Aditya Dasgupta
Political scientist at UC-Merced working on topics in political economy/development/econ history. Run the Political Economy of Agriculture and Rural Societies (PEARS) lab.
https://aditya-dasgupta.com
- The attempts to resurrect/reimpose apartheid as a legitimate political value, whether on the model of Israel, South Africa, or the US South, is to me one of the most bizarre turns of the current political moment and one that needs to be stamped out before it takes an ever darker turn
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaFinally. My fellow Fulbright Scholar Rumeysa Ozturk has been freed. My country jailed her for over a month as—let’s be perfectly frank—a political prisoner. Why? Because she wrote a mild oped that criticised Israel in her student newspaper. I've thought of her every day.
- Was reading the papers I assign on state-building in my political economy seminar -- this is an area in HPE that has some of the most interesting arguments/papers as well as knowledge accumulation...I wish I worked on it!
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaAppeasement, as Churchill warned, is like feeding a crocodile and hoping to be the last one eaten. Levitsky, Way, and me today in New York Times www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/o...
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- Nice idea: isolate the "objective" component of democracy scores by training a machine learning model to predict subjective scores with observable data. If we must work with democracy scores -- which I would say we shouldn't as they are historically/conceptually incoherent -- this is a good approach
- Looks pretty cool...!
- 🚨 Very excited that our paper on *Rulers on the Road* has been cond. accepted at the AJPS @ajpseditor.bsky.social. We analyze emperors' strategies of itinerant rule in the Holy Roman Empire 919-1519. Fun working with @claranw.bsky.social, @andrejkokkonen.bsky.social & Jørgen Møller shorturl.at/Spm7z
- I find it particularly galling that the researchers behind this paper engaged in a massive deception experiment with terrible ethics but have made every effort to hide their identity and remain anonymous
- The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988
- my attempts to train a GAN to simulate satellite imagery have failed badly / but also look kind of cool nonetheless
- These llm persuasion papers are the ultimate low hanging fruit papers and are fine as long as they are on recruited samples. But as soon as this gets out into real world spaces this going to be the next proliferating audit studies, deception experiments w legislators etc — stuff w real costs.
- The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaUniversity leaders need to understand: they are holding INCREDIBLY good cards. It is so rare in today's polarized era to have the support of 70+ percent of the public against the Trump admiministration on anything. Universities have that—AND winning legal arguments.
- There is a case to be made that habeas corpus lies historically at the heart of the whole enterprise of constitutional / limited government. These people are idiots.
- Look at the miserable consequences of appeasement for Columbia. This is the only way. Please faculty put pressure on your respective institutions to do the same.
- A quotation from Niall Ferguson (1999) on bond markets (19th century):
- Old view: the American bureaucracy is just a spoils system Revisionist view: the American bureaucracy actually accumulated a lot of power, expertise, and autonomy over time Revisionist revisionist view: the American bureaucracy is just a spoils system
- Why did I automatically assume this referred to Cass Sunstein….
- Admirable (and smart re: diffusing the financial impact via bonds)
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaPrinceton has announced that it is considering selling approximately $320 million of taxable bonds. The bonds are a way for the University to raise short-term funds. The major credit-rating agencies rate University bonds AAA, the highest level of creditworthiness.
- Is there any evidence that university presidents are meeting, coordinating responses, or even (ideally) making commitments to pool resources on this matter? If not, why not? I really struggle to understand the complete absence of attempts at collective action BUT maybe I'm just not privy to them
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- Looking forward to presenting some new work on the rise of the right in India this Friday..!
- Consistently bringing the best data-driven assessments of the state of American democracy on here...
- This is also the first step of the politics of apartheid authoritarianism, imported from Israel and South Africa (and revived from the US South), going from concept to implementation in the US...in the sense that it's going to be specific outgroups that lose their political rights
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- I was reflecting— I suspect the polyannaish attitude of some Americanists and so many observers is because it’s hard to believe how quickly this dynamic can spin out of control if you haven’t seen it before. It is textbook early-stage India, Turkey, Hungary, etc… www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/u...
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- The directness of control is an exaggeration, but whatever your position, it absolutely does shape pedagogy. That is kind of the stated aim, no, of things like requiring DEI statements at different stages of academic hiring/review..
- This is a great example of something so clear once pointed out with data
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaThe DOGE firings have nothing to do with “efficiency” or “cutting waste.” They’re a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as liberal. This was evident from the start, and now the data confirms it: targeted agencies overwhelmingly those seen as more left-leaning. 🧵⬇️
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- The Cold War and role of external assistance/technology transfer/security from the US in a context of fear of communism is a bit neglected in standard institutional stories (eg the ‘developmental state) of the East Asian miracle
- A thought on the constitutional importance of bureaucrats: actual decisions/actions are carried out by bureaucrats, not judges or politicians. In the face of conflicting directives, in some sense bureaucrats determine what the law requires. So they become pivotal in a constitutional crisis…
- Bangladesh is a good illustration of what can happen when autocrats and their cronies capture a country’s financial infrastructure: www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/b...
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- I think this would be a sound approach. It’s obvious what the tariffs are — effectively a national sales tax paid by consumers to fund transfers to the top 1%. These are also the biggest campaign contributors to Trump. Deter this lunacy by targeting penalties at the beneficiaries.
- the diagram of the ‘trade spiral’ is a great one
- Glad to see this out in print in the current issue of APSR! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
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- The case of LA illustrates a broader problem: mayors/local politicians are in general are essentially incredibly incompetent, lack capacity, and not up to the task of governing polities/economies of this scale. The US federal system was designed for an agrarian society not the urban age
- Very interesting. Just a correlation but there are plausible mechanisms
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- Also why scholars argue that Africa’s political development was different than Europe’s (due to land abundance/population scarcity). Land oriented institutions like feudalism or territorial sovereignty based states were not as important (is the claim, I’m not an expert). See two great books below:
- I designate varieties of capitalism an intellectual disaster for the diagrams alone (also the semi-random circling of countries in scatter plots after truncating the data to rich countries only)
- Reading this review essay on William Labov this morning, came across a memorable quip: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
- Blogged about some recent research on the political consequences of technological change in agriculture: blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/20...
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- A good piece in the unhinged Dem fund-raising emails. I was receiving dozens everyday in the run up to the elections. I assumed it must have been some kind organized spoofing campaign. Sadly more likely an artifact of political consultants and the Dem fundraising ecosystem (ActBlue etc) run amok.
- Not only is writing thinking, but IMO LLMs are evidence of this proposition. An algorithm trained to complete sentences/respond to prompts can effectively reason and construct implicit models of the world (pretty crude ones: arxiv.org/abs/2406.03689)
- Recently published a chapter on "Natural Experiments and Historical Social Science" which discusses when natural experiments work well (approximating John Snow's work on cholera) and when they are don't (resembling 'cargo cult science')...👇: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xxuhy...
