Tore Wig

Happy to announce that I have received an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator grant for the project "Authoritarian Threats to Scientific Knowledge". AutoKnow will study how authoritarian regimes and politics affect scientific progress, contents and topics in different fields. www.sv.uio.no/isv/english/...

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

🤯

After reading the 900th AI smugathon from a smug writer smugly reminding me that it’s just a stochastic parrot doing nothing very special, just aping all the “hack websites” scripts in its training data, I can’t help but wonder: Do these guys feel the slightest tinge of worry they might be wrong?

In the year of our lord 2026, people still believe this

A summary of what I understand and do not understand about the way democracy works: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7269378

Separately, I want to warn that systems of this kind pose a serious danger to pluralistic societies and democracy.

New working paper alert! We study preferences for democratic gatekeeping among 2000 elected politicians in Norway. We find willingness to gatekeep but not super strong and depends on strategic context. @daniel-a-n-goldstein.com thread below

Are politicians gatekeepers of democracy? Will they reject candidates for party leadership or coalitions to protect it? We ran pre-registered experiments on 2,000 Norwegian politicians. They do gatekeep, but it’s conditional. osf.io/preprints/so...

Interesting idea to incentivize self corrections in research. "... The Ctrl-Z award recognizes and celebrates early-career and senior scientists who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record."

LLMs can accurately predict the results of social science experiments Across 70 preregistered studies, there was a very strong correlation (r=.85) between LLM-predicted results and observed effects in actual experiments. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Host the anti-world cup in Avignon, you cowards.

Waiting for the Bluesky take that casts Infantino as the anti-colonial hero ranged against the dastardly imperialists of UEFA

We are in the singularity, and email search in outlook is still incredibly shit

Norway sends their regards..

The Aug. issue of @cpsjournal.bsky.social is out and our article on support coalitions and regime survival is in it: Larger & more diverse coalitions correspond to longer-lived regimes @sirianned.bsky.social @magnusrasmussen.bsky.social @torewig.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I don’t care much about football but I still hope the right result happens tonight

This is a great project with a great PI with the opportunity to get great colleagues in a great city which has great frozen pizzas and great brown cheese and has great weather all year around

We're hiring 2 postdocs at @uio.no on my ERC-Cog project on how authoritarian regimes shape scientific knowledge. 3–4 years, U. of Oslo. Deadline: 10 Sept 2026. Great dept., terms, well funded, bustling & green Scandi capital. Apply! 👉 jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/303060/postdoctoral-fello

Jeg er enig i alt som @torewig.bsky.social skriver her. Politikerne har ikke satt seg inn i tematikken, venstresiden har lagt KI for hat, mens høyresiden lever fint med amerikanske løsninger. Alle ser ut til å håpe at det bare går over eller går seg til www.morgenbladet.no/ideer/norsk-...

PRIO is hiring a new Executive Assistant, This is a role that sits at the heart of our leadership, and is involved with most aspects of management. You will work closely with me - not sure if that is a boon or a curse - but there is room to shape how the role evolves www.prio.org/about/career...

AI-powered mental health apps are all the rage. But do they work? This new experiment on women in Mexico says they do!

Why I don't expect liberal democracy to go away any time soon: My article on the resilience of liberal democracy, published in @jeppjournal.bsky.social. Perfectly timed to the day after Orbáns defeat and a small spike in "democracy-optimism". There are, I argue, good reasons for such optimism.

@au.dk is hiring 3 postdocs (2 yrs) on personality cults & strategic communication in autocracies, led by Jakob Tolstrup & Alexander Baturo. They're looking for profiles with text-as-data, survey experiments and/or Chinese politics experience. Start fall 2026. Looks like a great opportunity!

I'm very excited that you all can now read about Itinerant Rule in the Holy Roman Empire from 919-1519 in the @ajpseditor.bsky.social! Thank you @claranw.bsky.social, @andrejkokkonen.bsky.social and Jørgen Møller for a great collaboration! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The next US president is either Diocletian tier competent or we're gonna be on the market for a new global hegemon.

Genuinely just bonkers to watch the USA do this to one of the most successful and innovative hubs of scientific research the world has ever seen. All those years of Free Speech On Campus debates and it turns out they actually wanted less cancer research. Absurd.

Jeg havde ret. Følg med her på kanalen for andre skarpe analyser. For eksempel forudsiger jeg, at hverken Franciska Rosenkilde eller Lars Boje bliver statsminister efter folketingsvalget.

Observed in the wild

In the year of our lord, 2026, an academic journal has gone from accepting .tex file submissions, to only accepting word documents... (Between an original and R&R submission 🤬).

1/US unprepared for key Iranian strategy -- target key hubs of the global economy. Put pressure on allies and markets to turn interdependence into a weapon. Rather than an alternative to war, economic nodes are being used as a key tactic to degrade political support. www.euronews.com/business/202...

ayatollah is supposed to be an academic position and you can tell this is true because after an extensive search they went with an internal candidate

Democracy researcher here! Bombing a country to smithereens without a plan is not democracy promotion

"By the time a peer-reviewed paper on current AI limitations appears in a journal, the limitations it documents will likely be fixed." - Great piece on the impact of AI in the social sciences. substack.com/home/post/p-...

The Trump admin has mostly added 3 types of groups to the Foreign Terrorist Organization list: 1. Latin American crime groups, e.g., Venezuelan 2. Iran-backed groups 3. European antifa/left groups He's used the terrorist designations to justify 1. Maduro grab 2. Iran strike 3. ...?

In a world where the US is turning into an authoritarian banana republic, Russia has wrecked its economy trying and failing to conquer its neighbor, and China is turning into a hyper-nationalistic totalitarian nightmare, it is surprising so many people are thinking that Europe is the failing one.

I guess this makes sense. My ‘nearest neighbor’ is @torewig.bsky.social, which is nice :) Not sure exactly who these British birders and Portuguese progressives are, but happy to be hanging out with you!

☀️☀️ Exciting news in Madrid! We are VERY happy to officially announce the creation of the Instituto Juan Linz (aka “IJL”). ijlinz.es The IJL ("Juan Linz Institute" in English) is dedicated to cutting-edge research and teaching in political science, sociology, economic history and more. thread 1/12

Please consider citing if you are a fixest user!

Steve Levitsky, the co-author of How Democracies Die, on the dangerous place we have reached as Trump escalates: “Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists,” he said. “And in Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people."

NEW PAPER ALERT! My paper, with @bjornhoyland.bsky.social , on how “policy loss” shapes support for the EU has just been published in @cpsjournal.bsky.social. Check it out! 1/

I really think there needs to spontaneous protests against ICE happening right now in front of every federal building in the country and especially in Washington D.C. Otherwise those opposed to the Trump administration will not gain enough momentum or control the narrative.

One thing most people don't understand is that we in the US enjoy greater wealth funded by other countries because they assume we are a stable and relatively friendly hegemon.

Seeing people do "here's the savvy take on how and why the US should acquire Greenland" and just feeling so *embarrassed* for them. Have some dignity. You don't need to be an apologist for the world's dumbest autocrat, you're not somehow sophisticated for seeing The Smart Play on imperial vainglory.