Bye bye #EPSS2026 - the GOAT of all conferences ♥️ @epssnet.bsky.social

Welcome to Belfast! 🎉Tonight marks the informal start of #EPSS2026! Before the conference officially opens, there are two great ways to ease in.

Oxford academic Alexander Betts set a world record at the London Marathon yesterday for the fastest time while dressed as an academic, finishing the course in 2hr55m26 – an average speed of just under 9mph. He is Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs at the Refugee Studies Centre.

Spotted on a local windshield: an admirably thorough and polite critique of how the car had been parked

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

For anyone looking for postdocs for their students, over the next few months LSE “fellow” positions will start being listed. Research + teaching but 2-3 year runway. The new Global School of Sustainability has 5 new ones posted now! jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

🎺 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!

mad king moment from the PBS Newshour correspondent

Saint Olaf College is making a tenure track hire in feminist philosophy. We have great students, a lively, collegial department, and are near the vibrant twin cities metro area. Great job! Drop me a line with any questions. philjobs.org/job/show/29582

Tony! Toni!

Yes. If you don't have tasks for which this makes sense, then move along.

EPSA have announced that they will hold a conference in July 2026. 😵‍💫 We understand that there might be some confusion about EPSS and EPSA. 👉🏽 So we thought we would clarify some things. A short 🧵

The endowment tax provisions seem to have been written by someone who likes RDD -- so many consequential and arbitrary cutoffs!

New working paper! - zikai.li and I look at the problem of assessing pre-trends using one of the "new" DiD methods - fixed effects regression imputation. tl;dr - don't use the same regression you used to impute post-treatment to also impute pre-treatment. osf.io/preprints/so... (1/14)

Yesterday EPSS was founded, today we answer members’ questions. A 🧵 1. Who formed EPSS? EPSS was founded by a supermajority vote of the EPSA Council, made up of 3 EPSAL shareholders & 9 elected, appointed, or ex officio members. 1/

As an EPSA Council member I voted for the creation of EPSS yesterday and have been part of conversations about these issues for the past year. Others had a much bigger and longer-standing role, but I can answer questions, especially from those not at the conference.

🚨 Big News for European Political Science 🚨 We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the European Political Science Society (EPSS): a new, member-led, not-for-profit association built to support our scholarly community. 🔗 epssnet.org Here’s a thread with everything you need to know. 🧵

Whoa there, just tell your coauthors what regression you'd rather run -- no need to go to the NYT opinion pages about it

More polling just dropped -- by a pretty huge margin Americans think that having international students at US universities is good for the country, not bad -- 56% to 14% (+42) and for 18-29 YOs, nearly 1/2 say international students are "very good"

All over the US, Chinese students who have worked hard to get admissions spots at US universities and excelled in their programs are now considering whether it's safe to visit home or attend a conference abroad. They are wondering if they should transfer to a non-US program. What a ludicrous waste.

From end-of-quarter reflection essay by student: "Overall, I’ve realized that social science is more fundamentally flawed than I thought." Success I think? Then, "All science is imperfect in some way, and the act of generating knowledge despite the limitations of research is admirable." Success!

Great news. Much more of this. Can't wait to hear that she's home safe and free again.

🚨 REPLICATION REPORT UPDATE: One year ago, a tweet by John Holbein alerted me, @ollefolke.bsky.social, and @jopieboy.bsky.social to a paper with a shocking result about Sweden’s law criminalizing the purchase of sex.🧵

10/ Please help share our extended replication to correct the record on this misleading policy evaluation! Full replication text here: www.econstor.eu/handle/10419...

If we know where they were sent, but it isn’t to detention: exile. If we know where they are & it’s in detention: extraordinary rendition. If we don’t know where they are, but we know someone’s holding them: kidnapping. Otherwise, if we don’t know where they are: disappearance.

So far, about 1000 students have had their visas revoked. Rubio has claimed these are activists that have vandalized libraries, taken over campuses, and done all sorts of crazy things. But Rubio or the State Dept refuses to get into the details. So lets do that.

Great Swedish humor here: youtu.be/kF5Skmb6p1o?...

This week, my Somerville constituent Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted in broad daylight by DHS officials and sent to Louisiana to be locked in a detention center. She has not been charged with any crime.

Absolutely unacceptable, and would be even if it stopped at non-citizens

This sounds great.

Next Friday April 4 at 4pm DocFilms at UChicago will be showing "From Where We Stand" (dir Lucy Kaye), a profile of three post-industrial northern English towns fromwherewestand.co.uk I'll be moderating Q&A with producer/sociologist Adrian Favell, so good chance to get your Q in

Anyone have recommended readings (appropriate for undergraduates) about the challenges of obtaining representative samples, in online surveys or more broadly?

Some of my Columbia Law School colleagues and I offer our thoughts on legal issues with the Administration's March 13, 2025 letter to our University's president, and its threat to academic freedom. balkin.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-ti...

Job alert! 🚨 PLEASE SHARE! I'm hiring a LSE Fellow (postdoc) in the School of Public Policy! To provide teaching support on our core political science course (which is what I teach) + time for individual research. Closes March 31: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/... Questions? Email me!

Really, all bodies of literature are growing - it's just a question of how fast

Many gems in this piece on mentoring student research (in ecology, but applies elsewhere). esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1... e.g. on the value of asking questions with more than one conceivable answer, making explicit the theory behind the researcher's expectations

Author self-promotion seems to be the thing to do this week because, you know, Xmas. So grab yourself a handy paperback of Why Politics Fails - a book whose title remains undefeated by this year’s events. Perfect for ornery teens, parents, friends and foes. www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Politics...

I have a vague memory of a meta-study showing that variation in findings in a crowded empirical field (minimum wage effects? something in corporate finance?) reflected researcher ideology, somehow measured. Am I imagining this?

Are any other political scientists receiving a bunch of emails from French high school kids asking why Trump won? I must be on a list for some ill-conceived contact-an-expert homework assignment.

Not long before I'll be in the first 5% - recruit your friends please!

Hey all! We're hiring this year at UChicago Political Science for an open rank position in quantitative methods! Happy to answer any questions. See the Interfolio ad here: apply.interfolio.com/151969 EOE/Vet/Disability

Loving this meditative fiddle tune by Christian Sedelmyer: open.spotify.com/track/3WCVVO...

Looks like some spatial policy diffusion of the city-manager form of government (City Manager Yearbook, 1923)

Out today, my article about Ozick's scary stories about Wharton and Woolf

It's great that in political science it has become the norm to post replication data for published papers. Other fields not so much apparently! It feels like 2005 again to be writing polite emails asking authors for the data behind their published papers and getting no response.

The 2024 syllabus for my Advanced topics Causal Inference & Machine Learning course is up! @uchicago.bsky.social @dsi-uchicago.bsky.social t.co/3P6nO98aVA

Tis the season for looking at a lot of transcripts. The winner is the University of Oslo, which contextualizes the student's grade in each class by including a *histogram* of all grades awarded in that class. Honorable mention to Dartmouth for including the median grade in the class.

'A Regional Train passes a Railroad Crossing between Flooded Fields, Nidderau-Eichen, Germany' Photo Michael Probst