Incredible parallels in this Berinsky & @gabelenz.bsky.social paper. Politicians didn't stand up to Joe McCarthy in large part because they incorrectly inferred McCarthy/ism was extremely popular. Not standing up to McCarthy was a kind of 1950s Popularism gated academic.oup.com/poq/article/...

Research: Believing that the mass public in the opposing party supports undemocratic tactics leads people to be more supportive of undemocratic tactics themselves. Being assured that a majority of your opponents oppose such radical tactics increases support for democratic norms osf.io/my987/download

I went on Washington Journal to talk about Elon Musk and third parties. www.c-span.org/program/wash...

Don’t trust an observational model with a bunch of arbitrary control variables @gabelenz.bsky.social @alexandersahn.bsky.social Lenz, Gabriel S., and Alexander Sahn. "Achieving statistical significance with control variables and without transparency." Political Analysis doi.org/10.1017/pan....

New paper. What happens when a presidential candidate steps way out of line, not only with the public, but even with his own voters? And on a highly salient issue? Candidates typically don’t do that—they’re too strategic. But Trump isn’t. He’s good for social science. 🧵

Everything indicates that the Tesla protests are really eroding his wealth and are the only thing causing enough business/financial pain to him to possibly change his behavior. www.teslatakedown.com to find a protest near you this weekend. Something you can do to really make a difference.

One way to think about what's happening with Trump getting elected and then waging war on the Constitution and laws is that: It's taken less than 9 months for Trump v. U.S. to almost break the American republic. /1

Our institutions depend on a coalition of moderate Republican senators emerging. Give Schumer space to help it form.

Permitting reform: sexy? Not so much. Important? Crucially. Red tape trips up so many critical housing, transportation, renewable energy & climate resilience projects — and we can fix this. Here I talk to my colleagues about why it’s so important that we do. www.youtube.com/shorts/v17C4...

An underappreciated reason why Harris lost was flat real disposable income growth in the election year. RDI was above trend, but voters care about growth in the election year itself. Between Jan. and Nov. 2024, nothing happened.

New 2024 data: Over 50% of GOP fundraising now comes from just 100 mega-donors. Trump’s embrace of the billionaire class—and their embrace of him—will only supercharge this trend.

More evidence for the long-term stability and persistence of party id. A change induced by a major early life experience does not decay.

Imagine if employees of the IRS could give out cards to their friends and family and those with cards didn't have to pay taxes. I could see an argument that this is even worse.

Since their rollout, I have made heavy use of the custom GPT tools in ChatGPT. Here is a thread of some of the tools that I use regularly (all of them require ChatGPT 4). I think they are most useful for people doing quantitative social science, but some are more general.

It's added to the fun of writing papers in markdown that copilot tries to write not only the R code but also the paper, suggesting what I should say next. The spooky part is that once in a while it guesses correctly.

Across 93 countries, the preferences of the lowest socioeconomic group, rather than those of the median or upper strata, are most predictive of realized redistribution. This finding contradicts the expectations of both leading experts and regular citizens. www.nber.org/papers/w31974

NY Fed measure of underlying inflation also more or less says we won the war

Been working on the unicorn problem for years only to read it’s been solved by GPT-4. AGI must be close.

We should adopt the phase planetary destabilization in place of global warming. It sounds worse and is the even greater threat posed by global warming. lhttps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1259855

In the aftermath of the financial crisis austerity advocates claimed that contractionary policy was actually expansionary bc of confidence — which I mocked as belief in the Confidence Fairy. It seems to me now that we're seeing a somewhat parallel myth: the Credibility Fairy 1/

The real threat to humanity is humans, not AI. Every decade technology makes it easier for a small group to wipe us out. Will AI improve fast enough to protect us from ourselves? Sure hope so.

I'm curious to hear from IR scholars how much Trump's four years (and the possibility of more) lies behind this increase. How much of it is because Trump undermined the perception of a US backed world order? polisky

Sure wish Elon Musk spent $44B on catching oumaumua then on wrecking twitter. phys.org/news/2022-01...

Very excited that @i4replication.bsky.social is going to be doing annual stress tests of papers published in Psych Science. It’s amazing to see what they’ve done in econ & poli sci, and great that they’re expanding to psych!

An example of the ever present tendency of elites to extract from non-elites. Workers are being forced to pay thousands of dollars to quit. www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/m...

Exemplifies two well established tendencies in American politics: 1. Knowledge about party positions is surprisingly low. 2. People over attribute responsibility for everything to the sitting president.

Feature suggestion: Editorial Manager Clippy

Political Science should beat other fields to this obvious next step in improving transparency and reproducibility. Pre-register or justify! From a nice Data Colada post: datacolada.org/115

NYT covering Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark vs NYT covering Donald Trump’s “vermin” remark.

Suffering From Inflation™️ update, real wages edition

Want your findings to replicate? Want to actually discover true things? This new study shows you should preregister, have high power, and open materials. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wildest thing about the American economy I've learned after two years at the Federal Reserve: Almost 1% of US GDP is residential realtor commissions! fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1b2IC

I just spent three hours reformatting a paper for submission after it sent back on technical grounds. Why do we do this to ourselves? Journals outside of political science often require formatting compliance only after acceptance. Stop the torture! Polisky

I love democracy

“Overall, 73 percent of Gazans favored a peaceful settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the eve of Hamas’s October 7 attack, just 20 percent of Gazans favored a military solution that could result in the destruction of the state of Israel.” www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/what-...

4/ I write this as much for myself as for others. “The first principle is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynman

3/ If your findings are real, lower p-values will always be more common than higher p-values. If you're not seeing that in your work, you're not being honest with yourself.

2/ Real phenomena yield lower p-values more often than higher ones. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

1/ In writing peer reviews and promotion letters, I notice p-values often hover near the 0.05 threshold. This pattern raises eyebrows. We know that such a p-value distribution indicates false positives, not genuine findings.

Your regular reminder that if you think a paper should be published, you have to make a case for it in your review. Editors use the length of reviews as a signal for quality and effort, so make the case for the paper. So many good papers get rejected because reviewers fail to make the case.

Read this. There is a lot of fear of too much criticism in psychology, talk of protecting ECRs from this threat, etc. What about protecting ECRs from the damage of being silenced or worse when they raise legitimate criticism of famous people’s work? https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/

An illuminating survey experiment from WaPo-Schar VA poll. “Support preventing” vs “oppose allowing” — a gap of 25 points. Demonstrates softness of opinion on this issue but also power of status quo bias that likely applies in many contexts. www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

One of the things I find striking in the current crisis around Gaza is how clearly it displays that the strategic decisions states (& non-state/quasi-state actors) make are often more the product of internal politics & ideology than external interests & strategic calculations. 1/

Your semi-annual reminder to put your hand on your wallet when you encounter interaction findings. Only a quarter replicated in the ManyLabs replication project. They offer researchers just too many degrees of freedom. You can trust pre-registered ones more.

This is the last week to apply to Berkeley’s Assistant Professor faculty position in political science, with a preference for scholars who work in the areas of: American Politics, a focus on Institutions; Race, Ethnicity and Politics; Contemporary Political Theory. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04143