I'm one of those academics who measure message persuasiveness via survey experiment. I think it's absolutely the right method for doing so. I think the response to this good point from @anatosaurus.bsky.social is not to abandon survey exps but instead to measure "getting heard" (attention) also.

lol at the MPSA shade in the last line of the FAQ

Maybe your texts tell you to "BE A VOTER" like mine. It all started because of a PNAS paper that claimed that the noun form it increased voter turnout (relative to the verb form ) by 11 to 14 percentage points. It keeps not replicating, obviously. Most recently doi.org/10.1017/bpp....

Doing meta-reanalysis means my coauthors and I are constantly asking for data. This month we heard back from 21 of 32 author teams on first email, all responses "yes" or "soon." (nice!) Innovation: asking authors to post data publicly rather than privately with us via email (4 did, more will!)

chat's personalized flattery is getting out of hand

rarely have we needed the "suggestive" results from a "factors associated with" design to have the possibility that X affects Y "suggested" to us

encountered this article by David Weimer from 1986 (cited by 7) with three good ideas for improving science that just a few short decades later, we've started to implement. Collective Delusion In The Social Sciences: Publishing Incentives For Empirical Abuse doi.org/10.1111/j.15...

@chloethurston.bsky.social & Mary McGrath (both at @polisciatnu.bsky.social) join the Perspectives on Politics editorial team as Associate Editors in American Politics!

Congrats to @daniel-a-n-goldstein.com and @drewstommes.bsky.social for showing how an information treatment that US wars are fought predominantly by the poor increases preferences for recruiting from the rich. No effect on tax policy tho! here again we see fx on "target attitudes" not "nontarget"

What are you doing Thursday Nov 13? This panel on survey methods for measuring "rare traits" seems v. important especially if we think small numbers of people sometimes have outsize influence on politics. The speakers appear to be Bluesky-less, but I'll tag the moderator @mattgraham.bsky.social!

👀 this new meta-analysis on edutainment by @bardiarahmani.bsky.social, Montano, @dylanwgroves.bsky.social, and Green doi.org/10.1017/bpp.... 377 ests in 77 exps: edutainment moves attitudes, norms, beliefs 📊 Effects persist ⏳ Many reasonable theories about effect heterogeneity are not supported 😇

Currently in FirstView: In “Balancing Precision and Retention in Experimental Design,” @gustavodiaz.org and Erin Rossiter study how experimental design choices can increase precision when estimating treatment effects. Specifically, they examine block-randomized and pre-post designs.

Since it’s the #equinox, time to re-post the best #dataviz I’ve ever done: 365 pictures of the Earth from space, taken at exactly 6:00 a.m. Details on the NASA Earth Observatory: earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/52248...

love this #notamap as a way of understanding the scale of land use. we're so used to seeing state borders and we have a rough sense of their relative sizes -- this plot makes great use of that

The great Vincent Arel-Bundock shows how to use marginaleffects post-estimation summaries with DeclareDesign simulations!

Grateful to Matt Baum, Jamie Druckman, @jonmladd.bsky.social @brendannyhan.bsky.social @dannagal.bsky.social for joining the Author Meets Critics session on The American Mirage tomorrow at 12:00. If you spot me at the conference, ask for my favorite book merch: a custom magnetic bottle opener!

I'm once again a session chair for APSA and will be imposing the Nyhan / Samii rules. Encourage your chairs to do the same. I don't see any good arguments for the usual all papers all discussant comments all questions format

whaaaat!? that's so cool! literally just: weird_trick = D * X iv_robust(weird_trick ~ D | Z) to get the mean of X among compliers!

All statistical models are wrong, but some are stupid

Suppose there are only two publication tracks for an experiment: 1) Pre-registered experiment: PAP -> Realization -> Submit -> RR -> Publication 2) Registered report: PAP -> Submit -> RR -> Realization -> RR2 -> Publication when should we want 2 not 1? to protect against "null risk"?

It is *so hard* to fight this kind of asymmetry. Any suggestions or workflows you do to counteract?

Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science is hiring *multiple* senior folks (assoc/full prof) working on democracy broadly (institutions, political behavior, CP, AP). I’m not on the committee (hiding on research leave), but I'm happy to chat / answer questions! 👉 apply.interfolio.com/172986

This post seriously conflates "polling" with "survey experimentation" Also any paragraph that starts this way is a big 🚩

LESS looks like A LOT of fun -- now you've got one more reason to be happy you live in London or one more reason to be jealous of those who do!

Submitted!

My sister is taking her post-tenure (WOO!!!) sabbatical trip to Nepal and will be blogging it!

I

Really excited about this project. Also, shoutout to @aecoppock.bsky.social for the vayr package. Many folks really impressed by the elegance of his sunflower adjustment for over-plotting points. alexandercoppock.com/vayr/

Today I officially start at Northwestern! I am so happy to be here and so grateful to everyone who made this possible I've got new courses on persuasion and replication to teach a new research agenda on generalizability and meta-analysis new collaborators to find Yale gratitude posts to follow...

This is a fantastic development for European political science led by some very brilliant people focused on excellent research A sea change. Bravo. Help however you can * join the mailing list by sending a message to [email protected] * join *now* to show support * spread the word

With @mollyow.bsky.social, we wrote up an email exchange about testing for causal effect heterogeneity with the grf package. In short, a recommended approach had v. bad properties (wild over-rejection of true nulls of homogeneity) but Molly had a fix. alexandercoppock.com/testing_with...

Book review: I really enjoyed @aecoppock.bsky.social's Persuasion in Parallel (2022) and @charlespiller.bsky.social's Doctored (2025). Strong recommend for both if you are interested in replication and scientific integrity. Reviews on my blog: babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2025/06/two-...

We should have orders of magnitude fewer “theories” in PS than we do papers.

🚨 “Good Description” with @annagbusse.bsky.social 🚨 What sets 'good' description apart from 'mere' description? We develop a framework for evaluating descriptive research, whether we are doing it as scholars or assessing it as readers. Two main contributions... 🔗📄 tinyurl.com/gooddesc

Thanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

The discussion and engagement was so good on this over the last few weeks that I went ahead and added 2 whole new sections to this blog post (worth checking out if you already read this!): I reflect on the discussions and fun that we had as well as provide more resources and a call to action.

Our community must take this issue very seriously! ideally, we'd post these publicly: raw_no_pii.csv cleaning.R clean.rds analysis.R but destroy or archive privately: raw.csv remove_pii.R (was glad to see in this thread political science apparently does better than other fields but still)

This new package for mediation is great! The user interface is *so intuitive* but the unsung hero of this software is the documentation:

Exactly a year ago, a paper claimed apple cider vinegar was as effective as Ozempic for weight loss. *Clearly wrong.* This is the story of exactly one year of dealing with this paper. And the very normal, very complete failure of governance that resulted. open.substack.com/pub/jamescla...

Dear Academics, Stop submitting your colleagues’ working papers/drafts to generative AIs to develop your comments and feedback. Sincerely, Academics

Might be taste, but I find it far easier to grasp experimental results in a figure of contrasts rather than a regression table. Simple setup-4 experimental conditions (control and 3 dosage levels) interacted with pid, 5pt dv (a typical design). From this table-how does pid interact with dose?

Congratulations @awilke.bsky.social! Anna appears to a tables > figures kind of scholar so no screenshots of results -- you'll have to click through to actually read this paper to learn what happened :) doi.org/10.1111/ajps...

New visualization tool alert! The vayr package version 1.0.0 is now on CRAN. It contains position adjustments for ggplot2 that help with overplotting in pleasing ways. My favorite is position_sunflower(). - install.packages("vayr") - alexandercoppock.com/vayr #rstats #ggplot2 #dataviz

Climate Terminology Does Not Matter Across tens of thousands of participants in two large-scale experiments, we found that labeling climate change in different ways had no effect on their stated willingness to act. jayvanbavellab.substack.com/p/climate-te... via @dgoldwert.bsky.social

This is an absolutely amazing research effort and intervention outcome. Big congrats to all involved! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Love this

🧵 Why do facts often change beliefs but not attitudes? In a new WP with @yamilrvelez.bsky.social and @scottclifford.bsky.social, we caution against interpreting this as rigidity or motivated reasoning. Often, the beliefs *relevant* to people’s attitudes are not what researchers expect.

Left: frequency of finding het fx by starsign when there is none (declaration and diagnosis in alt-text) Right (inspo): classic R2 clapback -- you want het fx? Ok fine, here's fx of aspirin by starsign. (doi.org/10.1016/S014...

v. important new work on attention

solid meme work in this post.