Delighted to have consulted on this story. The Trump administration recognizes importance of batteries for drones & AI but is biased against EVs which is biggest source of demand for batteries. Can the US have a vibrant battery sector w/o robust production of EVs? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/c...

1/ 🚨 New paper ("Causal Beliefs and the Potential for Political Backlash Against AI") accepted at @poqjournal.bsky.social w/ @sborwein.bsky.social @rmichaelalvarez.bsky.social @bartbonikowski.bsky.social and Peter Loewen. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.31219/osf...

I rarely post on Bluesky, but wanted to share the findings from a project I've been working on for a while. 🔗 Interactive results: annagetmansky.github.io/refugee-conj... 📖 Published in @isq-jrnl.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1093/isq/... (Additional paper recently accepted in @fpa-isa.bsky.social)

Change in employment since Trump took office, by sector. www.ms.now/opinion/trum...

New paper in PNAS: Your homicide risk follows you around the country. If you’re born in the historically violent Wild West, Appalachian Highlands, or Deep South, a higher risk of violent death trails you wherever you go. 🧵1/14

Chag sameach, happy Hanukkah, and peace

My latest for @goodauth.bsky.social goodauthority.org/news/what-we...

Would be a wild "Author Meets Critics" roundtable if they could pull it off

An unordered list of my favorite books I read this year. Nonfiction:

I don’t think Trump continuing to look weak by trying to give Putin what he wants does much for him politically. And how can Zelensky agree to give up territory currently under Ukrainian control? Trump’s Russia First policy is an utter disaster.

The current Trump pressure campaign against Ukraine to accept a pro-Russia peace deal is actually worse than it looks. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/w...

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

First time making pozole—a lot of fun to make, tasty, and a perfect winter stew!

A great example of combining the strengths of various methods is this paper by Allen et al. (a recent favorite of mine): www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Agree with much of what Cyrus says in his blog post and the comments below. I'd add that some of the best recent work in poli sci is mixed methods, and uses a combo of observational data, experiments/quasi-experiments, and in-depth interviews/case studies to answer a puzzle from multiple angles.

New paper! @william-dinneen.bsky.social @guygrossman.bsky.social Yiqing Xu and I use GPT to code 91k articles from 174 polisci journals (2003–2023)and track research designs, transparency practices, and citations. How has the credibility revolution reshaped the discipline? doi.org/10.31235/osf... 🧵

Every professor I know is struggling with AI in a different way. I found a few things that really helped this semester. 1) I banned cellphones and laptops in class— made a huge difference in attention and quality of discussions.

This is not a peace deal and it’s not asking anything of the Russians. It’s just the US on behalf of the Russians pressuring Ukraine to surrender www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/1...

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

In Mexico, the share of income captured by the 1% has declined noticeably in recent years. This shift toward lower income concentration—alongside poverty reduction—helps explain not only the popularity of AMLO and Sheinbaum, but also some of the ongoing political battles and sources of polarization.

A few things are true at once: 1. Trump is deeply unpopular and increasingly seen as a lame duck. The economy is also looking shaky. And the Epstein Files.

Releasing 20,000+ pages of Epstein files related documents as .jpgs via a shared google drive owned by oversight.gop.119 is sorta wild, but also sort of exactly where we're at. The drive: drive.google.com/drive/folder...

A few observations based on this week's election results 1) Trump is unpopular and the elections were a rebuke to him and his unpopular policies.

Cool new working paper on why and how cable news threw gasoline on the culture war fire. The culture war isn't optimal for electoral candidates, but it's optimal for cable news companies. ungated: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/27v4x...

Big night for Big Candy!

The two competing dynamics that will define Trump's second term: 1) He wields more unchecked power than his first term—and arguably than any other president in history. 2) He is deeply unpopular, and getting more so.

An authoritarian... stifles dissent/speech persecutes opponents bypasses legislature uses military domestically defies courts declares false emergencies vilifies groups controls info/media controls universities creates cult of personality uses power for profit manipulates law to stay in power

Sarkozy is going to jail but he’s not the first one. In our new dataset we track modern leaders who have been prosecuted by their own states. There are 215 of them. Turns out leader prosecution is a common & healthy practice in democracies. Full access link: foreignpolicy.com/2025/10/28/d...

Survey folks, what are people’s recent experiences with online panels in terms of: 1. Panel quality (bots/LLMs)? 2. Representativeness? 3. Cost + time to complete? Planning a 700–800 US nat-rep pilot. Best practices welcome!

My main takeaway on the “moderation” debate is that Democrats would be better served by other debates besides left-right positioning, like how to develop new valence issues (corruption!) as wedge issues, and how to get attention for their policy proposals in the first place

Chili night in the DMV

New paper: LLMs are increasingly used to label data in political science. But how reliable are these annotations, and what are the consequences for scientific findings? What are best practices? Some new findings from a large empirical evaluation. Paper: eddieyang.net/research/llm_annotation.pdf

Suburban Maryland—great vibes!

One piece of evidence in favor of Thomas’s argument is that every single other populist movement in human history emerged without social media

I think there’s a comfort in blaming our current politics on social media. When I think a boring but more accurate story is that plutocratic tech elites and right-wingers *made a lot of choices*. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/o...

I am curious what would happen if Dems ran on a plank of creating an anti-corruption agency with stronger independence than the Fed. I think it would be highly successful because it would show "we will tie our own hands on this".

Some thoughts on where we are right now and the state of US democracy. Trump is both deeply unpopular right now—and yet more politically powerful than during his first term, thanks to a pliant Congress and Supreme Court. That’s an uncertain, and dangerous, place to be.

My new op-ed with @lkfazio.bsky.social: Trump sent a 'compact' to our universities. They should reject this devil's bargain. Any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would forever be subservient to the whims of the government. www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Why do authoritarian states charge political opponents with non-political crimes? In our @thejop.bsky.social paper with Jennifer Pan & @yiqingxu.bsky.social, we examine how *Disguised Repression* undermines opponents’ moral authority and mobilization capacity. doi.org/10.1086/7342...

Democrats and Republicans distrust mass media for different reasons. For the GOP, hating the media is an in-group identity signal. The media is part of "the establishment," so they hate them. Still, the dip in younger Dems trust in media is important to watch, too.

🚨 New Bright Line Watch report on state of US democracy brightlinewatch.org/violence-red... -Expert ratings ~= since April but ↓ substantially since January -US now most closely resembles an illiberal democracy -Partisan gap in democracy ratings highest since 2017 Full thread of results below

It's easy to see this speech as just weirdly performative, but there's a lot more—and a lot worse—going on here. The meeting & speeches are part of a larger project aimed at promoting the military leadership’s partisan alignment with the administration. How? 1/

Kept thinking about the debate between Klein and Coates and wrote down some thoughts.

No one outside the U.S. is confused and no one here would be confused if they saw this happening in another country.

So many echoes from this article for US politics....

"for now, we’re stuck in a ratchet, where violent losers copy one another, and their deeds become an excuse to oppress the rest of us."

Two things are true: 1. Trump has amassed extraordinary power in the presidency—thanks to a compliant Congress and a pro-executive Supreme Court. 2. Trump is increasingly unpopular. These twin dynamics will define U.S. politics through the 2026 midterms. Buckle up.

L’shanah tova! 🍎 🍯

“What we’re seeing is an unprecedented attempt to silence disfavored speech by the government,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. “Donald Trump is trying to dictate what Americans can say.” https://to.pbs.org/46AYg7U

Two things to add to this: 1) I am much more concerned with party elites and leaders encouraging and stoking violence than shifts in the public from vaguely worded questions. 2) These public shifts in support for violence are almost always downstream of elite rhetoric and narratives.