😆

Thanks for mentioning our work @iansociologo.bsky.social

Our book "Making a Career in Dictatorship", which is coming out soon, also talks about recent developments in the United States:

Oxford Uni Press:
global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Amazon:
www.amazon.de/Making-Caree...

Thanks for the follow-up. We wanted to avoid an apple-and-oranges comparison because the finalist selection for the Intervision 2025 was not entirely clear.

#3

While the Eurovision participant countries represent a rather coherent group of democracies, this is different for tonight's Intervision event.

Many of the participating countries have governments that systematically violate the civil liberties of their citizens.

#2

This is in stark contrast to the Eurovision song contest, where most participant countries are fully fledged democracies.

Average polyarchy score of Eurovision finalists: 0.8
Average polyarchy score of Intervision finalists: 0.3

#1:

There are a lot of autocracies and dictatorships participating in Putin's alternative song contest.

Quite a few are BRICS members and close allies of Russia.

To provide a first answer, @belengonzalez.bsky.social and I quickly collected the data on the participant/finalist countries and merged it with the dataset by the @vdeminstitute.bsky.social.

Here is what we found:

Big congrats!

Thanks for the shout-out, Jacob. Christian and I have been thinking a lot about how our theory applies to security organizations in the US, (e.g. ICE and the FBI). There will be more on it in our book, which will be published by the end of the year.