The one and only upside to the heatwaves already engulfing many parts of the world is how much I’m learning about ancient AC systems (more in quoted thread).

🚀 "ntwrk": A Stata package for network analysis 🚀 ⭐ Yesterday at the @statacorp.bsky.social Germany 2026 conference in Munich, I showcased the #ntwrk package: github.com/asjadnaqvi/s... The package is a designed for both network analysis and graph layouts. Check it out! Up soon SSC.

📣 The terrific Lara Türmer will present new research on the effectiveness of digital memorial interventions to strenghten democratic resilience at #EPSS2026 today. 📅 Thursday, 18 June 2026 🕜 13:30–15:10 📍 Hall 1A (ICC) #Democracy @epssnet.bsky.social @humboldt-govlab.bsky.social

Why do arguments often change people’s beliefs without changing their attitudes? In a new APSR with @scottclifford.bsky.social and @patrickpliu.bsky.social, we point to belief relevance: arguments are more persuasive when they grapple with the idiosyncratic reasons people hold their political views.

Publication day! My contribution to Volume 26 of the Annual Review of Political Science, "Participatory Democracy and Its Limits" is now officially available and is OPEN ACCESS (meaning freely available to all): www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Information science is asking, “How do people look for Waldo?”

MONDAY @ 1 PM: LA Charter reform is going into overtime at the Rules Committee, with one more meeting to discuss reforms for: - LAPD accountability; - non-citizen voting; & - personnel reforms. More meeting info: bit.ly/FRLA26 Email to support LAPD reform: tinyurl.com/CRPolice

My favorite policy book of the year is Reform as Process (Columbia University Press 2026) by Martin Williams from Michigan. I wrote a post on why I think this book deserves a wide audience, including scholars, students, and practitioners. jaeyeonkim.substack.com/p/my-favorit...

I called Katy's office this morning to ask for all three!

#AcademicSky On the value of education: “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life” - Judith Shaprio (former president of Barnard College)

🚨 FRIDAY 6/12 @ 1 PM: LA City Council's Rules Committee meets to discuss Charter reform one last time — just as the Chief Legislative Analyst says “further study is required” on almost all major reforms. Tell Council: No more “study", and no more stalling! Info + talking points: bit.ly/FRLA26

Did you know you can search for R packages by what they do, as opposed to just their names? Look! 👉🏼 rwarehouse.netlify.app @kylieainslie.bsky.social made The Warehouse for just this purpose. Send it to a new R programmer today ❤️ because it's the resource we all wish we'd had at some point #rstats

Registration is now open for #TSRConf 2026! Join us at Stanford University for conversations on platform accountability, #AI governance, online harms, transparency, and digital policy. Sign up by July 15 for early-bird pricing! 🔗 stanford.io/3SgrmWl #TrustAndSafety #OnlineSafety

‘Willingness to pay in attention is really different than willingness to pay in dollars.’ Cool research covered by @joshuabenton.com of @niemanlab.org on the difference between clickbait and substance in converting readers to newspaper subscribers.

How can we better insulate federal funding to universities from political interference? In a new essay, @dorfonlaw.bsky.social proposes new models for distributing research funds outside direct government control to help protect research and academic freedom.

I'm pleased to see our paper introducing the Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED), an events-based dataset on democratic erosion, finally out in Nature Scientific Data. In our data, we distinguish between resistance, precursors, symptoms, and destabilizing events www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What if polling organizations aren’t just passive recorders of political sentiment but also shape the agendas of other policy institutions? Qian Zhang @peterenns.bsky.social and I ask this question in @psjeditor.bsky.social (open access) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Brazil’s new framework for regulating addictive design bans features such as infinite scroll and autoplay for minors, but its long-term impact will depend on how regulators define its scope and enforce the rules, argues Victor Oliveira Fernandes.

New Paper: "Measuring Group Alignment in Public Opinion" The standard for issue polling is to report issue-by-issue agreement, yet democratic representation hinges whether coalitions can agree on *issue platforms*. This paper tells you exactly how to do that.

I'm looking for a new PhD student to come join me at UAlberta & Amii to study trans perspectives on AI policy & the future of AI as part of my new lab. The position is fully funded and offers access to a range of supports - more details in the poster below!

The LA Reporter’s guide for monitoring the situation (of the LA city election) thelareporter.la/p/the-la-rep...

Ahead of election day tomorrow*, I built an analysis of Los Angeles' political demography based on past voting patterns and projected neighborhood-by-neighborhood across the five main mayoral candidates three-las.talevy.soccer *(of course, results won't be clear until several days after)

Due to the inevitable failure of the Cultural Blockade and the irresistability of Luzian cartoons, there are now 66 wolves inside you #ZeroParades

LA VOTERS: want to know where mayoral candidate @nithyaforthecity.bsky.social stands on reforming City Hall? See what they had to say about Council size, ranked choice voting, and other Charter reform proposals, at: fairrepla.com/2026

Excited to share my new paper w/ @janzilinsky.bsky.social that's conditionally accepted at @ajpseditor.bsky.social 🎉 Is there a general "anti-technology" orientation among Americans? We built a scale and found that worries about social media, AI, and modernity do form a coherent disposition.

Americans say they want less inequality. Why don’t they support policies to reduce it? New paper: across 31 nationally representative survey waves (N=384,248) and a preregistered experiment (N=1,009), Americans favor PREdistributive over REdistributive policies 🧵 osf.io/preprints/so...

Looking forward to starting Pride month with a little bit of queer history!

New research from colleagues at UCD found that while AI chatbots can give useful information about upcoming elections, they sometimes return incomplete, inconsistent, or outright false answers & the choice of chatbot matters! See our full blog here: bit.ly/4dzKjvF 🧵 Below!

What is going on with Rae Huang’s matching funds? thelareporter.la/p/what-is-go... Lefty mayoral candidate celebrated 'unlocking' matching funds, but two months later, she hasn't qualified for them, prompting accusations of lying. Her campaign says it was "human error," life disruptions.

On my to-read list -- and the author is releasing it online, chapter-by-chapter, at book.tdda.info! Sign up to be notified about new chapter releases at: book.tdda.info/notify/

Today on @indicator.media: A handful of anonymous bots have taken over fact-checking on X. This isn’t hyperbole. In the first three weeks of May, just eight AI contributors wrote 50.3% of all visible Community Notes on the platform.

#Data visualization can help democratize public safety budgets—making it easier for #communities to shape decisions. Join Urban on 6/8 @ 3 p.m. ET for a virtual event to hear CI:Now, ACT 4 SA and the Polis Center share tools + lessons. https://urbn.is/4fw0v26 #LiveatUrban

Tomorrow at 12pm ET/6pm CET. We will be speaking with activists from Israel's Protest Headquarters about Israel's autocratization as well as lessons learned and what the democracy protests in Israel mean for the country's upcoming critical election (scheduled to be held in October at the latest).

Politics by Formula: How Congressional Policymaking Creates Disparities is now out! I show how politics shapes and often distorts important federal programs, driving inequalities across states.

PDLA’s work on Los Angeles Charter Reform was just featured in The Guardian, alongside stories from the broader democracy movement happening in the U.S. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

It's election season in LA, and Angelenos deserve answers: where do candidates for a seat at City Hall stand on reform? See what they had to say about Council size, ranked choice voting, and other Charter reform proposals. Survey responses at: fairrepla.com/2026

This is valuable work, partly because it counters the idea that you can easily nudge the public into supporting climate policy. A three-hour active workshop increased support from either a minority to... a slightly larger minority, or from a slight majority to... a slightly larger majority.

Reminder that I maintain a periodically-updated reading list of papers at the intersection of E2EE and Trust & Safety; suggestions welcome: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

THURSDAY, 5/21, 1 PM: LA City Council's Rules Committee takes up City Council expansion, lowering the voting age, and other elections & ethics reforms. It's been over 100 years since Council last expanded...isn't LA ready for a change? Meeting info at: bit.ly/FRLA26

What is "AI for libraries" beyond a catalogue chatbot? IMO: design patterns (OCR, extraction, classification, search), and agents that both run them and develop the small models behind them. As part of work with @natlibscot.bsky.social started a book on this: danielvanstrien.xyz/ai-patterns-...

𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸𝘀𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗽𝗮𝘀𝘁 “𝗶𝗻𝗼𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲” 𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝘁𝘀 𝘃𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗴𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀? A few months back @movadek.bsky.social & I promised we would try to find out. 𝗪𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗻𝗲𝘄𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗦𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗮: tinyurl.com/2add6c2a (1/7)

Our chapter! preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/... "AI is more likely to reinforce existing patterns of [information] exposure and behavior than it is to transform how people understand and relate to the political world" (w/@jenpans.bsky.social @aasiegel.bsky.social @yamilrvelez.bsky.social)

❗Confrontational tactics like street blockades and food attacks on art hurt activists' image, but not their cause. 📄 New paper out in Political Behavior (@polbehavior.bsky.social) w/ @dasalgon.bsky.social @sophiahunger.bsky.social & @swenhutter.bsky.social. 🧵1/7

Looking forward to tuning in bright and early from the West Coast! (Working Teams link for those interested: teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/...)

new working paper w/ @mako.cc: we argue that the focus on combating problematic information flowing through media systems has not kept pace with a more consequential threat: efforts to capture or destroy the very institutions we rely on to steward shared knowledge. osf.io/preprints/so...

Variety of, & so choice in, media can beat oligarchic control. Chalk this one up to competition, folks. Sometimes it works wonders.

"The purpose of a system is what it does" as applied to governance means that a democracy that can't make policy -- let alone make rules for *how* it does democracy -- can't stay democratic for long.

Making politics cognitively tractable to busy or casual citizens is a central imperative and institutional task for any inclusive, equal democracy (Elliott 2023)

Another brick in the (red?) wall that when center left parties mimic right wing parties on immigration, it does not hep them politically.

I aspire to someday be capable of this level of pun-ditry.