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Steven White

@notstevenwhite.bsky.social
6.1K followers 301 following 800 posts

Associate Professor of Political Science, Syracuse University. Chess enthusiast. Author of World War II and American Racial Politics (amzn.to/3ESQkzP). Now studying the history of police unions. notstevenwhite.github.io

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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 7h
Curiously, I think one can read the new Levitsky and Way article as suggesting that the United States actually is something of an exceptional case even after 10 years of trying to think about Trumpism in comparative perspective.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Damn I can't believe people have different preferences about pop culture than me
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
My favorite part of the NFL is when they talk about the rules like it's a practice LSAT question. Great sport.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Some people seem to be criticizing Adam Jentleson because they think he's wrong and some because they think he's just regurgitating basic findings from political science in the 1960s (implying he's right). It can't be both though!
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I was going to make a joke about how to dress for APSA, but then it occurred to me there probably aren't even that many grad students on Bluesky because that tends to involve being under 40
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I can only assume some Syracuse administrator not familiar with the monkey's paw story wished we'd get more media coverage
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Social media surely makes things much worse, but the American people were always kind of like this
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Language changes over time, The American Voter (1960) edition
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
I'm teaching our grad American politics field survey for the first time and am struggling over whether to stick to strict no AI or switch to "you can use AI if you declare it and also I expect you to be able to prove in our discussions that you understand what you wrote" for reading response papers
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Tough break for econ, living out their worst nightmare of getting lumped in with the rest of the social sciences
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Does democracy require bureaucratic agencies to be able to act independently of elected officials? If so, what's the line exactly? Like most people here, I think agency independence/capacity is largely a good thing for *other reasons*. But I'm not sure *democracy* is the best way to think about it.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
I've definitely seen a lot of people reticent to criticize entire academic disciplines like this, but (to use the example of my own discipline) political scientists IRL regularly criticize fields where the empirical standards are obviously...lax. We all know there's a lot of bad research out there.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
We should let high schools assign students to read the Bible just to hear students refer to the Bible as a "novel"
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I worry the implications of this are getting blown out of proportion. Do @adambonica.bsky.social and @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social really not think, for example, Hong is less likely to win WI-Gov than Crowley? Or that AES performs as well as Stevens in the general (margins, not win vs loss)?
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Earlier I thought it might be smart to buy Stevens contracts when they were at 1 cent (not because I thought she'd win, but I thought things might at least fluctuate), but I talked myself out of it because gambling is bad, etc. I guess what I've learned here is gambling is good and has no downsides.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
I find this genuinely confusing and would be open to hearing from people about why they think it's a good idea. Just empirically speaking, I can't imagine it helps El-Sayed and I don't understand how it's supposed to help professors either.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Too much social media focus on the contentious (but conventionally so) Michigan Senate primary, not enough focus on the utterly bizarre Wisconsin Gubernatorial primary
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Genuinely funny local politics story here, made all the more well suited for poli sci discourse because the bill was about term limits
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
I think it's largely true that Harris's loss is mostly explained by macro-level things like the economy and anti-incumbent sentiment. But it's interesting that many political scientists on Bluesky have only convinced themselves of this now after spending 2024 thinking she was probably going to win.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Term limits are probably bad. But we don't really know what the effect of U.S. Senate term limits would be, because we've never observed a U.S. Senate with term limits. We're just extrapolating from research on less prestigious/professional state legislatures. Which, maybe? But it's at least unclear
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
At least they were union jobs I guess?
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
I recently learned that 20 American universities actually do have their own mini nuclear reactors, including Idaho State and UMass Lowell neup.inl.gov/infrastructu...
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Amazing in retrospect that there was once a poli sci debate about whether majority-minority districts hurt Black Democratic voters because they could break up 2 districts with a moderate White Dem into 1 Black Dem and 1 white GOP district. An example where polarization really has changed the context
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
There's a disconnect between how Maine Dems view Platner & how people on Bluesky (including many political scientists) view him. I think this raises a lot of academic questions (about national vs local perspectives, social media, etc) that are more interesting than trying to label him as bad or good
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
The NYT isn't perfect, but I don't get why people are mad about the focus groups. Mass democracy with high voter turnout means people who barely understand what's going on in the government will sometimes determine major electoral outcomes. If you believe in democracy, it's worth understanding them.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
They really did ask better survey questions in the 1940s
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Looks like we missed the funniest possible outcome, the VA referendum losing by one vote because of Matt Glassman
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
I was actually thinking this would be an interesting way to dig into the data when people were talking about it a couple of days ago, but must have missed this at the time.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Interesting nuance: "emigrants came disproportionately from the NSDAP’s bourgeois-nationalist wing of merchants, professionals, and early joiners rather than its working-class populist base"
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
As a Hampshire graduate, this is sad to see. It's a weird place in a lot of ways, but in a world where universities are increasingly just converging towards being exactly the same it's a real loss to have fewer and fewer places actually trying new experiments in what's possible
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Caruana's not going to win the Candidates, but at least he's going out with some extremely weird (and, for this game at least, seemingly winning) chess: three pawns for his bishop and they're all on the g file
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Reposted by Steven White
Amanda Weiss @amandaweiss.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
I had a lot of fun the other day giving a workshop on the modern DID revolution at Syracuse University's Maxwell School — thank you @adam42smith.bsky.social for hosting! I have posted the slides to my website at amandakweiss.com/did if anyone is interested.
amandakweiss.com
DID Workshop Resources — Amanda Weiss
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
This is a much better articulation of something I was trying (and perhaps failing) to express yesterday. More evidence, I suppose, that longer form writing will always be better for this sort of conversation than the quick emotional reactions incentivized by social media.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
What exactly are people on the more populist/"dirtbag" left supposed to do? When leftists voted for Nader, liberals got mad at them. Now that they're trying to work within the Democratic Party, liberals also get mad at them. Is there some magical third option?
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
What a nice move by Anish Giri to basically end any lingering hope Fabiano Caruana has of ever becoming world champion (giving up the bishop, but if fxg6 black can play e4 with checkmate soon to come)
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Maybe this is part of why people like The Pitt so much
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Finally read this article. More of a meta point, but it's kind of crazy the Atlantic gave a practicing Mormon $10,000 so that he could nearly destroy his life? (I also didn't realize how central of a role Chris Christie played in all this). www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
theatlantic.com
My Year as a Degenerate Sports Gambler
Practically overnight, America made wagering on a game as frictionless as checking the weather. I was determined to understand the consequences—for my country, and for myself.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
This is a tough issue. Banning a vice people are going to do anyway is arguably illiberal. It's also true that legalization is causing major social problems. But even if we banned it, people would still do it. How much enforcement are liberal skeptics of legalized sports betting comfortable with?
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
This is how I learned we have a softball team
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
The rare song where I love the bass, guitar, and drum parts equally and can't imagine it without any of them
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
I think this is the median position of social science academics. It's just that having a middleground/uncertain position on something doesn't lend itself to enthusiastic posting. IRL conversations about AI seem much more balanced than online conversations among self selected enthusiasts/critics.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
But how will I know if someone with an incredibly common name has been cited in a field I've never thought about before
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Not sure this will exactly hurt her support among the Teamsters leadership
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
The historical political economy crowd is about to run one million difference in differences models, but not sure what it will mean, if anything, for more qualitative scholars.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
The new Yoko Ono bot on chess.com is actually kind of a neat idea. Based on her 1966 art piece Play It By Trust, all the pieces are the same color. I guess that was meant to make an anti-war point, but in practical terms a lot of chess players can probably keep track of which is which.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
I think the poli sci rediscovery of Reconstruction—in emphasizing the Radical Republicans/democratization of the South—has missed the role of finance & industry in the GOP coalition, which only became more influential as time went on. Federal occupation costs $$$ & they were the ones with the $$$.
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
Pascal’s day trader
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
So close to setting up a chess board correctly, but the black king is on the wrong square
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
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Steven White @notstevenwhite.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Having finally dabbled a bit with Claude, I'm curious what academic journal editors/etc. see as the line between AI use that needs to be reported (journals are increasingly requiring authors to report AI use) and what doesn't.
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