As @seanjwestwood.bsky.social's terrifying new PNAS article demonstrates, LLMs can now pass almost every attention check, mirror personas, stay consistent across pages, and systematically bias responses in the aggregate. So here’s a different angle: verify physical presence, not text.

Many think LLM-simulated participants can transform behavioral science. But there's been a lack of accessible discussion of what it means to validate LLMs for behavioral scientists. Under what conditions can we trust LLMs to learn about human parameters? Our paper maps the validation landscape. 1/

Cool new tool to check if your references contain retraction risks. www.retractionrisk.com

I am hiring a post-doctoral fellow (2 years) to work on all things political finance in Africa. There are no teaching obligations, and lots of opportunities for fieldwork. A PhD in Political Science is a requirement. Please spread the word! Happy to answer questions - send them to my LSE email.

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Survey experiments' popularity in political science is getting attention. What is good and bad about them? How can one maximize their benefits and mitigate their downsides? Greg Huber and I wrote up our thoughts: Paywalled: doi.org/10.1016/bs.h... Free: m-graham.com/papers/Huber...

Lots of concern about ⬆️ of survey experiments as signal of “credible causal evidence”, but I’m genuinely curious: what’s the alternative if we study trends that happen rarely, are hard to measure, or lack data? Causality aside, seems like surveys and/or experiments are an incredibly useful tool?

"The Credibility Revolution in Political Science" osf.io/preprints/so...

Readable, Reliable, Reusable: A Guide to Clean #rstats Code jacciz.github.io/portfolio/pr... Lots of good advice in this post. Too bad one (better, I) keeps forgetting about some practices in the process and follow bad practices

handy little data hoarder tool i built and deployed for myself but others might find useful lalten.org/linkpull/ 1) academic or govt site with a bunch of hyperlinks 2) write a regex to grab all links matching a pattern in said url, copy and paste into file 3) download with wget or curl

The new Comparative Constitutions Project website is now live! Developed by yours truly. We're also releasing version 5.0 of our Constitutional Chronology and Constitutional Characteristics datasets, updated through 2023. Explore and download: comparativeconstitutionsproject.org

UCD Graduate Studies and I have produced a Research Group Handbook template for supervisors and researchers. The template outlines core topics, resources, and policies that groups can adapt to their needs. ➡️ Template and details: www.ucd.ie/graduatestud... @ucddublin.bsky.social 1/2

⏰ ⏰ Final call! Submit your abstract for PolMeth - Europe 2026 by Nov 15th here: polmeth.eu. Don’t miss the chance to share your research and connect with other world-class scholars ☺️

testthat 3.3.0 out now! This is a massive release with tons of improvements including better failure messages, new expectations, improved snapshotting, new vignettes, and much much more: tidyverse.org/blog/2025/11... Post includes some thoughts on developing an #rstats package with Claude Code.

Conference deadlines have habit of sneaking up. This is your friendly reminder that the call for applications is still open for PolMeth - Europe. Don’t let yourself suffer from FOMO, and come to Dublin this coming May!

🌎New @lseimpactblog.bsky.social: Nano-targeting or mass appeal, what makes persuasive climate communications? Thomas Robinson, @miriamsorace.bsky.social @simonhix.bsky.social & @fresejoris.bsky.social explore how new tools make targeting individuals at scale with tailored communications possible 👉

"While testing one dimension at a time can yield simple results, those effects may not generalise to richer, real-world contexts." Read our new POAL Methods Briefs on Conjoint Experiments from Thomas Robinson! Link: www.poal.co.uk/research/met...

A little less than 2 weeks to submit an abstract proposal for PolMeth - Europe. Join us in Dublin this coming May to share your new political science research using cutting edge methods!!

I cannot stress this enough to my own students, you cannot outsource your own learning!!

My own TLDR for the message from this paper: statsepi.substack.com/p/sorry-what...

Submit, submit! 🚨 Pleasant reminder to all, the 5th European PolMeth meeting will be 14-15 May 2026 at Trinity College Dublin 🇮🇪 Submissions close Nov. 15 ⚠️ You can find out more about the conference, including the submission form, here: polmeth.eu If you have any questions, please contact me 😀

Not long left to apply for our Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science vacancy❗ 📚 jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/... Apply before 26 October and join an internationally outstanding group of social science methodologists 🌎

Every academic career is built on rejection, but we don’t show it. 
CVs list publications, grants & awards, not rejected manuscripts, unfunded proposals, or failures. 
But those invisible rejections shape us more than our successes ever do. 👉 catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/fail-bette... 🧵

#OpenAccess from August 2025 - Not Getting the Message on Climate? Attention as a Key Barrier to Mass-Marketing Experimentally-Validated Messages - cup.org/3HgDIJ9 - Nicholas Carnes & Geoffrey L. Henderson #ClimateChange

🚀 And this marks our launch of the CampAIgn Tracker 🇳🇱! @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social and I are glad to finally publish our dashboard where we monitor the use of AI imagery in campaign messages, by parties, politicians & other actors during the election #tk2025 See here www.campaigntracker.nl/en/

New data for legislative scholars! Committee Membership Dataset with @bcastanho.bsky.social, @dmpullan.bsky.social and Firuze Taner: Committee assignments for all MPs (Wikidata IDs!) in 14 countries Harmonized roles/policy areas Data: doi.org/10.7802/2940 Working paper: tinyurl.com/vf54r78p ⬇️

New jobs for computational social scientists at UNC and USC: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307... amd uscjobs.sc.edu/postings/194...

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):

Time for an explainer on how to get funding for a PhD in the UK (1/n)

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

It's academic job market season. I’ve written a reflection with some potentially helpful tips: jaeyk.github.io/essays/job_m...

📢 Call for Papers for EPSS 2026 conference in Belfast is out: epssnet.org/belfast-2026... Starting today, we'll feature two sections each week to provide more information about the conference. 🔝 This week: Electoral + Voting Behaviour & Climate Politics ▶️ Electoral + Voting Behaviour 🧵

Whoa—my book is up for pre-order! 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭 & 𝐌𝐋 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐢𝐧 #Rstats 𝐚𝐧𝐝 #PyData The book presents an ultra-simple and powerful workflow to make sense of ± any model you fit The web version will stay free forever and my proceeds go to charity. tinyurl.com/4fk56fc8

New 'Metrics Note! "One weird trick" to characterize compliers / the effective population underlying design-based OLS & IV specifications Check it out: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lgba6...

The new {marginaleffects} release for #RStats (0.30.0) comes with two new vignettes: 1. Speed up computation with automatic differentiation (often 10x gains) marginaleffects.com/bonus/perfor... 2. Power analyses with {marginaleffects} and {DeclareDesign}. marginaleffects.com/bonus/power....

💥Online first: "The sound of party competition: how applause reflects unity, disagreement, and the electoral cycle in parliaments" by @ankuepfer.bsky.social @jocmuel.bsky.social & @pluggedchris.bsky.social doi.org/10.1080/0140...

Next ECSR conference will take place 15-17 June 2026 at Trinity College Dublin. Abstract deadline 11 January 2026. If you're wondering if this conference is for you, have a look at the kind of work we publish in @europeansocreview.bsky.social Submissions: col.eventsair.com/ecsr-2026/su...

🚨 Reposting to avoid any confusion between EPSS & EPSA 🚨 If you want to support non-for-profit, member-led political science association, EPSS is the place to be! More here 👇🏽

Despite our pushing as editors, T&F won't reveal its other licensing agreements, or state clearly how they'll ensure proper attribution if content ends up in language models (and it is)

Please share: Seeking seed funding to develop innovations for open science, design, aggregation, transfer..? Call open now with @egap.bsky.social egap.org/our-work/res... @awilke.bsky.social Deadline 31 October

🚨 Very flattered to have a piece, w/ the terrific @miacosta.bsky.social, in the new @apsa.bsky.social Experiments Newsletter! In it, we offer some thoughts on how to think about how "realistic" experimental results are. Might be useful for students 😁 connect.apsanet.org/s42/newslett...

We just released version 3.1 of WhoGov, a global dataset on members of government from 1966-2023. The update fixes the mistakes that came to our attention while creating the Paths to Power dataset + mistakes users have notified us of More additions and updates to WhoGov are on their way, including:

In poli sci, "the top 20% of departments produced 75% of all faculty and the bottom 50% accounted for less than 5% of all tenure track faculty members at a research university. 49 programs did not have a single graduate placed in a TT position at a PhD-granting department in the past 10 years."

Now on FirstView! "…we present a predation index in political science based on a clear operational definition & coding, thereby providing a tool that every scholar can use to protect the integrity of the publishing process & their own work." doi.org/10.1017/S104... #polisky #academisky

🚨 Updated working paper! Ekin Dursun and I ask what instruments best manipulate emotions on surveys (osf.io/56h4g). We find that vignettes really work! They have large effects on emotions of interest & smaller effects on emotions *not* of interest. But as always, it's complicated.👇 (1/17)

🚨 I have a new paper with a fantastic team (thanks to @jgeller1phd.bsky.social!) with a nice mix of theoretical & applied perspectives on beta regression modeling (i.e., proportions). It's fully reproducible with #rstats code. Great resource for teaching & self-learning! osf.io/preprints/ps...

The European Political Science Society is now accepting paper & panel proposals for its annual conference! 📢 Call for Papers: EPSS 2026 – Belfast
 🗓️ June 18–20, 2026
 📍 ICC Belfast
 📬 Deadline: Nov 7, 2025 🧵

This looks interesting. "Bounding causal effects in survey experiments with noncompliance or inattention" www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wvzck...

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint. This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.