from the author) to the point that the text can be repeatably summarized with no intention or purpose associated with it
20.05.2025 15:47 — 👍 43 🔁 15 💬 1 📌 2Congratulations Julius on this publication and thank you for sharing! 🥳🥳🥳🥳
20.05.2025 10:31 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Started to add Skillpower Sessions — a short set of focused notes with practical strategies for writing — to my Respect the Marble posts.
Thank you to my students @dirckdekleer.bsky.social & @bogatyrev.bsky.social for suggesting this!
Here is the first one: substack.com/@catherineeu...
92 years ago today, the Nazis raided the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexuality, where the first study of trans people was conducted, and burned all of its contents.
Fitting that today is also the day SCOTUS greenlights the project of the eradication of trans people from society in the US.
There were another 1000 protests against the Trump administration this past week. At nearly any prior moment in U.S. history, this would be viewed as a staggering degree of unrest.
Some thoughts on protest numbers in an age of growing authoritarianism: lakauffman.substack.com/p/thinking-a...
