@causalinf.bsky.social nails the experience of using Claude Code and how it is so different from what has come before. People want to know "how do I use the AI" and the answer is simple: "just talk to it!"

On the "does ideological moderation help candidates win debate?": - candidates' ideology reflect strategic choices (endogeniety) - perceptions of candidate ideology are related to candidate quality (endogeneity) - favorable race dynamics attract higher-quality candidates (endogeneity) 🤔🤔🤔

🧵 New version of our paper (@bcegerod.bsky.social) is finally online: "How Many is Enough? Sample Size in Staggered Difference-in-Differences Designs" We show that even well-identified DiD studies are often underpowered; sample sizes needed are surprisingly large Paper: osf.io/preprints/os... 1/6

Things are grim. But in more frivolous news... @jamesbrandecon.bsky.social and I have been chipping away at `dbreg`, a 📦 for running big regression models on database backends. For the right kinds of problems, the speed-ups are near magical. Website: grantmcdermott.com/dbreg/ #rstats [1/2]

🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on repdata.com 3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_... applications open Feb 1 please repost!

SV needs to pick up Polanyi (more of a slog than James C. Scott, but worth it). AI will be disruptive but the idea that it will inescapably accelerate inequality only follows if you assume societal institutions are not themselves likely to be disrupted. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/why-...

“These findings provide clear evidence that data collected on MTurk simply cannot be trusted.”

Bookmarking this for the next time I someone cites Ansolobehere et al. 2003 to claim that FEC donation records reflect ideological consumption and are thus a good measure of ideology for corporate elites www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Measuring the Ideology of Political Parties Worldwide vrollet.github.io/files/Ideolo...

🎉 Tremendously excited to announce the release of VRscores—an open-source dataset for researchers and journalists interested in studying the political lean of different employers.

Companies are hiring many more internal policy specialists than lobbyists; it is a much larger investment in politics and internal expertise www.andrewbenjaminhall.com/HallSun25.pdf

Proposal for how to fix family wise error rates. For every uncorrected p value you must add an extra letter to the claim. “Eating chocolate maaaaaaaaay be associated with lower rates of stroke”

New York City is the Riyadh of America www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/n...

Excellent reference for those, like me, who can always benefit from a refresher on statistical power

📢 Thrilled to share our new article introducing CampaignView—a comprehensive open-source dataset of congressional candidate campaign bios and policy platforms (2018–2022). Paper + data here: campaignview.org & doi.org/10.7910/DVN/... 🧵1/4

Wild times for those of us who study corporate sociopolitical activism

Constitutional questions aside, it isn’t clear to me what the net partisan electoral effect would be? CA and NY would presumably lose representatives (and thus electors), but so would FL and TX?

Much of my recent research has been thinking critically about whether it is always reasonable to use public campaign finance records as a good way to understand corporate executives' political ideology. So it is pretty striking to see someone "saying the quiet part out loud!"

In the political literature this is known as donating for access. It’s very common. Campaign donations should be interpreted as strategic manifestations of political goals, not expressions of true preference.

Going to #AOM2025 and working on #nonmarket strategy or know someone who is? Join our PDW on Research Frontiers in Nonmarket Strategy — now in its 8th year! 🗓️ Sat, July 26 | 11:00AM–1:30PM 📍 Bella Center, Auditorium 12 📝 Pre-register by ***July 1***: umdsurvey.umd.edu/jfe/form/SV_...

Measuring and Modeling Neighborhoods Measuring and Modeling Neighborhoods By Cory McCartan, New York University, Jacob R. Brown, Boston University and Kosuke Imai, Harvard University Granular geographic data present new opportunities to understand how neighborhoods are formed, and how they…

📄 @fgilardi.bsky.social created this template for writing abstracts several years ago, and I’ve tried to follow Fabrizio‘s suggestions ever since. PDF: fabriziogilardi.org/resources/pa...

Americans who report paying “a lot of attention” to news (everyone on this platform) are (a) in the minority of voters and (b) very, very prone to assuming the other side of the aisle is all extremists. This is counterproductive to broader party efforts at persuasion. I have sources: 🧵

Most people consume less than 1 hour of news per day (Pew). The result of this is that they are simply not or are ill/mis-informed, and do not have hard preferences on policy or parties. About 15-20% of voters can correctly identify positions as belonging to the left or right (Kinder and Kalmoe, 17)

Some of us have been saying this for years.

After years of doubt, drafts, and disbelief, my first—and likely last—book is finally out. It’s about how entertainment shapes American politics. If you preorder (a.co/d/ctGUWkZ), I’d love to send a small token of thanks: forms.gle/1YrkYX2t2nPC...

Wow! Three scholars at Columbia, Michigan, & Maryland just introduced a measure of the partisan leanings of employers in the U.S. The data is constructed by linking voter registrations to online worker profiles. VRscores capture the political affiliations of 21.8M workers across 2.6M employers.

He was trying to summarize the recent DiD literature.

I am looking for a post-bac (Dartmouth language for a pre-doc) researcher to join our team studying elections and democracy. If you (or someone you know) have expertise in data science or political science, please apply or share this opportunity! polarizationresearchlab.org/hiring/

1/ Excited to share our new paper on measuring workforce politics with @reubenhurst.bsky.social and Justin Frake, where we measure the partisan composition (Democrats and Republicans) for over 3.5 million companies and nearly 28 million workers.

We created SuperBPE🚀, a *superword* tokenizer that includes tokens spanning multiple words. When pretraining at 8B scale, SuperBPE models consistently outperform the BPE baseline on 30 downstream tasks (+8% MMLU), while also being 27% more efficient at inference time.🧵

Things are definitely going great over here, why do you ask?

A lot has been written on the causes of polarization, but Avidit Acharya, Theo Serlin and I wanted to ask a different question: How Polarization *Ends* Paper link and 🧵 tinyurl.com/jp2pk4rt 1/10

Hurray!

We show how lobbyists took advantage of a "natural experiment" of sorts following a 1990 CA ballot question that dramatically cut the staff of the CA Assembly (but not so much the house). The bills that lobbyists sponsored became more likely to pass (open access: scholar.google.com/citations?vi...)

It was a great pleasure to see @annamikk.bsky.social present this paper on a number of occasions during our PhD years together. Congrats on the acceptance!

Polity has not coded any countries other than the US since 2018, but this places the US below the 2018 scores of Russia, Venezuela, Haiti, Iraq, Zimbabwe, the Central African Republic... Perhaps the inference we should make here is about the reliability of Polity.

Attitudes toward backsliding have shifted. In Aug '24, when we asked Americans if they felt the country was headed toward the end of democracy, Rs were much more likely to be worried. With new results in the first weeks of the Trump presidency, Ds are now the resigned party and Rs are optimistic.

Two years ago Stephen Chaudoin, @maxkagan.bsky.social, and I published a paper on politically-targeted trade retaliation (PTTR) against swing states and Red states. Since it's is back in the news, if you're interested in the domestic effects of PTTR check out doi.org/10.1007/s115...

nobody tell eric adams about this

Super interesting chart from @pewresearch.org Among college-educated, basically no relationship between income and party ID Among non-college, higher income appears very correlated with Republican ID

Amazing article... this person would like you to know that her Cybertruck is *not* a political statement, but actually just garden-variety tax avoidance www.businessinsider.com/cybertruck-d...

(copyright @nathankalmoe.bsky.social all rights reserved)

www.nytimes.com/interactive/... Why do people still think these open letters are a good idea? There is no evidence that they help, and some evidence that they decrease trust in the professions of the people who sign them.

A baseball stadium in New York's deep blue Flushing neighborhood may seem like a strange place to meet Trump supporters. But over the jolly refrain of "Meet the Mets," you can hear whispers that Biden is the reason that an outfielder costs $765 million.

Americans will use anything except the metric system

political scientists watching economists deal with a potential strike at conference hotels during their flagship annual conference

Just a reminder that @gmcd.bsky.social and @kylefbutts.bsky.social have made an incredible public good describing how to use data.table and fixest to encourage moving from Stata to R! stata2r.github.io