You asked; I delivered. "What about the correlation between top 3 political science pubs and department rank?" At the scholar level, r=0.19 At the school level, r=0.55 "Why the discrepancy?" There's a lot of variation at the scholar level within schools.

If you had to guess: what’s the correlation between the number of publications a political scientist has in the APSR--the flagship journal--& the ranking of their home institution? You’d probably assume it was pretty strong, right? If so, you'd be wrong. It’s r = 0.07.

I am very fortunate to be part of this cool project with John Holbein and Hans Hassell.

APSR acceptance! Woot!

White liberals' response to George Floyd's murder was largely to increase symbolic support. White liberals' exhibited little change in substantive/material policy commitments.

"Do ICE Arrests Spark Political Action?" Feedback welcome! osf.io/preprints/so...

ICE is everywhere. In 2022, ICE made arrests in 30% of counties. In 2025, ICE made arrests in 62% of counties. We ask: Do ICE arrests spark political action? Theory and prior evidence suggest it should. We find that ICE activity mostly does not mobilize citizens.

drops tomorrow!

AI-powered mental health apps are all the rage. But do they work? This new experiment on women in Mexico says they do!

"The legalization of mobile sports gambling in America was a policy mistake and that the evidence is now clear enough to say so."

"We show that, depending on how the impact of omitted variables is measured, it can be substantially easier for omitted variables to flip coefficient signs than to drive them to zero."

2 R&R's in one day! Woot!

plenty of room still! 😂

Come see us at #MPSA2026 bright and early tomorrow. 8am! Be there!

Presenting this at #MPSA2026 tomorrow bright and early at 8am. Come and see!

NEW - Changing the Scope of Conflict? Voter Registration and George Floyd’s Murder - https://cup.org/3Qofl0h - @hjghassell.bsky.social & @johnholbein1.bsky.social #OpenAccess

starting to think I must just be really good at finding null effects

Going to #MPSA2026? I have 3 papers on the program: 1. "Do virtual museums highlighting the experiences of minorities persuade visitors?" April 24, 3:20-4:50pm CDT 2. "The China Penalty" April 25, 8:00-9:30am CDT 3. "The Electoral Effects of Protests in the Trump Era" April 24, 8:00-9:30am CDT

"The Electoral Effects of Social Protests in the Trump Era" papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Do protests change elections? Prior research: "yes, and dramatically so." But is that always true? What about protests in the last few years? Our latest working paper challenges prevailing logic. Our finding: most recent protests have failed to do anything to influence elections.

My favorite new diff-in-diffs estimator is whichever one doesn’t take three days to run.

New paper with Martha Johnson in APSR (@apsrjournal.bsky.social)😀 — Open Access 🎉📄 lnkd.in/eEPUxdi8 1) Terrorism ≠ rally effects. 2) Do women leaders face unique crisis penalties? No evidence. 3) Event-during-survey → trends matter ⚠️

Let’s go Mets!

A social media platform--but, like, purely for funsies.

April Fools' Day is dumb

There's one trait where economists clearly outperform the other social sciences: Hubris.

Whoa. The Republican advantage among Mormons has dropped nearly 20 points over the past two decades.

Nothing quite like the uniquely demoralizing experience of a reviewer recommending rejection for a paper they clearly didn’t read very closely.

Great new paper in The Review of Economic Studies using randomized incentives to detect non-response bias, using administrative data to provide ground truth for comparison. While incentives increased participation, they didn't reliably reduce NR bias academic.oup.com/restud/advan...

Redistricting Reforms Reduce Gerrymandering by Constraining Partisan Actors is now forthcoming in the APSR! We use a game theoretic treatment and continuous DiD(iD) to show when redistricting reforms work with @corymccartan.com, @simko.bsky.social, Emma Ebowe, Michael Zhao, and Kosuke Imai

New w/@scottclifford.bsky.social. Lots of work uses agree-disagree scales, and a lit review shows these are 1) frequently just measured in one direction (agree = higher trait) and 2) correlated with each other. This has potentially big issues for conclusions. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

if you are still on Twitter/X and get any suscpicious DMs from the person who hacked me, can you let me know?

While LLMs will try to follow good research practices by default, you can pretty easily convince them to p-hack for you. In one case (out of the 4 tested), the LLM moved the result from p > 0.05 to p < 0.001. github.com/janetmalzahn...

"Do virtual museums highlighting the experiences of minorities persuade visitors? Evidence from a study on bias toward Asian Americans"

Asian Americans have long histories of violence, discrimination, & exclusion. Much of this behavior is poorly understood. The literature on discrimination against other racial groups is much larger than the literature on anti-Asian animus. A group of my coauthors and I are trying to fill that gap.

Some journals are now requesting reviewers affirm that they did not upload manuscripts into AI platforms.

This is infuriating.

Love the research process; hate the publication process

How rich is Elon? I'm closer in net worth to Larry Page than Larry Page is to Elon.

Look at how being diagnosed with cancer impacts people's involvement in crime!

angrily replying “duh” or “I’m not surprised” doesn’t make you look smart. It does the opposite.

Just think how exciting academia would be if there was a trade market/deadline: "I'll give you one deadwood and two future lines for your star Assistant Professor."

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars? These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research. So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

Paper accepted! Woot!

🧵 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

So much of classic political science research is woefully underpowered. I'm glad we're slowly coming to our senses.

Fire Ariely, Duke.