Very excited to see this out at @bjpols.bsky.social! In this article, I show that contemporary political news coverage makes it challenging for readers to learn information that is helpful for democratic accountability, even for very politically engaged audiences. A brief summary:

Nick Vivyan, Chris Hanretty (@chanret.bsky.social) and I have a new book out: “Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice”. The core of the book is making the argument that citizens’ views about political issues neither reduce to an ideological orientation nor to a lack of substance. (1/10)

🚨📄 New paper (conditional accepted at @thejop.bsky.social): We test whether social desirability bias actually distorts answers in online surveys. Short version: It mostly doesn’t. w. @timallinger.bsky.social @kristianvsf.bsky.social @morganlcj.bsky.social URL: osf.io/preprints/os...

When we look across journals, we see the same patterns repeated. The main exception is the Journal of Experimental Political Science, which has the highest rate of null-only reporting and lowest rate of rejection-only reporting. Kudos to them.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Reframing policy arguments with opponents' moral foundations did not change policy opinions across 5 issue areas: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Do ordinary Republicans and Democrats really avoid each other in everyday life? In a new working paper with Delia Baldassarri, we present descriptive and experimental evidence to challenge the view that partisanship drives the formation of social relationships. osf.io/preprints/so... 1/15

CALL FOR EDITOR - @jepsjournal.bsky.social seeks an editor or editorial team with a commitment to publishing articles that represent the substantive and methodological diversity of experimental work in the discipline. https://cup.org/4ae3Tul cc @apsa.bsky.social @experimentsapsa.bsky.social

This is a belated post about our paper in @poqjournal.bsky.social. We analyzed 100 survey experiments fielded by TESS (tessexperiments.org), using only information from the proposals to identify intended hypotheses. Here are some of the things we learned:

I am re-upping this as a reminder that @polbehavior.bsky.social is looking for a new editor! Editing was the most rewarding part of my career and I encourage folks to think about applying.

Here's a suggestion for a New Year's resolution: If you see influential bad research, say something. One part of the whole replication crisis story is that a lot of psychological researchers privately knew that a lot of stuff was bad, but it wasn't discussed publicly.

This book examines how moral rhetoric is a crucial – and potentially unifying – part of how we experience democratic representation. Shared Morals: The Role of Moral Rhetoric in Party Politics by @jaeheejung.bsky.social, Coming Soon https://cup.org/4pCplQa #Politics #PoliSci 🗺️

Perhaps others have seen it already, but I found this pre-print (first posted in September) deeply troubling, raising concerns about how LLMs used for classification tasks in research open new researcher-degrees-of-freedom, which they call "LLM-hacking" (akin to p-hacking) arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

Clear evidence that at universities conservatives don't face higher obstacles than liberals to establish student groups + invite outside speakers. "These results fail to offer support for the view that conservative students encounter more difficulty in efforts to access campus resources."

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.

New paper with Salvo Nunnari which aims to detect (partisan) motivated reasoning (MR) using experimental designs based on information order. This provides a flexible way to detect deviations from Bayesian updating which can be explained by MR. osf.io/preprints/so...

We really need to stop asking items like this using agree-disagree scales or comparable formats. These estimates aren't informative. academic.oup.com/poq/article/... www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Central attitudes in political belief systems are more resistant to change than peripheral attitudes, but not necessarily less amenable to persuasive attempts: https://osf.io/6a8ue

This paper was a blast to work on. The challenge: present party positions across many issues, in real time, using language voters actually use. 🧵 on why we went with a more involved retrieval-based approach and where I think these tools are headed.

Partisan voters can reward candidates who stick to the party line even on unpopular issues. Under uncertainty, voters infer that ideologically rigid candidates are also more likely to back the party's other, more popular positions academic.oup.com/sf/advance-a...

They find that survey professionalism is common, but there is limited evidence that survey professionals lower data quality. Professionals do not systematically differ from non-professionals and don’t exhibit more response instability. Read the paper here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Currently in FirstView: In “Survey Professionalism: New Evidence from Web Browsing Data,” Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, @tiagoventura.bsky.social, Tiago Ventura, @jonathannagler.bsky.social, @ericka.bric.digital, & Magdalena Wojcieszak provide evidence on survey professionalism across three samples.

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...

NEW PAPER w/ @cselmendorf.bsky.social & @jkalla.bsky.social: An under-appreciated reason why voters oppose dense new housing, especially in less-dense neighborhoods: they think it looks ugly and want to prevent that, even in other neighborhoods. Some of what we think is NIMBYism might not be!

A thread on our recent paper (w/Raihan Alam @raihanalam) in PNAS on why punishment often fails and what it means for crime, cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. I’m super excited for it, it’s the lab’s most extensive experimental work to date. Check it out! 1/ www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Do any meta-analyses or other reflection pieces exist that catalog the sorts of mechanisms specifically, and outcomes generally, studied as consequences of providing white Americans information on their declining population share?

(1/10) 🚨Preprint alert!🚨 In this article, I challenge claims of a generational rise of conservative men. In the media and recent academic publications, the so-called ‘youth gender gap’ has been interpreted as a generational phenomenon. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

✨New preprint! Why do people express outrage online? In 4 studies we develop a taxonomy of online outrage motives, test what motives people report, what they infer for in- vs. out-partisans, and how motive inferences shape downstream intergroup consequences. Led by @felix-chenwei.bsky.social 🧵👇

New WP on political violence in democracies with the fantastic @dianebolet.bsky.social and @bjarneck.bsky.social. Sadly very topical, but with some positive results osf.io/preprints/so... 1/

Very few Americans support actual political violence. Many more support intimidation. Almost no one thinks it’s appropriate to kill your political opponents, but many more would dox them. Read the latest: goodauthority.org/news/very-fe...

After a huge post-election flip in economic perceptions, I thought Democrats and Republicans might be lying to pollsters to send a partisan message — but I was wrong! New in the Journal of Experimental Political Science (open access): doi.org/10.1017/XPS....

#OpenAccess from August 2025 - Cleaning up Politics: Anti-Corruption Appeals in Electoral Campaigns - cup.org/4msGB8X "Surprisingly, a clean disciplinary record does not substantively enhance a candidate’s anticorruption appeal..." - Sofia Vera

A cautiously optimistic result on AI and disinformation. A week before 2024 UK elections 13% of all voters used AI to ask about political topics. A randomized trial found this may be good: using AI led to similar gains in true knowledge as doing web research, regardless of model & prompt used.

📣 MORAL APPEALS IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 📣 New version of @twidmann.bsky.social and my working paper answering: * Have moral appeals increased over time? * Is the tendency to moralize ideologically patterned? * Are some topics consistently more moralized than others? osf.io/preprints/os...

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

New preregistered report @jepsjournal.bsky.social "Thin" populism treatments manipulate perceptions of people-centrism + anti-elitism But: some treatments (e.g., "American people") affect perceptions of host ideology, complicating causal analyses of impact of populist rhetoric cup.org/4n3DvZm

colleagues in political science. the formal update to the Garand and Giles journal ranking survey is now live. many of you will receive an email momentarily inviting you to participate. in the event you do NOT receive an invitation, please see this website to self-enroll. thanks! sharing = caring!

Now Out on First View: "Can (Thin) Populism be Manipulated without Manipulating Host Ideology? Evidence from a Conjoint Validation Approach" www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New JEPS: Debunking NIMBY Myths Increases Support for Affordable Housing, Especially Near Respondents' Homes www.cambridge.org/core/service... -correcting stereotypes/misperceptions re: affordable housing increases support for building it -Effects often *larger* for housing near people's homes

𝘈 𝘖𝘯𝘦-𝘗𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘗𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘯 Statistical Power www.carlislerainey.com/blog/2025-08...

I expect this to be an important book. Congrats, @tanikar.bsky.social. academic.oup.com/book/60875

As the U.S. celebrates Labor Day, what do voters think about the working poor? In POQ, Benjamin Newman shows that most blame structural problems for poverty among workers – but that race and personal experience shape views too. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

#OpenAccess from @jepsjournal.bsky.social - Do Immigrants’ Partisan Preferences Influence Americans’ Support for Immigration? - cup.org/4p2Xskp - @danielmcdowell.bsky.social & David A. Steinberg #FirstView

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..." Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ; We really need more papers on this issue

Some people find politics interesting. Others do not. In a new paper, I show that appealing to MEANING increases political interest. In 6 experiments, connecting what people find meaningful in their lives to politics increases political interest. Link: osf.io/preprints/so...

Peterson & Jeong find that local media strengthens issue accountability. By reducing uncertainty about legislators’ policy positions, news makes voters more likely to evaluate politicians on issues, not just party lines. #MediaAndPolitics Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

There's a new issue of the section newsletter out! This one's on sample considerations in experiments: professional survey-takers, LLM usage, rural contexts, and more! connect.apsanet.org/s42/newslett...

New job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357 Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!

Anyone have favorite options for printing SEM output in R like semTable that work for v4.5.1? My Googling has turned up little.

new in early view at Political Psychology -->