Love a concise Amazon review.

Guys today is a red-letter day for bad survey questions. Look at this lovely double negative that just rolled in!

for everyone teaching survey design this fall, great news: a new terrible question example just dropped! (this is from a real survey I just took) 😱

From a Washington Post reader survey I just took. What a bizarre list of job titles. Also I love the idea that it's critically important to distinguish between the Presidents and Vice Presidents among their readership. TOTALLY different news preferences.

great call — more experiments and within-subject panels / less emphasis on what the national topline happens to be today while worrying about whether it got the sample right feels like a worthwhile trade for the public polling industry

I'm pretty over the doomsaying/complaining about AI and student learning and interested in moving on to the "solutions" part. In-class writing (by hand!) exercises, non-generic paper topics, etc. We can adapt! It might even be fun!

There is NOTHING on the front page of Fox News about the stock market crash. Nothing at all.

Pretty horrifying how well the "need for chaos" survey battery describes the Trump/Musk administration's current approach to governing. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This is why every political scientist you know has been in a state of panic for the past week. This isn't about policy disagreement, it's about the Constitution being destroyed before our very eyes.

Imagine: in his first week in office, Biden issues an executive order to cut all military R&D. He tells George Soros to carry it out, giving him access to the personal financial information of all military employees. Thousands of soldiers and contractors lose their jobs. This. Would. Be. ILLEGAL. 🧵

This is one of the reasons even “unlikely to succeed” resistance moves (protests, law suits, etc) have value at the moment.

"When the Press Fails," published in 1990, predicts exactly the situation we're in now. Because the Democrats are largely silent about the Billionaire's Coup, the media don't have "two sides" to cover and so default to repeating whatever line the government feeds them. This is called "indexing."

The sparse news coverage that exists of the Billionaire's Coup is, frankly, incomprehensible to a lay audience. "Treasury payment system" is meaningless jargon to most people. Tell people in plain language "Here is what Trump and Musk are doing, and here is how it affects Americans."

Hey Republicans in Congress: it’s your very last chance to go down in history as heroes, not villains. Get on the group chat, make a plan, stick together, turn this around.

Trump is openly violating the law on a vast and unprecedented scale and everyone is acting like it's normal. NPR had a long story about finding a rare shrew. NYT said he was disregarding "legal niceties." This is an attack on the Constitution as profound as the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Ok, thread time. Closed-ended survey responses are efficient and easy to analyze, but limit what respondents can say. Open-ended responses are useful for letting respondents answer with more depth in their own words (as opposed to yours).

An elegant and engrossing summary of the Lippmann/Dewey debate and its implications for democracy by @danwphilosophy.bsky.social www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/the-world-.... Lippmann's insights are foundational to my book, The Invented State: Policy Misperceptions in the American Public.

Just so we are getting this straight, the “Department of Government Efficiency” is trying to pay people *not* to work, at the same time they are blocking (for example) hiring any more VA doctors to treat wounded veterans? Right ….

I'm going to be holding a workshop on pre-registration this spring at Syracuse. I'd love to see advice/slides/materials from people who have put on similar workshops. Currently planning on lots of practical examples plus a thorough discussion of the points here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal....

Thank you for this! And I could not agree more. Evidence I've collected across several studies (some in the book, some elsewhere) suggests there is a big unmet demand for practical descriptive information about existing public policy.

Agreed! Recommend this call to action by @taliastroud.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... (which clearly not enough people have paid ATTENTION to) and also this for some cool research designs looking at effects of "passive exposure" academic.oup.com/joc/article/...

Thank you! Really happy to hear this. And if anyone else wants recommendations for undergrad-friendly chapters of my book, just let me know.

Interesting to think about how this fits into the dual-process model and the ELM. Seems as though people are sometimes motivated not to engage deliberatively, because it would interfere with the enjoyment they get from the performance.

Some of my colleagues think it is odd that when I am done with work for the day, I close all my programs (including browser/tabs) and then shut down my computer. I cannot be the only person who does this, right? Didn't we all learn that this was Proper Computer Care at some point in school?

@pewresearch.org is now hiring interns for summer 2025. Apply or share with others who might be interested, please! These internships are paid and a great learning/networking experience for undergrads: pewtrusts.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Center...

Thrilled to see our newest paper from the U.S. 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study published! Huge kudos to @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social and @davidlazer.bsky.social the academic lead authors on the project, as well as Pablo Barberá, the lead Meta researcher on the project.

Last year I started requiring a 15-minute one-on-one meeting with each student (~60 of them) to discuss their final paper topic. It's a lot of work spread out over two weeks (the TA helps too), but has been so rewarding. And the best: this year 50% of them scheduled a (voluntary) follow-up meeting.

Super helpful add-to-syllabus for people teaching grad survey courses. I love pieces that offer real practical takeaways like this.

Super important info here — “what’s going to happen with vaccines” is one of the most common questions I get about the next four years. Thank you for compiling this, looking forward (well, sort of) to the next edition.

Resist the temptation to: 1) Believe no criticisms ever affect Trump’s popularity. It’s not true. 2) Think it’s not worth doing anything that won’t alone stop the Trump administration.

Watching @dannagal.bsky.social explain how our need for community, control, and comprehension creates a demand for misinformation (at the interdisciplinary Knowledge Resistance conf in Stockholm — I present on Saturday). knowledge-resistance.com/wp-content/u...

Every time I read a "Letter" in the APSR (their fancy term for "research note") I get the Sesame Street letter song stuck in my head. "What's the letter?" [Clap, clap] "What's the letter?" [Clap, clap]. "The letter of the day is... www.cambridge.org/core/journal... "

Nothing like explaining the Electoral College to a 6 and 8 year old to really hammer home how utterly dumb it is.

Huh.

has anyone else noticed that the search on Macs has gotten gradually worse? It used to be that searching for "314" called up my folder for "Public Opinion 314," now it's not even in the first set of results. This happens with other searches, too...it's like search just got dumber.

Let's do a thread. What Kamala Harris policy proposal are you most excited about? As someone with a diabetic in the family, for me it's the promise to extend the $35 monthly cap on insulin prices to all Americans.

When you're talking to undecided voters, mention the candidates' actual policy proposals. Surveys show that Harris's are far more popular than Trump's (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int...), but many voters are unfamiliar with them.

We also asked my "aversion to social change" measures that predicted Trump support in 2016: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... They are even more strongly related now. Voters who think the country is changing too fast, undermining traditional values are strongly for Trump

Constantly shouting about how "young men are for Trump" may well have the unintentional effect of pushing more young men to support Trump. Descriptive norms affect attitudes and behavior. And it's not even accurate! In most polls, the majority of 18-29 year old men are still pro-Harris.

The belief that "the media aren't covering Trump correctly and that's why he's winning" is very reminiscent of 2016's "misinformation made Trump win." Media coverage and misinformation can both matter, but it's also true (albeit upsetting) that many voters know exactly who Trump is and don't care.

Are we sure that most Americans actually know what fascism entails? I'm not convinced that they do -- would likely be more informative for news orgs to report on specific democracy-subverting actions Trump has said he would take. People need examples to understand the magnitude of the danger.

Democrats and Republicans from New York State are going in droves to PA to canvass, but imagine if we could affect the presidential race by knocking on our own neighbors’ doors. We’d build local infrastructure & community. The electoral college has so many negative downstream effects on democracy.

Congrats to @SUPoliSci colleague and Moynihan Center director, Brian Taylor, on his new Very Short Introduction on Russian Politics! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/russian-politics-9780197516027?cc=us&lang=en&

Trump's decline — in so many ways — is where critics of campaign coverage should focus their blitz from now to election day.

More Americans identify as feminists than as MAGA. Also, who knew so many "realists" walked among us? d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/cr... (and if you want an academic take on ideologies beyond lib/cons, check out @atrexler.com & Johnston link.springer.com/article/10.1...)

This is the best Substack I have encountered in a LONG time. Children's book authors Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett joyfully dissect and explain picture books and it is funny and informative and thought-provoking. Here's today's edition: lookingatpicturebooks.substack.com/p/millions-o...

Does anyone manage a mailing list for a small-ish group (<1k people) and really like or dislike their vendor? Considering MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.

Item that at some point in the past I put on my calendar for tomorrow at 12:30: "faculty advisory thing" No other details. ?????? ???

Very nice write-up in the @chronicle.com of our recent study (with Ann Owen & Steve Wu) emphasizing the difficulties of mitigating gender bias in qualitative student evaluation comments, & how we revised our T&P guidelines at Hamilton in response: www.chronicle.com/newsletter/t...