New in @polanalysis.bsky.social, @wpmarble.bsky.social and Josh Clinton have an extension of MRP for small area estimation of polling data calibrated with election results. If you toss around the term "logit shift" in casual conversation, this one is for you www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Building affordable housing ➡️ support for funding housing. Nearby homeowners ⬆️ support; renters ⬇️ support. Both are “the policy adjacent”—secondhand recipients & drivers of policy feedback. Forthcoming @ajpseditor.bsky.social ( doi.org/10.1111/ajps...) w/ A. Magazinnik & @msands.bsky.social 1/9

Yesterday I recorded an ep with @danieltavana.bsky.social, one of the few political scientists with an active research agenda on Iran. We spoke at length about the regime, divisions in Iranian society, the prospects for democracy in Iran. One of my best episodes to date. Link in replies.

This post has some more discussion of other methods for incorporating known ground-truth margins in an MRP framework, based on some validation exercises in osf.io/preprints/so...

Folks doing public opinion research: I wrote an R package called `calibratedMRP` that implements methods to calibrate MRP estimates to known geographic-level ground truth (e.g. election results) github.com/wpmarble/cal...

NEW - Foreign Policy Failures and Global Attitudes Towards Great Powers: Evidence from the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan - https://cup.org/3YSsX4N - @rachelmyrick.bsky.social & @wpmarble.bsky.social #OpenAccess

blog post: 3rd helpings of the logit shift You have multiple outcomes, but only some have aggregate truth to shift to. How can we calibrate our estimates of p(y_1, y_2 | X) to aggregate data about E[y_1] ? @wpmarble.bsky.social and Josh Clinton have ideas !

New paper in @ajpseditor.bsky.social. Is descriptive representation good for substantive representation? Why do voters stay loyal to corrupt and poorly governing ethnic parties? I argue that we ought to focus less on patronage and more on dignity concerns. Defiant pride can come at a price. 1/🧵

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 most polls overstate support for political violence www.gelliottmorris.com/p/most-polls...

Absolutely momentous day for California. We're turning the corner on housing at the very moment America needs us to.

Job/life update: Today was my last day at Penn, where I've been lucky to teach amazing students and work with great colleagues for the past 3 years. This fall, I'll join @hooverinstitution.bsky.social as a Hoover Fellow—I'm excited to join a vibrant, interdisciplinary community of scholars there.

I made an event timeline to try to make sense of all the federal overreach at @georgemasonu.bsky.social and whoo boy. When you lay it out like this, the executive over reach comes into focus. open.substack.com/pub/misofact...

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump. Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt. Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

Universities often serve as "anchor institutions" that deeply affect the character of their communities. In a new paper, we estimate how (and when) the establishment of a college influences local political and civic life. 🧵 osf.io/preprints/so...

Nothing more American than getting a head start on work by taking a meeting in your car while you commute to work by yourself

Very cool paper about how important social networks are in driving movement conference.nber.org/conf_papers...

I just posted a new paper on @ssrn.bsky.social, titled "The Chadha Presidency". Here's the link, and I'll post the abstract in the next post. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Been a busy year in the data mines.📊 Just published my mid-year roundup: 29 data visualizations on the state of US democracy, tracking everything from judicial resistance to billionaire influence to why Dems have a mobilization crisis, not a moderation problem. All charts free to use:

Universities often serve as "anchor institutions" that deeply affect the character of their communities. In a new paper, we estimate how (and when) the establishment of a college influences local political and civic life. 🧵 osf.io/preprints/so...

Horrendous. In attempting to reclassify Head Start as “welfare” rather than education, the Trump administration is trying an end run around Supreme Court precedent that protects undocumented children from limits to education based on their immigration status. 🧵

War on universities, war on science, war on knowledge

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years. NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

A reminder of how the number of centrifuges in Iran soared after Trump’s 2018 JCPOA withdrawal. @brendannyhan.bsky.social

America now has the foreign policy of a personalist dictator. New piece from me in @foreignaffairs.com www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

There are nearly 100,000 people at the rally in Philadelphia. #NoKings

She is saying, in effect: "We are going to liberate the city from its democratically elected leadership using the military"

What would you say if you saw it in another country? A senator from a coequal branch of government dragged away by security to prevent him from asking a question of a Cabinet official and arrested

Eyewitness account from someone arrested at a (small, peaceful) protest in L.A. The arrests of journalists should be particularly alarming: open.substack.com/pub/smotus/p...

On the campaign trail, this was JD Vance's suggestion for making childcare more affordable: "Maybe grandma and grandpa [want] to help out a little bit more, or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more." (www.vanityfair.com/news/story/j...)

The claim that Trump is just "enforcing immigration law" is ridiculous given that the administration has repeatedly *violated immigration law* by detaining/deporting people without due process.

Just spotted in the NYT: "A New York Times reporter was struck with a nonlethal round by officers late Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. The reporter was treated at a hospital but not seriously injured." That's at least five journalists I've heard of who ended up in ER or urgent care over weekend.

There's not even a pretense here that people should be arrested for breaking a law — just for opposing Trump politically. Naked authoritarianism.

This is a fever dream. The city is not under migrant occupation. This whole thing kicked off because ICE began an intense operation across the city to raid Home Depots and nail salons and places where random undocumented immigrants might be going about their day working a job.

Since 2016, 1 notable pro-GOP shift has come from Latinos. How did Latinos shift towards a party taking strong positions against unauthorized immigration? @wpmarble.bsky.social & I use population-based panel surveys to help answer that in a new paper: osf.io/preprints/so... Quick 🧵

New paper w/ @dhopkins1776.bsky.social on immigration attitudes and the GOP swing among Latinos ⬇️

please apply / encourage your students to apply!

How did we get here: Afrikaner Refugees edition. A 🧵 (backed up by research)

📢Heavily revised working paper on AI + Zoning — with @alexbartik.bsky.social and Dan Milo, we have a new draft of our paper which expands on our method to understand housing regulations with AI. Incudes a new public data release with more housing regulation data:

The presidents of 200 US colleges declare: "As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education." Good! www.aacu.org/newsroom/a-c...

Stanford’s president and provost release a statement supporting Harvard. stanforddaily.com/2025/04/15/l...

MIT following Harvard's lead here

The 245-year-old American Academy of Arts & Sciences releases a statement rejecting assaults on scholarly and cultural institutions, the rule of law, & open inquiry--and calls on all Americans to "help fortify" democratic civic culture. www.amacad.org/news/board-s...

If you bow to these ppl they will just destroy you faster www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

I recently spoke to the New York Times about how domestic migration and demographic change contribute to the rise of the AfD in Germany. Check out the article here: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/w...

Proud that my piece on respectability is officially out at APSR. It’s open access! The piece matters a lot to me bc it reflects my strong belief that Black people’s political & social lives warrant deep study & deserve their place in our field’s “top” journals. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Big thanks to Matt for having me on the Science of Politics podcast to talk about my working paper on educational polarization!

Private donors gave more than $350M to support election administration in 2020. Many critics argued that these grants swung the election from Trump to Biden. In a new paper, @apoorvalal.com and I find that these grants did not provide Democrats a noticeable advantage. bit.ly/lal_thompson...