Valentin Lang

Lucan Way and I have been writing about competitive authoritarianism for more than 25 years. We never thought we'd write this piece. www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/com...

Yesterday, I was appointed Professor at Saarland University @uni-saarland.de I look forward to meeting many new colleagues and to continuing my research and teaching on political economy and economic policy there! www.uni-saarland.de/en/news/vale...

It's time. Time to write about this style of writing. Which I've done here. substack.com/home/post/p-...

"Historical exposure to #immigration has no electoral effects when #immigration is not salient, but new immigration waves activate latent differences in political preferences." @valentinlang.bsky.social et al paper using forced migration across Germany. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The @financialtimes.com has a longer analysis of the election results in Sachsen-Anhalt with data from @juliusk.bsky.social and comments by @indubioproreto.bsky.social @posch-daniel.bsky.social and myself today: www.ft.com/content/ef6d...

For years I've tracked billionaire excess. Each year I show students a chart that blows their minds. This year I had to redraw it for a trillionaire: Elon Musk, $1.32T. Depressing that we're here. Silver lining: couldn't have happened to a less deserving person, proof that wealth ≠ merit.

Out in @jeeanews.bsky.social: our paper on the long-run evolution of wealth in Germany! 🥳

V-Dem v.16 is now released, w. updated scores for 2025. Most countries remain stable from 2024, but some clear improvements (on diff’t democracy indices), incl. S. Korea, Sri Lanka & Mauritius. Largest declines came, by far, in the US. This figure shows 10-yr changes on the Liberal Dem. index.

As the Hormuz crisis becomes a food security crisis, the @wfp.org is going into 2026 in a massive funding hole due to aid retrenchment by the US and many European donors facing the prospect of rearmament. The geopolitics driving the crisis are also leaving the cupboard bare for crisis response.

❓ Ständig im Krisenmodus? ❗ Wie wir als Gemeinschaft Krisen bewältigen 📆 Mi., 11.3., 17:30 📍 Aula im Mannheimer Schloss Öffentliche Podiumsdiskussion mit den MZES-Forschern Marc Helbling, @valentinlang.bsky.social und Kolleg*innen verschiedener Disziplinen: 👉 www.uni-mannheim.de/newsroom/pre...

Morgen Abend Podiumsdiskussion hier👇 Freuen uns auf Besuch! www.uni-mannheim.de/newsroom/pre...

Baden-Württemberg was divided into an American and a French occupation zone after WW2 along a highway. Settlement patterns of German refugees from the East differed, and so does the vote for the AfD today. 👇🏻

Wer vor der Landtagswahl am Sonntag noch etwas richtig interessantes über Wahlergebnisse in Baden-Württemberg lesen will, hier entlang:

1/3 A new study by @valentinlang.bsky.social & Stephan A Schneider suggests that 🇩🇪 regions that received a high number of refugees in the wake of WWII are less likely to be deceived by the siren songs of far-right parties in today’s elections than regions that received few migrants in the late 1940s

It’s insane this is legal. People around Trump are profiting off war and death. I’m introducing legislation ASAP to ban this.

must read 👇

IE SPEGA had the pleasure to host the 18th edition of @the-peio.bsky.social, a truly transatlantic conference that brings together senior and junior scholars from both sides of the Atlantic doing state-of-the-art work in the fields of international political economy and international organizations.

If you're in Europe and just waking up, here are the 60+ bodies - around half of them under the UN umbrella - from which the US has withdrawn

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

Don’t say you weren’t warned. New poll suggests Jordan Bardella would win second round of 🇫🇷 presidential election against any other of four tested candidates ⬇️

AI presents a fundamental threat to our ability to use polls to assess public opinion. Bad actors who are able to infiltrate panels can flip close election polls for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Models will also infer and confirm hypotheses in experiments. Current quality checks fail

Happy to share that our paper on the ideological biases of international organizations is now out in the current issue of the AJPS (@ajpseditor.bsky.social): dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajps... @the-peio.bsky.social @mzesunimannheim.bsky.social @akentikelenis.bsky.social

Latest projection suggests that more than 505,000 adults and kids have died due to USAID's illegal dismantling by Musk, Rubio, and Lewin Source: www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?vi...

Last week, OpenAI finally released GPT-5, which many had hoped would usher in the next significant leap in A.I. capabilities. But it is just the latest product to suggest that A.I. might not get much better.

Our paper with @nicolaslagios.bsky.social & @ilantojerow.bsky.social is now out in the Economic Journal ( @resmedia.bsky.social). It shows that demonstrating against the far-right in France had the intended effect. 1/18 academic.oup.com/ej/article-a... 1/18

Freue mich drauf!

Important and interesting work on EU regional cohesion policies and how they need to be reformed.

Yesterday, the Commission proposed piling a whole heap of new goals—from competitiveness to defense—onto the EU’s regional policy. Since that’s pretty much the opposite of what @valentinlang.bsky.social, @danbischof.bsky.social, and I argued in a recent paper, a quick recap of our main points:

sickening grotesque repugnant horrifying repugnant nauseating shameful shame shame shame shame shame

Rubio’s position seems to be: - We get to say who is a terrorist. Our decision is final. It can’t be challenged. Just trust us. - Once we decide you are a terrorist, we can immediately deport you. No judges. - After we deport you, we can make you rot in a foreign prison. No criminal charges needed.

This is exactly what the Erdogan regime used to do (before it got all the compliant courts it needed): remove judges that rule against it.

Europe urgently needs to ramp up defense spending. But it must do so without risking a repeat of the euro crisis. @lucasguttenberg.bsky.social and I think the Commission’s current plan to use the flexibility built in the EU’s fiscal rules will not achieve this. Short thread: tinyurl.com/327u4ph6

💥 New: Will the IMF survive Donald Trump’s presidency? ✍️ Robert H. Wade @lseid.bsky.social writes ahead of tonight's @lseevents.bsky.social event on the "new Washington consensus" blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2...

Here is United States law regarding the President's attempts to close our development assistance agency in secret over the weekend. It is illegal. No ambiguity. Americans decide with their actions, today, if the US is a country of laws or—something else. —> crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/...

1/8 The claim that "the World Bank is bankrolling economic growth in China" does not make any sense. China is actually an important source of income for the World Bank. A short thread 🧵 nypost.com/2025/01/29/b...

Zur Bundestagswahl 2025 habe ich mit @pluggedchris.bsky.social, @annakurella.bsky.social und @jocmuel.bsky.social das Tool #PartyCheck auf Basis der OES 2025 Parteipositionen entwickelt. Nach 15 Fragen bekommt ihr einen Match. Schaut doch mal rein! party-check.org

Also for the international crowd: #Instagram censors “Democrat” as a search term, while allowing “Republican” and seems to prioritize anti-leftwing content in search queries for alternative search terms. #DSA

For the European Stability Mechanism, we wrote a new paper on inequality during the Euro Crisis in Greece and Portugal. www.esm.europa.eu/publications... tl;dr: changing incomes from pensions and transfers have played a crucial role, especially for the most vulnerable.

People don't really think any of this! Overestimates of small proportions are a quirk of general innumeracy, not genuine misperceptions. See research by @brianguay.bsky.social et al: —PNAS forthcoming: www.brianguay.com/files/guay_2... —Psychonomic Bulletin 2017: link.springer.com/article/10.3...

The CfP for the #German #Development #Economics (GDE) conference 2025 is out, hosted by #Goethe university in #Frankfurt on June 12-13 (keynote: Lori Beaman). Send us your best development papers: events.gwdg.de/e/gde2025. @heidland.bsky.social @langlotzsarah.bsky.social

Bold move from the Spanish government, which is going to regularise about 300,000 #undocumented #immigrants per year. They must have read the recent JOLE paper by Elias, Monras, and Vasquez Grenno on the effects of the 2005 amnesty: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.... #econsky #migcitsky

Highly recommended piece by @codendahl.bsky.social that also covers some of our research on the economic effects of EU regional policies with @valentinlang.bsky.social and @danbischof.bsky.social.