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Jonathan S Doucette

@jdoucette.bsky.social
1.2K followers 353 following 134 posts

Associate Professor, Department of Politics, Aalborg University. My research examines religion, historical regimes, state formation, and democratization. Personal website: t.co/M1J5XAy13P

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Reposted by Jonathan S Doucette
Adam Scharpf @ascharpf.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ... Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups? Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com: tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
What can we learn about regime change today from studying historical transitions to early democracy? We usually explain transitions to and from democracy by asking what changes demand for democracy among citizens or elites, or what makes established elites willing to accept it.
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Does a strong state have to come before democracy? With David Andersen, we scrutinize eight versions of the "state-first" claim using V-Dem data, 1789–2015. Impartial bureaucracy helps democracies survive and deepen. State capacity has no robust effects. See: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
State First? A Disaggregation and Empirical Interrogation | British Journal of Political Science | Cambridge Core
State First? A Disaggregation and Empirical Interrogation - Volume 52 Issue 1
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Does a strong state have to come before democracy? With David Andersen, we scrutinize eight versions of the "state-first" claim using V-Dem data, 1789–2015. Impartial bureaucracy helps democracies survive and deepen. State capacity has no robust effects. See: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
State First? A Disaggregation and Empirical Interrogation | British Journal of Political Science | Cambridge Core
State First? A Disaggregation and Empirical Interrogation - Volume 52 Issue 1
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Reposted by Jonathan S Doucette
Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
1/5: How does the development of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia compare to Western Europe? My new Cambridge Element, How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, is out. Chapter 2 compares three transformations in the East with the West: doi.org/10.1017/9781...
doi.org
How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
1/5: How does the development of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia compare to Western Europe? My new Cambridge Element, How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, is out. Chapter 2 compares three transformations in the East with the West: doi.org/10.1017/9781...
doi.org
How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
What effect sizes can a design reliably detect, and how does that compare to the smallest effect size of interest? These questions are rarely pondered outside of experiments. I (with assistance from Claude) wrote an R package, "simpower", that helps with this: github.com/faranordk/si....
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
What effect sizes can a design reliably detect, and how does that compare to the smallest effect size of interest? These questions are rarely pondered outside of experiments. I (with assistance from Claude) wrote an R package, "simpower", that helps with this: github.com/faranordk/si....
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Reposted by Jonathan S Doucette
Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
🔥🔥🔥 noahdasanaike.github.io/sage.html
The Small-Area Global Elections (SAGE)
Dataset
Noah Dasanaike*
June 30, 2026
Conditionally Accepted at Nature Scientific Data
Abstract
Cross-national research on electoral behavior has been bounded by the granularity of comparative election data. Existing archives aggregate to constituency or country level, omit spatial information, or restrict coverage to a small set of well-documented democracies. The Small-Area Global Elections (SAGE) dataset collects lower-house parliamentary and presidential returns for 110 countries and territories at the smallest unit each electoral authority publishes, geocodes the units, and harmonizes party and candidate identifiers across languages. For most countries the unit is a polling station with fewer than a thousand voters; the full dataset carries roughly ten billion votes cast across more than eight million units. The dataset is openly available in tabular and spatial formats, with companion R and Python packages providing direct access. SAGE supports spatial analyses of electoral behavior across democracies and hybrid regimes at a granularity not previously available for cross-national comparison.Map
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
What do we know about Europe's self-governing cities? I wrote a survey summarizing what we about 1) why they emerged, and 2) their consequences for Europe's development. osf.io/yqza5/files/...
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
What do we know about Europe's self-governing cities? I wrote a survey summarizing what we about 1) why they emerged, and 2) their consequences for Europe's development. osf.io/yqza5/files/...
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
In terms of its role in Europe's development, the Dominican order is perhaps most known for its part in the inquisition. However, it also had a more benevolent impact on regime change and the development of human capital 1/N
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
1/N: How did Western European settlers impact economic development in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia? In many but not all cases, the short run impact was destructive as settlement was related to conquest and repression. However, this changed in the long run www.cambridge.org/core/element...
cambridge.org
How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
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Reposted by Jonathan S Doucette
Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
My new Elements ("How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia") is now published at: www.cambridge.org/core/element... It is free to read for the next 14 days!
cambridge.org
How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
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Reposted by Jonathan S Doucette
Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR @cambup-polsci.cambridge.org · 12/06/2026
New Cambridge Element, How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia by Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette, out now! Read for free for the next 2 weeks at cup.org/3PRJCos
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
My new Elements ("How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia") is now published at: www.cambridge.org/core/element... It is free to read for the next 14 days!
cambridge.org
How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
1/N: How did Western European settlers impact economic development in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia? In many but not all cases, the short run impact was destructive as settlement was related to conquest and repression. However, this changed in the long run www.cambridge.org/core/element...
cambridge.org
How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
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Yiqing Xu @yiqingxu.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
On panelView, and why we should always look at our data first.. yiqingxu.substack.com/p/plot-your-...
yiqingxu.substack.com
Please look at your (panel) data
Many of the most egregious issues can be avoided by simply looking at the data.
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Roman Senninger @rsenninger.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
New paper out in Nature Human Behaviour. "Government policy documents across 185 countries largely cite Global North sources" with @seramirezruiz.bsky.social DOI: doi.org/10.1038/s415... Ungated: rdcu.be/fh0Ss
doi.org
Government policy documents across 185 countries largely cite Global North sources - Nature Human Behaviour
This analysis of 1.2 million policy documents from 185 countries identifies global inequalities in whose knowledge is cited in policymaking. Governments in the Global South rely more on foreign source...
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
IN DANISH Underviser du i kvantitativ metode? Så har jeg forfattet en lille artikel om (mis)brugen af kontrolvariable (på dansk) der kan læses i Politica: politica.dk/fileadmin/po...
politica.dk
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Sascha O. Becker @essobecker.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
ASREC Europe Venice 🇮🇹 Fri/Sat 25/26 Sep 2026 co-organized with @valerueda.bsky.social 3 keynotes: Mara Squicciarini 🎉 @saumjha.bsky.social 🎉 Joel Mokyr 🎉 Submit here by 30 April 👉 forms.office.com/Pages/Respon...
forms.office.com
Microsoft Forms
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Carl Henrik Knutsen @chknutsen.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
V-Dem v.16 is now released, w. updated scores for 2025. Most countries remain stable from 2024, but some clear improvements (on diff’t democracy indices), incl. S. Korea, Sri Lanka & Mauritius. Largest declines came, by far, in the US. This figure shows 10-yr changes on the Liberal Dem. index.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 11/02/2026
I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
It must be very hard to publish null results
Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.
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American Political Science Review @apsrjournal.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
From our August Issue: What Can We Learn about the Effects of Democracy Using Cross-National Data? by JONATHAN STAVNSKÆR DOUCETTE. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
So much of classic political science research is woefully underpowered. I'm glad we're slowly coming to our senses.
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Roman Senninger @rsenninger.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
📄 New WP version out: revised text, tightened argument, and new analysis. The Politics of Evidence Selection (w/ @jesperasring.bsky.social) Grateful for the helpful comments and presentation opportunities. Further feedback welcome! 🔗 osf.io/preprints/so...
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Dominik Schraff @dschraff.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Our Department at Aalborg University is hiring an Associate Professor in Sociology with a focus on quantitative methods: www.stillinger.aau.dk/videnskabeli...
stillinger.aau.dk
Associate Professor in sociology with focus on quantitative methods
At The Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of Society and Politics, a position as Associate Professor in Sociology with focus on quantitati...
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𝙅𝙖𝙘🍩𝙗 𝙉𝙮𝙧𝙪𝙥 @jacobnyrup.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
We are happy to release the Paths to Power Dashboard. It is the perfect tool for politics nerds! You can find it here: ptp.isv.sv.uio.no/ptp/ It allows you to explore governments from 1966-2021 using the PtP and WhoGov datasets. See examples below. The app has been programmed by Stuart Bramwell.
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Michael Albertus @mikealbertus.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
Can state-building disrupt rather than stabilize society? In a new @apsrjournal.bsky.social article, @victorgayeco.bsky.social and I show that the expansion of state communication networks spurred rebellion for decades in France before the Revolution 👉 Article: doi.org/10.1017/S000... 🧵1/X
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
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...
cambridge.org
How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
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...
cambridge.org
How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
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Jared Rubin @jaredcrubin.com · 19/11/2025
Now forthcoming at Quarterly Journal of Economics Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis Available at: digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_... (See thread below for an overview)
digitalcommons.chapman.edu
Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis
We trace the evolution of the language of science, religion, and political economy in the centuries leading to the British Industrial Revolution. Using textual analysis of 264,443 works printed in Eng...
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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
Great piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Robustness is better assessed with a few thoughtful models than with billions of regressions | PNAS
Robustness is better assessed with a few thoughtful models than with billions of regressions
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Volha Charnysh @vcharnysh.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
Looking for rising stars in Historical Political Economy? 🌍📚 Check out this year’s job market candidates: www.broadstreet.blog/p/hpe-candid...
broadstreet.blog
HPE candidates on the job market
Job market season is here.
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
Sometimes individual leaders can leave an imprint that persists long after their tenure. In a new paper with Jørgen Møller, we show how Pope Gregory VII used his network to spread urban political autonomy across Europe www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
Sometimes individual leaders can leave an imprint that persists long after their tenure. In a new paper with Jørgen Møller, we show how Pope Gregory VII used his network to spread urban political autonomy across Europe www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...
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Anna Grzymala-Busse @annagbusse.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
A must read, especially for anyone who thinks that making little concessions and keeping your head down will work:
Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him. This is the enduring lesson of Weimar: extremism never triumphs on its own. It succeeds because others enable it—because of their ambition, because of their fear, or because they misjudge the dangers of small concessions. In the end, however, those who empower an autocrat often surrender not only their democracy but also the very influence they once hoped to preserve
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
The same is true for most cross-national studies www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
What Can We Learn about the Effects of Democracy Using Cross-National Data? | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core
What Can We Learn about the Effects of Democracy Using Cross-National Data?
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
If you need to escape from current politics for a while, my co-author, Jørgen Møller, discusses our book "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, 1000-1500" on the New Books podcast: newbooksnetwork.com/the-catholic...
newbooksnetwork.com
Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette, "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500" (Oxford UP, 2022) - New Books Network
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Joe Noonan @joenoonan.se · 23/07/2025
There 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. 🧵
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Lotem Halevy @lotemhalevy.bsky.social · 07/05/2025
🚨🚨 Accepted yesterday! 🚨🚨 @lenkabustikova.bsky.social and I introduce the concept of "Confessional Illiberalism" and distinguish it from two other forms of illiberalism, reactionary and prejudicial illiberalism. We also compare the concept to other '-isms' to tidy the backsliding literature.
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History of the Germans Podcast @hotgpod.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
The family became afflicted with the disease of dynasties: inheritance by babies and buffoon, or both That would normally be the death nail for a noble House, but not this time. The Estates of Württemberg stepped in to protect the state, deposed buffoons and ruledon behalf of the babies. (2/3)
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Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Thrilled that my article has just been published at @apsrjournal.bsky.social! 🎉 The article argues that low statistical power is a major impediment to acquiring cumulative knowledge on questions concerning cross-national differences: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
What Can We Learn about the Effects of Democracy Using Cross-National Data? | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core
What Can We Learn about the Effects of Democracy Using Cross-National Data?
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Dan Pemstein @danpemstein.com · 30/04/2025
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/...
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.
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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
Power corrupts. It’s time for Singapore to become a democracy.
nytimes.com
Opinion | My Father Founded Singapore. He Would Be Troubled by What It’s Become. (Gift Article)
The nation’s current leaders are not living up to my father’s high standards of governance, and Singapore is suffering as a result.
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Carl Müller-Crepon @carlmc.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
🚨 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
Itineraries of 25 Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, 919 to 1519Itinerant 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.
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Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science @skytteprize.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
Herbert P. Kitschelt is the winner of the 2025 Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. 🏆 He is awarded the prize for " having increased knowledge of the functioning of democratic party systems with exquisite theoretical acuity and impressive empirical breadth and depth."
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Magnus B Rasmussen @magnusrasmussen.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
Les om den utrolige historien om hvordan vi har klart å rekonstruere de tapte norske kommunevalgene før 1937 www.forskning.no/politikk-sta...
forskning.no
Hvordan kunne valgresultatet fra norske kommunevalg bare forsvinne?
Her er den utrolige historien.
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Frederik Hjorth @fghjorth.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
How do challenger parties—those without prior governing experience—gain access to executive power? In our paper out now in @thejop.bsky.social, @mvinaes.bsky.social, @jacobnyrup.bsky.social, and I explore whether simply holding legislative office helps them join government. Brief 🧵👇 1/10
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Filipe Campante @filipecampante.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
Here's @adamprz.bsky.social, telling it like it is... I could not agree more.
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