I asked Eric Schneider for help, and he reminded me of his excellent paper, which I read a few yrs ago. I found it super valuable then, but more so now as I turn a data appendix into a paper.

A reminder that a lot of what I do, others have done in other disciplines/contexts.

It's easy to sit online and have political debates, sign statements, and harrass people at their homes. It's not so easy to function while your friends and family are at war, whether you agree with it or not, war is necessarily devastating and therefore 'wrong.'

OCR & historical data gurus: I have scans of biz directory for interwar Romania. I want to digitize the data for Bessarabia (Moldova) to look @ economic conditions & class composition of villages. Anyone have ideas abt how to do this w/o hand typing? Ex attached & pls share!

Goes to submit paper ...

'References included in wordcount'.

Cool, cool. I'm going to listen to angsty music on my way home and figure out how to cut 700+ words before tomorrow morning.

(Yes, I know I should I have figured this out before submitting but we all make mistakes.)

Finished two papers last week (please be kind but harsh reviewers🤞). So, felt very justified in continuing my streak of taking the weekend off and feeling like the luckiest academic on the planet that this is my postdoc.

Surely an understatement, but still it’s good to see that the Hungarian Statistical office is now publishing some statistics that show what many have long known -- that Hungarians are leaving in droves: dailynewshungary.com/hungarians-lea…

Activism is important before AND AFTER reform, but unfortunately, when it comes to enfranchisement, it has little to do w the timing of reforms + how reforms are enacted in law.

Big + prominent cases are crucial, but they are far from *the norm* throughout contemporary history.

#AcademicTwitter I am looking for data on classic bio variables for Swedish legislators from 2009 through today (gender, age, constituency, ...). Any idea of where I can get this?

Friends in Philadelphia and Delaware, I'll present my research tomorrow (Thursday) at Univ. of Delaware and next Tuesday at Penn. Would be great to meet there. I really look forward to these two events. Thanks for the invite to Daniel Kinderman and Mitchell Orenstein.
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🚨Pleased to announce Bob Powell's final paper published at JTP! 🚨

Model of authoritarian power sharing and the problems of weak institutions. I wrote an accompanying comment.

Submitted on behalf of Bob's estate by me, Anne Meng, and Ernesto Dal Bo

journals.sagepub.com/home/jtp

I remain convinced that a proper marriage in social sciences is between theory and process tracing.

- Both concerned with mechanisms
- Both obsessed with definitions + concepts
- Both (when done properly) are oversimplifications of the 'real world' in completely different ways

Four months in and this morning view still hadn't gotten old.

Ya know what has gotten old? Getting lost almost every morning on my way to my office.

If you've been to the University of Konstanz, you know. For everyone else, there are books written about its architecture.

I don't know what this overly heated debate is bc I've been avoiding scrolling, but I'm pretty sure my entire research agenda can be summarized as:

'Make Duverger, Sartori and Panebianco sexy again'.

The stuff written in the 1950-1980s is good, and still relevant!

I did a PhD so I could study things that I find interesting + important in the way that I want, ask all the questions I want, get paid to read and write, AND so that I could spend my lunch hour fiddling w the natbib package trying to format page numbers in multiple citations.

Idk if any grad student needs to hear this but...

FINISH THAT DISSERTATION. THE BEST DISSERTATION IS A DONE DISSERTATION. NO DISSERTATION IS PERFECT.

The grass really is greener on the other side. Promise.

3 mnths ago I didn't believe the MANY who told me this, but it's true.

My book has a cover! This is getting real… 😃 Many thanks to UChicagoPress & Sara Doskow for this amazing design. More updates soon!