@jhkirkland1
Professor of Politics and Policy at UVa. Legislatures, Representation, Public Opinion, Subnational Politics, all the good stuff. Co-editor of Cambridge Studies in American Legislatures (Cambridge.org/AmericanLegislatures)
For those interested in measuring political violence, check out Lily and Nathan's new review paper below. See also my forthcoming paper at POQ (w/ @llopez.bsky.social and Lucas Lothamer) introducing our own measure scottaclifford.com/wp-content/u...
any scholarship on state rivalries that people recommend?
The broader point: LLMs can persuade, but once politics enters the picture, their power runs into real limits.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.18092
We’re also considering moving to some version of oral exams at least in some subfields.
*Academics of Bluesky:* Do you know a great UG/PG student with excellent quants skills?
@nspmartin.bsky.social and I are advertising a great fully-funded PhD on MRP and minority voting with our friends at Ipsos, so send them our way! ✌️
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
My take on the partisan expressive responding literature is now in print. Open access: doi.org/10.1017/S000...
I posted about this a few weeks ago and I’m curious about your take. Have we figured out how to reduce the environmental impacts of AI data centers yet? I‘m trying to stay open minded about this stuff, but the carbon and water footprints of AI seem awfully large.
I am once again asking you to read Marshall (2022) before running a close-election RDD
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
New w/@scottclifford.bsky.social.
Lots of work uses agree-disagree scales, and a lit review shows these are 1) frequently just measured in one direction (agree = higher trait) and 2) correlated with each other.
This has potentially big issues for conclusions.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🚨 Please share widely! 🚨
I'm hiring a postdoc (from Aug 1) to help build a new research program on politically sustainable immigration policies at Notre Dame.
Looking for a social scientist with strong quant skills, familiarity with new computational tools, and interest in public-facing research.
📢 Registration Reminder for EPSS Belfast 2026
If you haven't registered already, please note that the registration deadline for the EPSS Belfast Conference is Friday, 13 March 👇🏼
Register here: app.oxfordabstracts.com/register/eve...
"Revisiting Ideology Measures in Political Surveys" by Ken Kollman and John E. Jackson. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"Democrats Versus Democracy: The Southern Response to the Voting Rights Act" by Mayya Komisarchik.
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
This paper got presented at PolNet back in like 2012 or something I think: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
Legislators Are Raising Money Instead of Making Policy
By rewarding fundraising, parties miss out on diverse leaders & effective legislators. But states that reform make more policy.
New #ScienceOfPolitics with Michael Kistner on Paying for the Party
www.niskanencenter.org/legislators-...
The debate over DHS funding is ongoing. How has opinion shifted on this topic in recent years?
In POQ, Ollerenshaw & Jardina find that opposition to federal spending on border security has dramatically increased among Democrats.
Read more: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...
🚨 New paper out at @ajpseditor.bsky.social 🚨
Do the public hold meaningful attitudes? Using the case of abortion policy preferences, we provide strong evidence that policy prefrences can be coherent, stable over time, and causally explain vote choice.
doi.org/10.1111/ajps...
Article: The political effects of X’s feed algorithm Abstract: Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
Figure 2. ITT estimates of feed-setting changes on engagement and political attitudes. ITT effect estimates of switching the algorithm on and off (in s.d.). Left, effect of moving from the chronological to the algorithmic feed for users initially on the chronological feed. Right, effect of moving in the opposite direction for users initially on the algorithmic feed. For each outcome, the results of two specifications are reported. Blue, unconditional estimates with robust s.e., controlling only for the initial feed setting and, where applicable, pre-treatment outcome levels. Orange: conditional estimates, controlling for pre-treatment covariates using GRFs; 90% and 95% CIs are reported. Numerical effect sizes and P values correspond to the conditional estimates (all tests are two-sided). The unit of observation is respondent. From top to bottom, sample sizes are n = 4,965, n = 3,337, n = 4,965, n = 4,965, n = 4,596, n = 4,596 and n = 4,850. Tests are described in Methods. Supplementary Information Table 2.16 reports the exact numerical point estimates, s.e., CIs and sample sizes for every specification. All outcomes are standardized. Additional results are presented in Supplementary Information section 2. PCA, first principal component from principal component analysis.
X's algorithm is in fact doing what you think it's doing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Seeing some AI boosterism of late and I’m trying to learn a bit more about the state of the art. Just for my own edification… have we figured out how to reduce the environmental impacts of AI data centers yet, or are we just not worried about that anymore?
🚨🎉 New Publication! 🎉🚨
Measuring Factional Conflict: A Comparative Approach Using Party Leadership Contests
w/ @malpas.bsky.social & @blumrm.bsky.social
Out now in Party Politics. 🔗 doi.org/10.1177/1354...
(🧵 below)
My brother wanted a London pub crawl. The result? My new Substack post: "Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next?" How private equity reshaped the local, which pubs are most at risk and most importantly what to do about it.
open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...
I was watching Lonesome Dove just this weekend. RIP indeed.
This is a unique opportunity for junior scholars of extremism and democracy. You do NOT want to miss it. Apply!
@adamramey.bsky.social warns Big Five–politics findings may be distorted by who completes surveys. New data show Agreeable & Neurotic respondents finish at different rates, shifting estimated trait–behavior links—watch for selection bias.
Read more here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Anderson, Byles, Calianos, Francis, Kot, Mosk, Seo, Vizbaras & Nyhan: boosting warmth toward the other party didn’t change intent to share true/false news or discernment. But accuracy reminders modestly improved discernment among political news sharers.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
We have a vacant position as Associate Professor in Political Science (International Relations). Deadline April 29. Please apply or distribute. www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.
I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
Friends, can I ask you to spread the word that we have a THREE-YEAR postdoc in American history at Cambridge up for grabs - ANY field, but applications are due March 1 so don't delay - apply, apply, apply! networks.h-net.org/jobs/69790/u...
