There is growing interest in HPE about social conflict in the run-up to the French Revolution. In a new article at Data & Corpus, I describe the Jean Nicolas Database, a database of 8,516 rebellions in France (1661-1789) 👉Article: doi.org/10.46298/dc.... 👉Database: doi.org/10.7910/DVN/... 🧵1/6

Survey experiments have become a popular methodology among social scientists. Has it been effective? In POQ, Rauf et al. study the efficacy of 100 survey experiments. Their results show that a majority of hypotheses were not supported. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

had a chance to visit the Indian agricultural research institute (IARI) fields yesterday — where many of the crops grown in India are/were developed, including the varieties responsible for the green revolution

India’s rural employment guarantee program, one of the world’s biggest safety nets — and possibly the most studied program in the history of development economics? — is at serious risk of being repealed: indianexpress.com/article/indi...

📣📣📣 GREAT, time-sensitive opportunity for senior/mid-career scholars to join us in Madrid at UC3M´s social sciences department (UC3M-ATRAE Program 2026) on an attractive pay+research funds package 📣📣📣 This does NOT happen everyday. THREAD below if this is of interest 1/n

Fascinating. Linking two other important works on US regional culture: books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&... (Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America) and onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... (Frontier culture: The roots and persistence of “rugged individualism” in the United States)

Excited to post the latest version of my JMP: The female labor supply constraints of spousal jealousy bit.ly/4nn9apn I use two field experiments to study the role of spousal jealousy in constraining married women’s employment. More below 👇:

I agree with this — survey experiments represent a different intellectual lineage from usage of natural experiments to overcome real-world endogeneity (credibility revolution). That said, I think collective confusion that randomization=credible has given survey experiments too much epistemic status

> Between 1995 and 2021 (our sample period), there were a total of 47 individuals who have been a congressional leader; 20 of whom made stock trades both before and after ascension to leadership.

This is about to radicalize me against the credibility revolution

Go home prediction markets: you’re drunk Political prediction markets moved billions in 2024, but new evidence shows they weren’t very accurate or efficient PredictIt beat chance 93% of the time Kalshi? 78% Polymarket? 67% Big price divergences, weak/negative correlations, & rampant arbitrage

the case for slower, better/more careful research papers in poli sci gets another data point in its favor

incredible that we can turn correcting coding errors into litigation about the process in which we are allowed to transmit this information

Important public good (replications are much needed to help keep the whole enterprise honest but under-supplied)

💡 How does moving to opportunity reshape political behavior? 🗞️ In our new BJPolS paper, @thmskrr.bsky.social and I show that residential relocations that increase access to opportunity foster political integration and shift political preferences to the left. 👉 tinyurl.com/46utjj65

Many have asked for the LLM Survey paper. The release was bungled a bit by PNAS, but it is live now: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Ireland winning goal and end of match with Irish commentary

Happy to learn I received the Michael Wallerstein prize in political economy for this article on the political consequences of technological change in agriculture in the US: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Do architecture and urban planning affect political behavior? Happy to share a paper that @tesaliarizzo.bsky.social and I have coming out at the APSR which uses computer vision to investigate how the built environment shapes inequalities in civic participation in Mexico: osf.io/preprints/so.... 🧵1/5

Do architecture and urban planning affect political behavior? Happy to share a paper that @tesaliarizzo.bsky.social and I have coming out at the APSR which uses computer vision to investigate how the built environment shapes inequalities in civic participation in Mexico: osf.io/preprints/so.... 🧵1/5

lol, also technically human extinction ought to be quite good for gdp per capita

Paths to Power (PtP) is out in @bjpols.bsky.social! It is a database with data on cabinet members' social profile globally from 1966-2021. This is a great team effort with @chknutsen.bsky.social, @peterla.bsky.social, @inalkristiansen.bsky.social. But many more helped us along the way 🙏 A short 🧵

My response to the NYT’s “moderate to win” argument: The data shows the strategy is tapped out. Being seen as moderate by voters doesn’t boost votes, replacing every progressive with moderates would net 0 seats, and the graveyard of defeated D incumbents if full of moderates, not progressives.

Very happy to be able to share the polling-level dataset on Indian Parliamentary Elections 2009, 2014, 2019 that we have been working on for more than a decade. Both the data and the data descriptor are open access: rdcu.be/eujHH @statsvitenskap.bsky.social @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social

My book w/@profsorelle.bsky.social will be out in January! These ideas have brewed since I interned at Queens Legal Services 20 years ago. The book is for anyone who cares about people, justice, power & democracy. Much more to share more in the coming months! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Came across a cool paper on how false beliefs are sustained in equilibrium. In Murcia, prayers for rain appear to work - because they are timed to occur when rain is increasingly likely. Praying for rain globally is only found where rainfall is predictable with time: www.nber.org/papers/w31411

This book is relevant to thinking about the present constitutional moment in the US. Constitutional and federal mythology aside, the US has always had some elements of extreme political centralization in the hands of the presidency that go back to a desire to create an electoral monarchy

I will be engaging a conversation with @daliyang.bsky.social, @vicshih.bsky.social, @tompepinsky.com and Martin Dimitrov on my new book at the #APSA2025 Author Meets Critics panel on 9/14, 10:00 to 11:30am PDT. Come join us if you are still around. www.cambridge.org/core/books/d...

Incredible parallels in this Berinsky & @gabelenz.bsky.social paper. Politicians didn't stand up to Joe McCarthy in large part because they incorrectly inferred McCarthy/ism was extremely popular. Not standing up to McCarthy was a kind of 1950s Popularism gated academic.oup.com/poq/article/...

Come check out our panel on Bureaucratic Performance in the Developing World at APSA (Thu, September 11, 12:00 to 1:30pm PDT in East Meeting Level, East 12. I'll be presenting some new work on how farmers and officials in India learned to game satellite-based environmental enforcement.....

I wasn’t familiar with this terminology but the “missing intercept” problem seems like a good way to think about partial vs general equilibrium effects and why the latter isn’t just about adding up the former: voxdev.org/topic/method...

The American Viewer: Political Consequences of Entertainment Media The American Viewer: Political Consequences of Entertainment Media By Eunji Kim, Columbia University and Shawn Patterson Jr., University of Pennsylvania American voters consume an astounding amount of entertainment media, yet its…

What a way to kick off the @ucmerced.bsky.social academic year! Political Science and CAPE hosted the inaugural Fall Kick-Off for faculty and students last week, featuring a celebration of Professor Christopher Ojeda's new book The Sad Citizen: How Politics is Depressing and Why It Matters.

The thing about industrial policy is that it doesn’t seem to work very well unless you have a highly professionalized and relatively politically autonomous bureaucracy (think MITI in Japan vs license raj in India) that implements it. I think that’s the fundamental problem in the US spanning party

Teaching a new class on technology and politics this fall — which tries to think about contemporary tech governance issues via the historical experience of past technological revolutions (IR, atom bomb, printing press, automobile, etc) Sharing the syllabus in case it is of interest..!

I’m starting to think everyone needs a basic primer in what machine learning is, just like they need to know algebra/the basics of calculus. It’s just as accessible and I think important for critical thinking about the tools everyone will increasingly be using, including government

In a polarized climate, nothing the president does is a bridge too far for co-partisans. Worth reading this article: muse.jhu.edu/article/729166

"The Value of Clean Water: Experimental Evidence From Rural India" static1.squarespace.com/static/558ef...

The student newspaper. This fell. To the student. Newspaper.

Peter Temin has himself written on the history of economic history at MIT here: read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article...

The dominant framework that political scientists have to think about parties is Downsian competition — parties just fluidly adjust to what the electorate demands. In fact, parties are more like clubs, and insiders are more than happy to sink the whole ship if it means they enjoy rents for a while..

A great review essay from Avinash Dixit on why government should not / cannot be run like a business: www.edegan.com/pdfs/Dixit%2...

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand: $678M raised through those spam tactics $282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies. $11M to actual campaigns (1.6%) The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

An incredible embarrassment for an educational institution: www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Re-reading this classic, its central thesis — bureaucracies gain autonomy from politicians on the basis of their popularity/reputation — does not seem to hold up very well in the current era. Agencies with stellar reputations (Post Office, NASA, NIH, etc) have been carved up just the same?

I wonder if the Columbia leadership realizes (or cares) how much blowback there might be from *within* the academy. This post, from a Cornell Law professor, is worth reading: 3d.laboratorium.net/2025-07-25-c...

Gaza has reached IPC Phase 5, which is the worst level of food insecurity & is associated with high amounts of death & permanent disability. For people experiencing this level of malnutrition, even if it ended today, many of the consequences (eg personal outcomes like disabilities) are irreversible.

A really great paper on market power providing evidence that competition between agricultural middle-men results in better prices for farmers. The setting is rural India, but the principle is of course generally relevant: pages.jh.edu/schatt20/pap...

Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." -- a saying surprisingly universal in its relevance to things that organizations/governments do

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: