Kyle Marquardt
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kailmarkvart.bsky.social
Kyle Marquardt
@kailmarkvart.bsky.social
Professor, @sampol.bsky.social; Project Manager, @vdeminstitute.bsky.social; Iowan; klmarquardt.com
Turkey, 26.10-06.11.25
November 9, 2025 at 8:47 PM
Faroe Islands, late September 2025
October 14, 2025 at 7:08 PM
Sidenote: Elsewhere colleagues (incl @acrowinghen.bsky.social , @medzihorsky.bsky.social, @danpemstein.com, @chknutsen.bsky.social, @silindberg.bsky.social) and I find little evidence that bad-vibes among V-Dem’s country experts drive the recent global democratic decline.
doi.org/10.1017/S104...
August 26, 2025 at 10:10 PM
August 26, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Equally importantly, we examined the degree to which perceptions of democracy trends correlate with actual V-Dem coding, i.e., the degree to which experts changed their scores for specific variables in their main country of expertise 2012-2023. 12/17
August 26, 2025 at 10:05 PM
We find that, although the prime about global democracy trends does slightly decrease positivity about local trends, this effect is not significant, providing little evidence of a causal effect of global on local perceptions. 11/17
August 26, 2025 at 10:05 PM
First, V-Dem experts are pessimistic (or realistic, depending on your perspective): 88% believe the level of global democracy has declined in the past decade. Expert perceptions of global and local (country-specific) trends also correlate. 7/17
August 26, 2025 at 10:05 PM
...leading them to erroneously lower their ratings of democratic institutions in their countries of expertise. These biased ratings in turn result in the negative trends in global democracy in expert-coded datasets, reinforcing the pessimistic narrative about democracy. 4/17 doi.org/10.1017/S104...
August 26, 2025 at 10:05 PM
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...
August 26, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Very much would love to hear what you find! I checked the V-Dem data and it doesn't look like there's any clear trend in the average across countries since the 1990s (though a trend weighted by population shows a gradual decline since the 1990s). v-dem.net/data_analysi...
February 27, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Super interesting project! In light of recent discussions would be fascinating to see how this indicator compares to the V-Dem indicator of a similar concept, as well as intercoder reliability stats on the coding of the new indicator.
February 27, 2025 at 11:08 AM
Many krai opportunities indeed!
February 21, 2025 at 6:01 PM
🏆🚨🏆 Reminder 🏆🚨🏆

Please nominate doctoral dissertations for the @apsa.bsky.social Gabriel A. Almond Award, which honors the best doctoral dissertation in the field of comparative politics!

Deadline: February 12, 2025.

Submit nominations here: apsa.secure-platform.com/a/organizati...
January 7, 2025 at 12:23 AM
Onward to 2025.
December 31, 2024 at 12:30 PM
Also, you may be wondering "What about LLMs?" So did our reviewers! Though we ended up cutting this from the final draft of the article, here is a brief outline of our thoughts about the use of LLMs to replace traditional coders of #poliskydata.
December 5, 2024 at 3:03 PM
Our conclusion lays out the overall implications of these results well.
December 5, 2024 at 9:51 AM
This figure shows the probability that a crowdworker would provide a correct response to trained-coder questions with different characteristics. Crowdworkers are substantially more likely to provide correct responses for more recent years and simpler questions.
December 5, 2024 at 9:51 AM
This result holds true in other expert-coded data contexts. This figure shows the degree to which different factors can make crowds more substitutable for expert-coded data, where lower values on the horizontal axis mean more substitutability.
December 5, 2024 at 9:51 AM
This is what happens when you ask a bunch of crowdworkers to use the same scale to code a subset of these years in Argentina. Trends are more difficult to discern.
December 5, 2024 at 9:51 AM
For example, this graphic shows the codings experts provided for trends in freedom from political killings in Argentina, 1916-2015. Each dot represents a coding, different colors different experts, with a smoothing line per expert. (Higher scores = more freedom, less killings).
December 5, 2024 at 9:51 AM
In other recent work, colleagues (including @chknutsen.bsky.social, @acrowinghen.bsky.social, @medzihorsky.bsky.social, and @silindberg.bsky.social) and I have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of using experts vs trained coders to code #poliskydata. doi.org/10.1017/S104...
December 5, 2024 at 9:51 AM
Thrilled to have this #openaccess article, co-authored with seven colleagues including @danpemstein.com and @silindberg.bsky.social, published in IPSR! Shockingly long🧵follows. doi.org/10.1177/0192...
December 5, 2024 at 9:51 AM
Among other things, that means you can now examine trends in the characteristics of political elites in terms of gender and their association with their countries' socialist regimes...
November 22, 2024 at 2:42 PM
Data from a small-scale Levada telephone survey of two regions (Tatarstan and Buryatia) in 2022 indicate that, if anything, support for compulsory education has only grown in the interim in those two regions. (NB: bc of design differences, the results aren't directly comparable to those from 1993)
November 19, 2024 at 10:27 PM
A key element of this story is that regional language policies have been - and remain - popular. In eight of the 15 regions surveyed in the 1993 Colton/Hough survey, a majority of respondents supported compulsory education in regional (titular) language.
November 19, 2024 at 10:27 PM