iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · 6h

For my new research unit Politics of Democracy at the Berlin Social Science Center @wzb.bsky.social, we have 3 open research positions. 2 postdocs: 4 + 2 years (100%) 1 doc: 2 years (75%) Starting date: 1 March 2027 (negotiable) Application deadline: 1 November

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Eric Michael Garcia @ericmgarcia.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Still kind of inconceivable how many people died or will die because of the death of USAID. And the world’s richest man did it almost as a joke

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Even worse, I just had my first experience as reviewer of a clearly AI generated manuscript. Hours and hours of my life spent telling an algorithm why it's making no sense.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Believe me, nobody enjoys a long, luxurious sniff of the "abolishing the triple lock is at net +40 approval with the public" hopium more than I do. But it's hopium - when/if it's happening, it's going to be massively unpopular. Triple lock reform is worth 15bn, 10 times the WFA cuts.

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Rob Ford @robfordmancs.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Electoral reform: “I hear you, I agree with you, and today I am announcing a new national commission on electoral reform.” Biggest opportunity to reform FPP in perhaps a century has now arrived. But long way to go…

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Figuring out what’s going on in Suella Braverman’s head is a lot easier when you know she’s part of a cult.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

More generally, in Western Europe we’ve collectively decided that if we ignore Russian hybrid influence operations hard enough, Putin is just going to get bored and move on.

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Jack Bailey @jack-bailey.co.uk · 24/09/2026

Another thought on this: we’re going to end up with PR-like electoral fragmentation, but without any of the predictability. Worst of both worlds.

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Marta Miori @martamiori.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

New opinion piece with @profjanegreen.bsky.social in @financialtimes.com ⬇️📊 We argue that five parties in the polls doesn't mean five-way races. What's really going on is a scramble within each bloc over who can win, fought out seat by seat.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

"Did you make it with Claude?" "No I made it with the Claude in my head"

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it” (Eric Williams)

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Political Studies @polstudies.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

How much more complicated does government formation get when one more party enters parliament? Chris Hanretty (@chanret.bsky.social) finds identifiability declines as parties increase, with no "sweet spots". Read OPEN ACCESS: buff.ly/EPcxz0X @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social #polsky #PartySystems

"Abstract
Government identifiability – the degree to which the party composition of the eventual government can be predicted given the election results – is a desirable characteristic of a political system. But the measurement of identifiability has remained impressionistic, limiting our ability to speak precisely about trade-offs between identifiability and other characteristics of the political system. I show that a recent measure of bargaining complexity by Cronert and Nyman acts as a ratio-level measure of government identifiability measured in bits – or equivalently, the number of yes/no questions needed to identify the composition of the government. I then show how identifiability is linearly related to the number of seat-winning parties in three different contexts: parliamentary governments, presidential cabinets, and municipal governments. Across all three contexts, an additional seat-winning party increases entropy of government formation by between 0.7 and 0.8 bits. Since identifiability is linearly related to the number of parties, any increase in the number of parties through electoral reform will worsen identifiability by the same amount. Conversely, there are no “sweet spots” where we can achieve high levels of identifiability at low cost in terms of the number of parties."

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The popularity of moustaches is a leading indicator of world wars.

Frequency of moustaches over time (1842-1976). Source: https://blog.panicola.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/robinson1976a_facialhairtrends.pdf

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

There's a curious pro-surrender leftist narrative in Italy - which I'm hearing both on TV and in the wild - whereby the cause of the continuation of the Ukraine war is the fault of the EU's hidden puppeteers: the *Baltic states*. (This, of course, caused the rise of the AfD.)

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Inevitably followed by another equally inane tantrum in a year’s time.

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 18/09/2026

One remarkable thing about early 2025 was how many social, political, and media figures finally bought in on Trumpism at the absolute top of the market.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The gap between “devolution of powers to local residents” as the government’s go-to progressive solution to all ills and the behaviour of actually-existing-local-government in, say, Piddington makes for quite a contrast.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Paradoxically, this is likely a worst-of-both-worlds strategy, but at the same time creating incentives for this behaviour - right-party actors exercising checks-and-balances and moving to the centre - at scale would be the ideal realistic scenario for the pro-liberal democracy crowd.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is fascism and no amount of language policing can change that. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s...

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Liam Hoare 🇺🇦 @liamhoare.com · 16/09/2026

As I’ve been trying to warn, if conditions remain the same, a far-right government is coming in one form or another by the end of the decade just as night follows day. None of the events that might derail the rise of far-right populism in Austria have thus far materialized.

viennabriefing.substack.com

Believe Him

The far-right Freedom Party continues to lead in the polls. A recent interview with party leader Herbert Kickl provided clues as to what his government would look like

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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

VAR but for peer review

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Leonardo Carella would not rule out a future in the Premier League and is keeping all options open.

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Dorian Lynskey @dorianlynskey.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

You know how some AI doomers argue we should shut down AI research all together until we work out what the hell is going on and how to proceed safely? I think we should do that with newspaper columns. At the current rate, there is a 10% chance columnists will eventually destroy all life on earth

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 12/09/2026

Reform has already enjoyed several years of support from a loss-making TV channel whose main function seems to be to give money and favourable coverage to its MPs. The government has done nothing about this. It's probably a more effective way of spending millions than Farage will manage.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

China shock 2.0 in the wild: ubiquitous ad by Chinese EV maker BYD on Italian television shows fake media snippets from Spain, Germany and France, claiming that foreign governments subsidise cars/petrol in crisis time , whereas the Italian government doesn’t but luckily BYD is doing huge discounts.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Anglo-Saxon/Norman conquest discourse is the first step on the road to nodding along to Dan Hannan. Just say no, kids.

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Chelsea Parlett @chelseaparlett.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a “you’re right to push back on this”.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

nah the doomsday clock is also bullshit.

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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

New PISA data out England is now top ten in all three areas (reading, maths, science) and the second highest performing country outside of east Asia (after Estonia). This is a huge public policy success.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

An entirely realistic portrait of academic salaries’ purchasing power in university towns’ housing markets.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

There’s a risk of mistaking the current brief moment of respite for Labour in the polls and in the media for the end of the radical right threat - with the implication that we can move on to politics-as-usual, nothing to see here, let’s not poke the bear. That is absurd wishful thinking.

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Anthony Calacino @acalacino.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

New publication alert! 🚨 In this open access article published in Energy Research & Social Science, I use a survey experiment to test how Brazilians respond to climate policy focused foreign aid and shame. Link: kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

Screenshot of research article at Energy Research & Social Science

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"academics are a liability in politics" heuristic remains undefeated.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The key part here is Orr saying "the Electoral Commission are absolutely useless. They're so dumb and ineffective." It's true. And it should be the wake-up call that the Brexit referendum wasn't. youtu.be/aXut3s90rUI?...

youtu.be

Going undercover to expose Reform's secret donations plot

YouTube video by Channel 4 News

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Given increasing interest in academic malpractice from international media, I expect nothing less than frontpage coverage for the next two months.

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Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

New working paper. We propose a theory of dynamic identity-based linkages between voters and parties. We base this theory on models of expressive voting where voting signifies joining a community of social groups of voters. People have a sense of which parties are associated with which groups.

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

2026 dilemmas: is my complete inability to read this paper and get a sense of what it's *actually* getting at due to the fact that AI overuse has made academic writing unintelligible or due to the fact that AI overuse has further scrambled my brain?

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Italy is a texbook case of how *not* to do electoral laws. Now, the Right wants to add a second-round runoff on top of the "majority premium capped at 55% of seats conditional on a coalition getting 42% calculated on the sum of parties over 3% plus the strongest under 3%" system approved last month.

English translation of text from Il Sole 24 Ore: "The center-right is tempted to introduce a runoff in the electoral law. No decision has yet been made, and evaluations are ongoing, particularly from a technical and constitutional standpoint. However, according to insiders, the chances of the mechanism being included in the center-right reform are increasing . The matter will be discussed tomorrow by the majority's sherpas, who were convened on the eve of the deadline for submitting amendments, on Tuesday at 12:00 p.m., in the Senate Constitutional Affairs Committee. Decisions will be made there on the issue, which some, like FdI Senator Marcello Pera, are insisting on, even given Vannacci's party's continued rise in the polls."

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

(The only reason Cleverly has a chance in London is the Supplementary Vote, which the his party abolished and Labour just reinstated.)

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Elon Musk is a world historical mass murderer whose actions will lead to the preventable death of millions and the implications of that are horrifying so Very Serious People make a huge performance of scoffing at the suggestion but it is the dry spreadsheet reality of what he did.

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Rob Ford @robfordmancs.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

New analysis from me at @politicalquarterly.bsky.social on electoral reform, examining the case for reform, the options we might pursue and why reform efforts failed before (despite twice coming very close to success): onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Has the Moment for Electoral Reform at Westminster Finally Arrived?

The rise to power of Andy Burnham, a vocal critic of first past the post, has put Westminster electoral reform back on the political agenda. This article examines the case for reforming the voting sy...

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

No snark meant for Elliott or this pollster, but it's sad that "deportations" is now of the issues that parties and leaders are routinely rated on. Even if they are losing it on competence, MAGA still sets the terms of the debate.

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Institute for Public Policy Research @ippr.org · 26/08/2026

💷 | NEW REPORT: Nearly 80% of Britain’s rising fiscal costs will come from an ageing population by 2075, but our tax system still piles more of the burden onto work & younger earners. In this report, @benansell.bsky.social argues for a new fiscal settlement 👇 www.ippr.org/articles/tax...

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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

There's a lot of great work in political science on variants of "why/when do mainstream parties accommodate the radical right, and with what consequences?" but not as much on "why doesn't the radical right moderate, and if so when and with what consequences?"

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UNITED24 Media @united24media.com · 24/08/2026

Russia has tried to take Ukraine's independence away by force for years. It has failed. Ukraine is still here. Still free. Still fighting.

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