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

NEW ARTICLE: @palesl.bsky.social, Vesa Koskimaa and I have an letter out in JOP, "Politicians talk less about the future as they age" doi.org/10.1086/739406 (1/10)

Really proud of our new article in @apsrjournal.bsky.social!! @nicoravanilla.bsky.social @matthewjnanes.bsky.social What does citizen contact do to police attitudes in conflict settings? For those interested in bureaucrats, embeddedness, conflict, mixed methods: doi.org/10.1017/S000...

Do architecture and urban planning affect political behavior? Happy to share a paper that @tesaliarizzo.bsky.social and I have coming out at the APSR which uses computer vision to investigate how the built environment shapes inequalities in civic participation in Mexico: osf.io/preprints/so.... 🧵1/5

📄 New WP version out - full overhaul! The Politics of Evidence Selection (w/ @jesperasring.bsky.social ) Comments welcome! 🔗 osf.io/preprints/so...

My response to the NYT’s “moderate to win” argument: The data shows the strategy is tapped out. Being seen as moderate by voters doesn’t boost votes, replacing every progressive with moderates would net 0 seats, and the graveyard of defeated D incumbents if full of moderates, not progressives.

How common are “survey professionals” - people who take dozens of online surveys for pay - across online panels, and do they harm data quality? Our paper, FirstView at @politicalanalysis.bsky.social, tackles this question using browsing data from three U.S. samples (Facebook, YouGov, and Lucid):

This seems important in a world where so many countries are turning against immigration: "A structural estimation of a model of endogenous growth and migrations suggests the increased immigration to the US since 1965 may have increased innovation and wages by 5%."

Do high workloads force bureaucrats to discriminate? In a published paper at the @thejop.bsky.social, I challenge the dominant explanation of discrimination in public service delivery. Surprisingly, I find that bureaucrats are able to handle substantial workloads without discriminating.

Our article “Unsuccessful Candidates Are More Concerned About Electoral Fairness than Election Winners” is now online @thejop.bsky.social Using RDD and elite survey data from Denmark, we show that losing candidates express greater concern about electoral fairness. 🔗 doi.org/10.1086/734240

Economic crises tend to favour the right. Voters tend to assign greater importance to issues owned by the right. When center-right parties preside over a crisis, voters often drift further rightward to nationalist parties rather than defect to the left onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A new @ajpseditor.bsky.social paper claims that building *any* public housing costs the largest incumbent party in 🇩🇪 municipalities around 0.5 % pts. I don't think this estimate is right. Alternative estimation strategies suggests effects that are between eight and forty times smaller (1/n)

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand: $678M raised through those spam tactics $282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies. $11M to actual campaigns (1.6%) The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

🧵Introducing the Trump Action Tracker website! Today I’m launching www.trumpactiontracker.info - a live, searchable list of authoritarian‑style actions from Trump’s second term (over 740 actions so far). 1/14

Analyzing scientists' biographies during the baby boom, we find that mothers have a unique life cycle pattern of productivity. Children reduce the productivity of mothers but not fathers, with important implications for promotions and participation. buff.ly/39WbYRH

@robmickey.bsky.social & @dziblatt.bsky.social let me post the working paper Why doesn't police reform work? Because police depts can't credibly commit to their end of the bargain (doing more/better/riskier work in exchange for more $) www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/35o94...

Local reactions to wolf attacks in Germany are not powerful enough to influence the election decisions of many voters www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Democratic Tea Party is happening. But one key difference from the GOP Tea Party is the lack of a Fox News and big money to coordinate it. The Tea Party had a real grassroots element (sorry it's true), but coordination by media & Koch money was crucial web.stanford.edu/~gjmartin/pa...

I’m currently building a dataset on police forces around the globe. No other country has a force quite like ICE (w/ broad enforcement powers, tactical gear, immigration focus); the most apt comparisons are to secret police in authoritarian regimes rather than border/immigration forces elsewhere.

If the GOP reconciliation bill passes, ICE gets through FY2029: - $45 billion for detention, on top of the current annual budget of $3.4 billion - $14.4 billion for transportation and removal, on top of the current annual budget of $750 million - $8 billion for hiring/retention - Billions more.

The Trump admin in a nutshell; in order to justify their own mistake, they’re going to release a violent felon with five deportations so he can testify against the guy with no criminal record they mistakenly deported. In other words, the story is always more important than the principle.

Did some quick math and i think this would represent one of the most dramatic and rapid expansions of prisons/policing/paramilitary forces in world history.

Can we say we are living in a police state now?

If you're still at #EPSA2025 today: Catch our Panel P13-S315: Politicians & Representation 🕐 13:10–14:50 📍 Room -1.A.05 Featuring: @jacklucas.bsky.social, @mathisbr.bsky.social, John Griffin, @mafaldapratas.bsky.social I’m presenting our study on evidence selection by politicians👇

Very excited to share a new preprint. @jesperasring.bsky.social and I study how politicians engage with evidence in the real world. Link: osf.io/8zv9s

To help researchers navigate social desirability bias, this study assesses commonly-used approaches and offers practical guidance on selecting the most suitable tools for different contexts, from Bursztyn, Haaland, Röver, and Roth https://www.nber.org/papers/w33920

Super interesting – and may I say "funny" – design. Well worth the read!

New preprint w. @rsenninger.bsky.social Sharing evidence on immigration with parliamentary candidates, we find that politicians from extreme parties - especially those on the far right - select evidence that aligns with their party's priorities

🚨New WP 🚨 The US plays a dominant role in informing policy worldwide. We show how its expertise shapes global policymaking — but also discuss how political pressures, shifting funding, and challenges to science could put this position at risk. Much more in the paper. Full thread below 👇

Just published in @jpube.bsky.social: "Gulags, crime, and elite violence: Origins and consequences of the Russian mafia" By Jakub Lonsky www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #econsky

LAPD when they think nobody is watching

Here's the one chart you need to see: - Abrego Garcia deported - SCOTUS ruling gets press - News coverage shot up - Google search traffic shot up - Trump approval fell down and then - News media moved on - Trump immigration approval went back up Exactly as predicted by the survey experiment.

From our new issue: "Elite Cues and Noncompliance" by Zachary P. Dickson (@zachdickson.bsky.social‬‬) and Sara B. Hobolt (@sarahobolt.bsky.social‬). #APSRNewIssue www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd. It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

Vi har gennemgået, hvad Israels ministre og talspersoner har sagt om landets nye plan for Gaza. Her er den korte version: Planen er at tvinge Gazas over 2 mio. beboere ned på et område mindre end Ærø 1/9

Men are extremely keen to explain to me that Britain *needs* a domestic steel production plant and doesn't necessarily *need* universities. Okay. Steel contributed about £1.7bn to the UK economy in 2024. Universities contributed more than £200bn.

"We find some evidence that published papers with greater connectivity subsequently receive fewer citations." In short, the publication game is a bit of a rigged game. At least at one particular journal. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

🚨 New publication 🚨 : Happy to share that my paper, "Losing Touch: The Rhetorical Cost of Governing" is now forthcoming at @cpsjournal.bsky.social. Short 🧵 about the paper here 👇 1/10

The Democratic Party’s age problem isn’t just bad, it’s much worse than Republicans’. Half of registered Democratic voters are under 50, yet half their senators are over 67. Despite claiming to represent the future, party leadership systematically blocks younger voices from gaining power.

When politicians use simple language, citizens understand more and see them as less elite. New paper with @danbischof.bsky.social out in @thejop.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1086/736693