New paper alert! 📣

@chrisblattman.bsky.social, Arthur Yu, and I reexamine the autocratic growth penalty—the finding that autocracies systematically underperform democracies in economic growth.

TL;DR, the penalty is concentrated in personalist, not institutionalized autocracies.

Details👇 1/X

🧵 NEW PAPER - "Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages" is live at SMR. We combine NLP w pairwise LLM evals to track ideas across media ecosystems and languages. We also figured out a way to eval unsupervised probs on widely understood supervised performance metrics.

Just published in the @ajpseditor.bsky.social. You have likely heard of the “dictator’s dilemma,” in which repression reduces knowledge of discontent and thus loosens an autocrat’s grip on power. But when does the dilemma hold? And what do dictators do to ease it? We have answers.

Somebody at @ajpseditor.bsky.social has a great sense of humor, having accepted our paper on the “dictator’s dilemma” the very day that Bashar al-Assad fled Syria.

Joint with @luozhaotian.bsky.social, @antonshirikov.bsky.social, and Dmitriy Vorobyev.

https://osf.io/b94fc

You have likely heard of the “dictator’s dilemma,” in which repression reduces knowledge of discontent and thus loosens an autocrat’s hold on power. But is the dilemma real? And what do dictators do to ease it? We have an answer.

osf.io/preprints/so...

Polisky: please help us spread the word about the Saltzman Institute’s postdoc, and tell your best students to apply!

www.siwps.org/programs/cal...