Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · 12h

It was great to be back at Forum2000 this year. There were interesting speeches from María Corina Machado, Salome Zourabichvili, and Petr Pavel. Notably absent from most of the discussions, however, were the small matters of the dramatic degradation of US democracy and climate change.

Reposted by Alexander Hudson

International IDEA @internationalidea.bsky.social · 5d

We celebrate the decision of the @nobelpeacecenter.bsky.social Committee to award the 2025 #NobelPeacePrize to Venezuelan democracy champion Maria Corina Machado.

It is a timely recognition of the essential relationship between #democracy and #peace.

www.idea.int/news/stateme...

Statement on the award of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado

www.idea.int

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mike runey @molenasreddin.bsky.social · 12d

we at the IDEA democracy assessment team have written an explainer on 'democratic resilience': what it means, where it came from, and what it needs to mean if we're to have a democratic future. hope you give it a read!

www.idea.int/blog/democra...

Democracy Notes Explainer: What is democratic resilience?

The term ‘democratic resilience’ is increasingly common in the public lexicon, making prominent appearances in official policy documents, in academic and

www.idea.int

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · 12d

If a party narrowly wins an election and then implements a very good (or bad) agenda, how should we evaluate democracy in that country? Measures of democratic performance will certainly be affected, but is that enough of the story? I have some thoughts on the matter. www.idea.int/blog/line-go...

Line goes down: Or, how not to read a democracy report

If you’re reading this blog post, you’re most likely a person who is used to looking at trend lines. Trend lines are everywhere, tracking things like stock prices, sea-surface temperatures, crime rate...

www.idea.int

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Old White Nepo Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 13d

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.

harpers.org/archive/1941...

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

harpers.org

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Klaudia Wegschaider @wegschaider.bsky.social · 14d

🤔 Curious about our new open access dataset on migrant electoral rights?

Join us for the webinar to get an overview. 📊

GLOBALCIT @globalcit.bsky.social · 14d

🚨 Webinar Alert 🚨

Join us for the online launch of the new Migrant Electoral Rights (MER) Dataset, the most comprehensive global dataset on migrant suffrage to date 🌐

📅 Oct 15 | 17:00 CEST
📍 Online
🔗 Register www.eui.eu/events?id=58...

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · 15d

At a time like this, we really need more from journalism than this mealy-mouthed non-statement.
Also amazing that this came out the same day as Secretary Hegseth stated his opposition to 'stupid rules of engagement'.

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · 23d

How exciting! Congratulations! I can't wait to read it.

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Anna Fruhstorfer @annakfruhstorfer.bsky.social · 23d

Something I have been working on is starting to feel real, the proofs of Constitutional Change under Autocracy have arrived. I could not be more excited! Publication is expected in early 2026.

Book Cover with title (constitutional change under autocracy), author (Anna Fruhstorfer), and publisher (Oxford University Press).

First page of proof with book title, author, and publisher

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Reposted by Alexander Hudson

International IDEA @internationalidea.bsky.social · Sep 12

Yesterday, @internationalidea.bsky.social launched its Global State of Democracy 2025 Report: #DemocracyOnTheMove.

The #GSoD2025 report focuses on the intersection between #migration and #democracy.

(Re)Watch the live recording of the event ➡️ youtube.com/live/fom0bzA...
#DemocracyForAll

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · Sep 15

You can find the report here: interactive.idea.int/gsod-2025
I'd be glad to hear what you think about it.

The Global State of Democracy 2025

The Global State of Democracy 2025 report from International IDEA

interactive.idea.int

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · Sep 15

Rather than scrolling past the data visualizations, I would invite you to take a couple of minutes and see what mousing over a segment, or clicking on a field can reveal. You might uncover something new!

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · Sep 15

We've tried to do something better than the 'grey literature' standard with the GSoD report this year. We worked with some amazing designers to produce an interactive online report that enables the reader to see what's behind the summary data in the graphs.

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · Sep 15

As you've likely heard, today is the International Day of Democracy. A good day to read a report about the Global State of Democracy? I know that can seem like a herculean labour one would rather walk past.

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Maarten Vink @maartenpvink.bsky.social · Sep 11

Great to see @globalcit.bsky.social’s Rainer Bauböck at the launch of the @internationalidea.bsky.social Global State of Democracy Report 2025. Emphasising the important implications of out-of-country voting in times of democratic recession both in migrant origin countries and destination countries.

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Klaudia Wegschaider @wegschaider.bsky.social · Sep 9

➡️📍📑 New Working Paper
with @sumpierrez.bsky.social and Rainer Bauböck

Work on migrant voting rights often has a state-centric perspective. We propose *migrant franchise constellations* as a migrant-centric approach.

A 🧵 with our argument and new data! 🗳️

preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/...

The expansion of voting rights beyond territory and citizenship marks a major democratic development of the last fifty years. Migrant suffrage has been mostly studied from a state-centric perspective. But the rights that migrants hold emerge from specific combinations of the country of residence and the country of citizenship. From this migrant-centric perspective, what is the diagnosis of the spread and status of global migrant suffrage? We present franchise constellations as a migrant-centric framework for studying voting rights. Drawing on the most comprehensive dataset on migrant electoral rights, combined with novel data on nationality-specific restrictions, we compute almost 1.3 million dyad-year observations based on 172 countries between 1960 and 2020. Using migrant stock data, we find that at least 74 million migrants remained completely disenfranchised in 2020. Bilateral and multilateral efforts emerge as a fruitful path for addressing global migrant disenfranchisement.

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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · Sep 10

The pretty draft is now online.

Link to paper (free): www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....

Our replication package starts from the raw data and we put real work into making it readable & setting it up so people could poke at it, so please do explore it: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

The social sciences face a replicability crisis. A key determinant of replication success is statistical power. We assess the
power of political science research by collating over 16,000 hypothesis tests from about 2,000 articles in 46 areas of the
discipline. Under generous assumptions, we show that quantitative research in political science is greatly underpow-
ered: the median analysis has about 10% power, and only about 1 in 10 tests have at least 80% power to detect the
consensus effects reported in the literature. We also find substantial heterogeneity in tests across research areas, with
some being characterized by high power but most having very low power. To contextualize our findings, we survey
political methodologists to assess their expectations about power levels. Most methodologists greatly overestimate the
statistical power of political science research.

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Reposted by Alexander Hudson

International IDEA @internationalidea.bsky.social · Sep 3

From Research to Practice
Voices from Our Pilot Areas

The third panel of #LegitimultFinalConference, featuring @internationalidea.bsky.social’s Democracy Assessment experts @aehudson.bsky.social & @gentagola.bsky.social, focuses on lessons learnt and good practices for future activities.

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Reposted by Alexander Hudson

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · Aug 28

New, from me:
America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism.
This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...

The authoritarian checklist

It is time to admit that America is no longer a functioning democracy

donmoynihan.substack.com

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · Aug 28

You'll read the report anyway (right?), so why watch the launch? It's a time-effective way to hear the main messages from the report directly from one of the authors. And, there will be an outstanding panel discussion with a diverse panel of external experts. Sign up to see it live, or watch later.

International IDEA @internationalidea.bsky.social · Aug 11

📅 1 month to go! On 11 Sept, we launch the 2025 Global State of Democracy Report: Democracy on the Move, exploring global democratic performance & how migration shapes democracy, from voting rights to inclusive policies.
🔗 Register: bit.ly/3H2Esky
#GSoD2025 #DemocracyForAll

Launch of The Global State of Democracy Report 2025: ‘Democracy on the Move’ | International IDEA

Can democracy keep pace with a world on the move?

bit.ly

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · Aug 27

I have worried a bit about how reports on the state of democracy that are (1) based on data from expert surveys that may then (2) be read by the coders, could create a feedback loop that would bias future measures. Good to see some empirical tests of this, and that it's not a problem for V-Dem.

Kyle Marquardt @kailmarkvart.bsky.social · Aug 26

Excited to introduce a new working paper with @danpemstein.com, @chknutsen.bsky.social and other colleagues not on Bluesky! We use experimental and observational data to investigate the degree to which general biases affect expert perceptions of specific cases. 🧵 1/17 v-dem.net/media/public...

Title: Global Trends and Expert Perceptions: Pessimism and the Assessment of Democratic Backsliding.

Abstract There are longstanding concerns about biases in expert-coded data. Here we attempt to causally identify the effect of these biases, specifically evaluating the claim that pessimism about global democracy affects expert coding of democracy locally in specific countries. Observational analyses of data from an original survey of experts demonstrate that perceptions of global and local democratic trends are indeed correlated. However, an embedded experiment yields no evidence of a causal effect of perceptions of global democracy trends on perceptions of local trends. Moreover, we find little evidence that pessimism about global trends substantially affects actual coding behavior with regard to specific countries. Together, these results alleviate some concerns about expert biases both in widely-used measures of democracy and more broadly.

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Centre for Deliberative Democracy @deldemucan.bsky.social · Aug 8

🔔 New Book Alert 🔔

"The Sciences of the Democracies" by our colleague Jean-Paul Gagnon and over 30 contributors challenges us to rethink how we understand and study democracy.

Congratulations to all the authors!

Open access download here: uclpress.co.uk/book/the-sci...

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · Aug 7

It was published in open access, and is free to read on the publishers website here: uclpress.co.uk/book/the-sci...

The Sciences of the Democracies

The field of democracy studies is more constricted than it needs to be, as researchers, for all their insights, continue to study only fragments of democracy in isolation from each other. Seeking chan...

uclpress.co.uk

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · Aug 7

The _Sciences of the Democracies_ was written as a "choral work of many collaborating authors", but chiefly by Jean-Paul Gagnon and Benjamin Abrams.

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Alexander Hudson @aehudson.bsky.social · Aug 7

As the narrative of the current crisis of [liberal] democracy continues to dominate in some parts of the world, it's an excellent time to consider alternative ways of seeing democracy and its prospects.

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