🚨 What happens with voters when politicians use simpler language? New @thejop.bsky.social paper with @rsenninger.bsky.social: simple language changes not just what citizens understand, but who they think politicians are. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Remember that recent paper claiming to show that "ideological bias" determined the results obtained by immigration policy research teams? A careful, open-code reanalysis by @kauspurg.bsky.social & Josef Brüderl finds that the result arises from a coding error. —> doi.org/10.31222/osf...

New pub with Camilla Bjarnøe, Kristina Jessen Hansen & Mads Thau What makes political group appeals work? Politicians routinely flatter voter groups but we know little whether it works. We tested class-based flattery appeals using survey experiments in 🇩🇰 Denmark and 🇺🇸 the US.

Excellent news! Nature is expanding Registered Reports to all the fields in which they publish! A great result by all those proposing this strong solution to publication bias and selective reporting (and getting expert feedback before data collection)! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Here are remarks I gave at the Keeping the Republic Conference at Notre Dame. If you’ve followed me over the past decade or so, my skepticism toward the field’s fixation on polarization likely won’t come as much of a surprise. But here they are, for what they’re worth. substack.com/home/post/p-...

The DNC "autopsy" omits the biggest reason Democrats lost in 2024: inflation and anti-incumbent sentiment. In doing so, it fails to incentivize party actors to think about how they will overcome the same negative forces in 2030 and 2032 www.gelliottmorris.com/p/the-dnc-au...

New piece in Science: Sudden elimination of USAID grants triggered waves of violence in affected regions in Africa, undermining civic governance and fueling civic unrest. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New paper out in Nature Human Behaviour. "Government policy documents across 185 countries largely cite Global North sources" with @seramirezruiz.bsky.social DOI: doi.org/10.1038/s415... Ungated: rdcu.be/fh0Ss

The Voting Rights Act is essentially dead and it’s quite possible that we will, like when a similar SCOTUS gutted civil rights at the fall of Reconstruction, see a disappearance of much of the Black congressional representation, especially in the most heavily Black states, which are in the South.

📄 New paper with a fantastic MA student @jmschulte.bsky.social: When social democrats move right on migration, do voters actually follow? We study Olaf Scholz's radical shift on migration in Germany (October 2023).

🚨 New WP 📄 (w/ @muzhou-zhang.bsky.social and @winniexia.bsky.social ) We ask which countries people in 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇩🇪🇩🇰🇮🇹🇷🇴 think their governments should learn from and show: 1) Citizens have clear favorites (Nordics top) 2) Performance info shifts what they prefer and how they explain it Comments welcome!

This is completely insane and he should be impeached. It is also extremely confusing. He writes "God Bless the Great People of Iran!" in the same post as he threatens them with annihilation (although I guess it makes sense in a sick way) and brags about having ushered in regime change (he has not).

Popular attitudes are often seen as a safeguard against democratic backsliding: if citizens don’t oppose lib democracy, politicians have little incentive to erode it. In @cpsjournal.bsky.social I argue that, while intuitive, this reasoning conflates two states of the world: doi.org/10.1177/0010...

Delighted our paper (with an amazing group of co-authors) is forthcoming in the APSR Takeaway for Labour and other centre-left parties: fixing public services is key to reducing support for the populist right 👇

New in the American Economic Review: migration doesn't hollow out the home economy — it builds it up. More than 75% of the long-run income gains from migration are domestic. The home economy itself grows. Here's what we found: 🧵

You and whose economy? Group-based retrospection in economic voting by Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard is now available in Early View. @chdausgaard.bsky.social ajps.org/2026/03/20/y...

We got a paper in @pspolisci.bsky.social l on public administration beyond public administration journals A substantial share of quantitatively oriented PA research is being produced in top economics journals! www.cambridge.org/core/journal... @karlemilbendtsen.bsky.social Five stylized facts:

Our latest on the Orban System: how a dozen or so businessmen closely tied to the Hungarian premier hit gold from state contracts when he took over www.ft.com/content/70c2...

Do conjoint/factorial/vignette experiments reflect choices in the real world? Are hypothetical scenarios in the artificial survey context externally valid? Do hypothetical bias, intention-behavior gap and social desirability biases undermine validity? Two cautionary studies on this question:

‼️The FT has launched a four-part series on Orbán and the Orbán government. The first part focused on Russian interference in support of Fidesz; this second part deals with the “family’s” enrichment. You wouldn’t believe it, but the FT mapped out their real estate empire from the air ✈️

It’s basically criminology 101 that arrest quotas destroy civil liberties

The only thing popularists fear more than an unpopular idea from the left is a popular one that might actually threaten billionaires.

AOC: “That’s one reason he must be removed from office - if the Epstein files have such a hold on Trump & this admin that they are willing to plunge us & risk world war in order to save themselves politically - that is the definition of someone who cant make objective decisions for the American ppl”

Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ... Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups? Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com: tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf

🔥Revised paper🔥 More regressions. More tests of mechanisms. Same story. Tldr: Brexit caused much regulatory uncertainty at a moment when UK state capacity was v weak, and hard-to-regulate companies (aka oil firms) did not think twice and generated a mess in the high seas. Now with full receipts ⬇️

I am extremely honored, and equally perplexed, that my book has received the Stein Rokkan Prize. Thank you so much to everyone who helped out with this project along the way. So much of the book is the result of feedback by kind people who took the time to listen and read. Thank you.

Wild how economists and political scientists worry so much about unbiased tests **in their papers** and yet basically ignore how their journals filter on significance. Given our noisy tests, the latter creates huge bias away from zero.

In bookstores in the UK on May 21 Very much looking forward to this

Very glad that our first DEMNORM paper found such a great home at @thejop.bsky.social. If you’re interested in the role of social desirability in online surveys, check out the thread and paper below ⬇️

Congratulations to our faculty member Andrew Bertoli, whose paper on analyzing the impact of events through surveys has just come out in @psrm.bsky.social! 🎉 🎉🎉 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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.

Nice to see it all dressed up! Our paper on politicians' wages, corruption and criminal violence is out in the February issue of AEJ:Policy. Check it out at: www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

For absolutely no reason, let me remind people of this banger of a paper by @caroartc.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.jp...

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

Why did antisemitism rise in Germany during the Covid pandemic? And why was this increase concentrated among political centrists, rather than on the fringes? doi.org/10.1017/S153... @kanol.bsky.social @wzb.bsky.social @uni-hamburg.de @politikuhh.bsky.social @socfub.bsky.social

Reminder that, as of the latest reports, Liam Ramos is still in prison in Texas - now for 5 days. His parents are legal asylum seekers with no criminal record.

I'm hiring two three-year postdocs and an RA for my project on how police presence affects perceived safety. I'm looking for candidates who can contribute to the theoretical development and who have strong expertise in causal inference. Deadline: March 1. www.stillinger.aau.dk/videnskabeli...

I love this project. It's very smart and has very important implications. Do make sure to read it if you haven't already:

📄 New WP version out: revised text, tightened argument, and new analysis. The Politics of Evidence Selection (w/ @jesperasring.bsky.social) Grateful for the helpful comments and presentation opportunities. Further feedback welcome! 🔗 osf.io/preprints/so...

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this: America's problems are solved problems. Just not here. What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

We just had a week that changed everything, including my view of impeachment. Before: Wait until 2027. Now: Embrace it in 2026 and hold hearing-like forums to spotlight the many articles of impeachment filed against Trump and his cabinet. My latest @thebulwark.com www.thebulwark.com/p/embracing-...

I think this is really bad. And wrong. The point is, more or less, that if Trump doesn't do exactly as Hitler (and for some reason not Mussolini, the "founder" of fascism) then he cannot be a fascist. The main points where Trump differs is 1) that he does not like war and prefer small operations.

No matter how you slice it, US police officers are safer on the job and paid waaaaay more than other countries' police despite doing a…less than stellar job The question isn't more police vs. less police. It's why are US police paid so much while doing such little and such poor police work?

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the release of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and the advent of the late-2000s electro-pop era, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.

Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪

New paper alert! "Public Speakers With Nonnative Accents Garner Less Engagement" -- now out in Psych Science! This is my first graduate student's first first-author paper (and it was her first-year project). Short THREAD on the results:

Political communication research overwhelmingly relies on text. But parliamentary speech is multimodal! In our new @psrm.bsky.social article, Mathias Rask and I show that legislators also signal partisan conflict nonverbally— through changes in vocal pitch during floor speeches. 🧵 1/11 #polisky

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts www.nber.org/papers/w34524 via @florianederer.bsky.social