📢 JOB ANNOUNCEMENT 📢 Our department is hiring an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Political Science. We seek a scholar in AP, CP, PE, or IR who applies frontier methods of statistics and data science to substantive questions in their area of expertise. apply.interfolio.com/189477

Here's a little something that might interest a number of you in my network, part of a forum in the Journal of Public Policy: www.cambridge.org/core/journal.... Many thanks to editor Josh Ryan and the commentators Samuel Bagg, Tara Grillos, Agustin Markarian, and Mary Scudder!

Latest version of Positron can open xlsx files in the data viewer(!) and it has a dropdown menu now for previewing different formats of #QuartoPub documents And—most importantly, but also from a few weeks ago, so less new—the plots panel can pick up dimensions from chunk options!!!! #rstats

The image here borrows its title from Grant's 1868 presidential campaign slogan, "Let us have peace." Here's what Frederick Douglass had to say about that sentiment.

Internecine Democratic Party Bluesky is absolutely the worst Bluesky.

Pork roll, egg, and cheese on an egg everything bagel = perfect start to Father's Day in New Jersey

*with sound effects*

For years I've tracked billionaire excess. Each year I show students a chart that blows their minds. This year I had to redraw it for a trillionaire: Elon Musk, $1.32T. Depressing that we're here. Silver lining: couldn't have happened to a less deserving person, proof that wealth ≠ merit.

How has the US added housing supply since 2000? Are conservative places building a lot more than liberal places? In new research, I show that: —Additional homes were disproportionately in high-income, conservative, greenfield areas —BUT infill growth was more likely to be located in liberal areas

Let’s not be hasty. The Queen of England was almost assassinated this way.

Added BlueSky compatibility to Wallflower. All your Mastodon and BlueSky posts in one (quiet, restrained) place. https://thewallflower.app

Mike has written a terrific book about what happened in state legislatures after the imposition of Jim Crow. Data are amazing, analysis is nuanced, and the lessons are important. Check it out!

New preprint: Jack Lucas, @breunig.eurosky.social and I reanalyze 70,470 assessments made by 12,860 politicians about their constituents' public opinion and demographics, sourced from every available published study of elite perceptual accuracy, and our own original data. /1 osf.io/preprints/ps...

As a native Iowan who has settled in New Jersey, this is spot-on.

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.

A summary of key findings from our recent @strathplacelab.bsky.social & @parliview.bsky.social findings on the use and perceptions of AI for learning about politics in the recent Scottish elections @strathpolir.bsky.social @connectedpol.bsky.social

The NJ Bike Walk Coalition is organizing a rally at the statehouse in Trenton this Thursday, May 21, to try to get New Jersey's terrible e-bike law repealed or replaced with something better. Details are here, would be great if we could get a turnout at it... bit.ly/ride-rally

If members of Congress cannot maintain political support independent of the president, then Congress is not an independent and coequal branch of government.

This is insane. The terms of DOJ's slush fund appear to transfer control of $1.8 billion beyond US government entirely. Unless I'm misreading this, that would circumvent Congress *entirely* and put the money outside of *any* constitutional and/or legal constraints ofany kind. Straight up theft.

I'm seeing a lot of dunking on this; but this type of analysis is useful for several reasons. 1/4

“He’s dealing with a personal heath condition, and he’ll be back soon,” Mr. Scharfenberger said in an interview. When pressed on the nature of the health condition and why Mr. Kean had not been seen in New Jersey or in Washington, Mr. Scharfenberger said, “There’s no cameras where Tom is.”

I would totally try this.

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

Georgia's governor signs a comically transparent law. It makes local elections in 5 big blue counties nonpartisan, to give GOP candidates a chance to win without a party label in places like Atlanta. And it doesn't change anything in the rest of the state, for red counties to know who's GOP.

All this is to say, we know how this movie ends, and it ain't a feel good story. Southern authoritarianism is bad morally, politically, and economically, and we absolutely cannot let the Southern model of governance go national. The masks are off. We know what we're dealing with. It cannot succeed.

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

A perverse incentive of Callais: the more racist a party is, the more its gerrymander is insulated from any VRA challenge. boltsmag.org/scotus-calla...

I am unspeakably angry about this turnout gap figure, and it gives insight into the whole ballgame for gutting the VRA. Alito points out that Black turnout exceeded White turnout twice in 5 elections. The argument is garbage 1/x

Florida has a new congressional map thehill.com/homenews/cam...

Thrilled to announce my paper with @dianamejordan.bsky.social & sky-less Trent Ollerenshaw is now published open-access at @apsrjournal.bsky.social. In a (very) large replication & extension, we show that design effects of repeated measure experiments are nonzero but typically small. Thread:

In which I cite @twallack.bsky.social's excellent WaPo piece on higher ed from this weekend. "The bachelor's degree is now multiple products that share a name. The hackers priced the cheapest ones first."

Apparently both LaTeX and Typst now support accessible pdfs for screen readers, which is great news. For folks writing in Quarto, check out this handy guide for making your pdfs accessible with just a quick argument in the file YAML. quarto.org/docs/blog/po...

LET IT FALL

🚨 I have an article out at APR titled “Educational Polarization in American Politics: More than Just a Diploma Divide” in which i look at how educational attainment shapes public opinion and political behavior across the entire education spectrum, not just the across the degree/no degree binary 1/x

The plan was for Iran to capitulate in response to threats, or quickly fold in the face of airstrikes and assassinations, empowering new leaders who then capitulate. There is no backup plan. Never was. Their whole worldview is that strength gets you whatever you want and bluster equals strength.

Brutal.

They were trying and failing to get people to subscribe at $20/mo and each 60 second video was costing the company $15-18 in costs to make. That’s it, everybody, right there. That’s the Economics of AI. Visionary stuff.

Anne Applebaum explains Trump

Basically Dante's fourth circle of hell

#DR26 The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times. Within only one year, the USA’s score on the V-Dem Liberal Democracy index (LDI) has declined by 24 %, from 0.75 in 2024 to 0.57 in 2025. 🧵1(4) #Polisky #PoliSciSky #PolDataSky

friend, this is Marcus Junius Brutus CAESAR has declared himself DICTATOR FOR LIFE and MUST BE STOPPED can you rush a donation of ten denarii today to show that you STAND WITH THE REPUBLIC?

Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96.

My 2 cents: this is random noise plus very cold weather plus long term trend of NYC becoming a playground for the rich and pricing out the poor.

A short history of the end times/rapture in the American military. Cold war: Forces were seen as the defense against godless communism, but also as a rich environment for missionary outreach. 1959 - National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) estimated 50% of those in service were not affiliated

The Trump administration has such an impoverished view of power. Power only for domination, never service. Power only to cause fear, never love or inspiration or admiration. That type of power can be successful - for a time. It is the power of empire. But it is also self-defeating in the long-term

An administration wielding lawless, performative violence—violence for the sake of spectacle—both at home and abroad.

This is so good

context: transgender Americans are moving to other states at at least triple the rate of all American adults.