This country would be far better off if, once a month, we all clocked out a little early, headed down to the local brewery, ordered some carne asada fries and just kicked it while a cover band played biker rock jams.

ngl the updated branding for @bsky.app is bold

It's basically impossible to have any sort of nuanced discussion on this site about AI without it devolving into a shouting match about it. People are genuinely angry about it for a lot of valid reasons and are channeling that anger into completely destructive and toxic ways online.

good stuff from Paul here

this is a bit right

Agreed. “Let’s one shot a mediocre paper in 15 minutes” is a fun parlor trick but the more exciting thing is the ability to produce higher quality research faster by treating AI like a hyper efficient (if not particularly creative and sometimes mistake-prone) collaborator.

increasingly coming around to the notion that this is a view from a sort of aristocracy that sneers at anyone who is actually trying to, and possibly must, accomplish a goal by completing work

i have never learned so much so quickly than when i started using claude code to teach me things with demonstrations and proofs. just an absolutely incredible tool for learning complex material (but requires prior expertise)

the mind boggles

what's the venn diagram look like between academics who put 500 words on each of their slides and academics who are AI skeptics

so uhh how is everyones' university IT dealing with Claude Code?

Yes yes

why can't we bash both

an important and underdiscussed point on the rise of agentic AI

when you read the phrase "quasi-experimental" what does it mean to you?

if, like me, you were not aware of this: Ghost Criminology is a thing (but it's also not real science):

sean is right about this, but it's not clear what things will look like which is why it's hard to talk about concretely

i mean, if you're using canvas for assignments these days and this is a shock to you i don't know whta to tell you

I have not seen this mentioned here, but this is a great example of how the research world has dramatically changed underneath of us and if you're not keeping up you're going to be left behind quickly: yiqingxu.org/papers/2026_...

@mattgrossmann.bsky.social, @joshmccrain.bsky.social, and I are putting together a panel at PolMeth in July on using CongressData, CSPP, and SenateData. We are aiming to have up to 5 people (preference to junior faculty using the data or interested in doing so). Please reach out to me if interested!

Hard to convince my daughter not to draw on herself when we both have a bunch of tattoos

So little discussion of Claude code on here. We are experiencing an unprecedented shock to how empirical research is done and it's going to primarily affect grad students

this is extremely interesting

new pre-print just dropped! the nationalization of politics at the local level -- specifically within school districts -- affects turnover of school board members and superintendents. osf.io/preprints/so...

continues to blow my mind people use R for data wrangling and don't use the tidyverse tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

Excellent incapsulation of bluesky brain

🧵 New version of our paper (@bcegerod.bsky.social) is finally online: "How Many is Enough? Sample Size in Staggered Difference-in-Differences Designs" We show that even well-identified DiD studies are often underpowered; sample sizes needed are surprisingly large Paper: osf.io/preprints/os... 1/6

So much of classic political science research is woefully underpowered. I'm glad we're slowly coming to our senses.

well put

Parenting a toddler over winter break while my wife has to work

Trump's bellicosity toward Venezuela is a betrayal of everything that the FIFA Peace Prize stands for.

Horrific

there's a huuuuge gap between "using AI for peer review" and "having AI do the peer review for you" fwiw

lots of people responding to this as if it'll get used to replace human samples in academic research. there's no way this is true. this is definitely a tool for testing and simulations -- potentially very valuable here (regardless of what qualtrics is trying to sell it as)

some insane numbers in this story. i asked my office of disability last year when teaching a 420 person class what assistance they provided in meeting each individual accomodation. you can guess the answer. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

more broadly, sure untenured faculty teach undergraduates in this environment?

The implication here is that he put the national guard into a dangerous position (ie a big scary city) , which I think is counter the point wanting to be made

cool paper. yet another way policing is similar to academia

Incredible. Good thing nobody trusts JAMA *touches ear* oh shit

my perspective on this (which is not particularly novel) is that we will need to move exclusively to: a) mail-based samples (or samples that can verify something concrete like voter file); b) in person samples (back to undergraduates); c) elite samples (oof) of course, lots of unknowns here

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

this story is WILD “Lame duck session” was out, because “lame” was offensive. Even “Americans” should be avoided, the guide said, because it excluded non-U. S. citizens. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/u...

it's also possible to convince voters of this! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

PRL welcomes postdoc applications at Dartmouth for 2026-2027. Work with @seanjwestwood.bsky.social & @ylelkes.bsky.social on projects like www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... and elite rhetoric analysis using americaspoliticalpulse.com/elites/ Pls apply by Jan 5 on Interfolio 🙏 apply.interfolio.com/175722

👏👏

absolutely brutal

one of the most exhausting things on here is the self righteousness of people complaining about other people still being on twitter

The Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma is recruiting graduate students who wish to earn PhDs in political science. We want students who are interested in American Politics in a area that can be supervised by one of our three faculty (Rachel Blum, Chuck Finocchiaro and myself).

i just continue to be amazed at how much i've been able to learn via ChatGPT since it got "smarter". Just an incredible tool for researchers who already have a strong technical background

it's actually fine if you don't want to vote for/send money to/post favorably about a guy who accidentally got a Nazi tattoo while drunk and kept it because he thought it looked cool. that doesn't make you unreasonably closed-minded.