Brian Libgober
blibgober.bsky.social
Brian Libgober
@blibgober.bsky.social
NU Political science professor and Chicago man. Visiting Fellow at Princeton CSDP.

I write about how law and special interest politics interact.
Reposted by Brian Libgober
Really looking forward to the first annual Workshop on Organizational and Political Economics in Chicago (OPEC!) this coming Saturday.

@luozhaotian.bsky.social has done fabulous work pulling this together.
1st Workshop on Organizational and Political Economics in Chicago | Becker Friedman Institute
bfi.uchicago.edu
November 11, 2025 at 2:05 AM
Will people who this happens to blame the Democrats or the Republicans?
My ACA current plan is going from $385/mo to $821/mo.
November 11, 2025 at 3:49 AM
Reposted by Brian Libgober
Assume all the yes and no votes from Dem senators are strategic and not sincere votes. The party caucus made a decision. No way to know how many were in favor. Then the caucus decided who would vote yes and no based on what would protect each of them politically the most. That’s how this works.
November 10, 2025 at 2:12 AM
An extension until Jan 30 is not much of an extension, really. If the Republicans were not going to cave until after January, which seems a reasonable belief, it is not really obvious to me how the Ds are worse off through the deal. Let’s blow up the holidays for ACA tax credits is not a great sell.
November 10, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Is it just me or does Thomas Paine look like a NYT columnist?
Coming in 2026 from the Postal Service, a series of stamps honoring key figures from the American Revolution.
November 9, 2025 at 1:02 PM
The budget negotiation is much like a strange production of Waiting for Godot, where Godot is played by Donald Trump
November 7, 2025 at 9:28 PM
Reposted by Brian Libgober
@himself.bsky.social nails it. People have so much pent up energy to be organized/to help. So enough with the text messages for $ and let’s get the Party started doing stuff for everyday people.
November 5, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by Brian Libgober
The question to sort out is how much of the impressive Dem sweep was a result of differential voter turnout that might not carry as strongly into 2026 and 2028 and how much of it signals a sustainable repudiation of Trump in the form of the mobilization of new voters and voters changing sides.
November 5, 2025 at 10:42 AM
Reposted by Brian Libgober
Cuomo was drummed out of office 4 years ago for sexual harassment. He then lost the mayoral Dem primary. He then employed rank gutter racism to win as an independent -- winning Trump's endorsement! -- and that didn't work either. Few modern politicians so richly deserve obscurity and exile.
November 5, 2025 at 2:49 AM
This is a good idea
Here's what Democrats should do - as a minimum - to help fix the media ecosystem:

Start a newspaper in every single congressional district - yes, all 435 of them - called "The <name of geographic area> Democrat." It can literally be the district number if there's nothing better to hand. (1/7)
November 4, 2025 at 11:52 PM
Reposted by Brian Libgober
🚨More scholarship! In 'Noisy Politics, Quiet Technocrats' @benbraun.bsky.social & Maximilian Düsterhöft comb more than 11,000 speeches by 18 central banks to explore whether CBs discuss politically controversial topics, shedding light on how CBs strategically interact within their social context.🏦🌐
Current ScholarshipNoisy Politics, Quiet Technocrats: Strategic Silence by Central Banks
Benjamin Braun & Maximilian Düsterhöft
justmoney.org
November 4, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Poor Biden. Back in the basement I guess.
HAVE YOU VOTED YET? 🇺🇸
November 4, 2025 at 8:09 PM
This is pretty cool.
ANES Data Release! electionstudies.org/data-center/...

The 3-wave ANES panel is now available. It merges data from 3 election studies (2016-2020-2024), the first time the ANES has collected interviews of the same respondents across 3 presidential elections.
2016-2020-2024-panel-merged-study - ANES | American National Election Studies
electionstudies.org
November 1, 2025 at 11:26 PM
Reposted by Brian Libgober
Get the hell out of Evanston.
October 31, 2025 at 11:57 PM
He’s asking the right questions.
Why would someone pay $20k for a robot controlled by a human in a remote location to do things more slowly and clumsily when the median wage for a maid or housekeeper is $33k per year, which is typically spread across 10-20 households?
October 30, 2025 at 10:29 AM
Versailles on the Potomac
October 26, 2025 at 2:38 AM
My six year old, on the Simpsons: “all the important people are bad.”
October 21, 2025 at 1:27 AM
Reposted by Brian Libgober
they are too lazy, incompetent, and detached from reality to do full-blown IRL fascism; they visit gratuitous state violence on people at the margins and attempt to sell the rest of us a Videodrome simulacrum of authoritarianism but not enough of us wish to buy to make it work
Some folks were worried that they'd sic thugs on the protestors or declare martial law. Instead they posted AI videos and complained.

These people have no juice. Their supporters are cowards. They are are all bark and no bite. They collapse when we push back. Remember that.
October 19, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Great episode of the reliably great podcast.

open.spotify.com/episode/1IRR...
Why Argentina Needs Bailout After Bailout After Bailout
open.spotify.com
October 19, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Why Did UChicago Destroy the Humanities?
The answer is simple: to spend untold sums on useless buildings by starchitects

An important piece on where higher education is rn.
October 16, 2025 at 10:16 PM
The Supreme Court enabled this with their deranged decision to make it practically impossible to prosecute presidents for crimes. All we got to constrain the president is the “honor” of seal time six.
That's twenty-seven flat-out murders. That's twenty-seven lives taken without even a semblance of a legal justification under domestic or international law.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/u...
October 14, 2025 at 9:42 PM
Reposted by Brian Libgober
Trump treats strategic uncertainty “as if it were a lever: increase unpredictability, and your opponent backs down. ..

“.. It draws from an incomplete version of brinkmanship—one that omits the crucial role of credible signaling, commitment mechanisms, and reputation.”

@maverick12.bsky.social
"Strategic Uncertainty" Isn't Strategy
Game Theory Lessons for Trump’s 2025 Tariff Doctrine
www.emerging-strategy.com
October 10, 2025 at 9:35 PM
It remains the biggest puzzle how American public opinion could possibly be behaving so normally when government is acting so abnormally. But one can take some conciliation in the normal operation of political gravity.
new polls website just dropped fiftyplusone.news
October 9, 2025 at 3:31 PM