The specter of AI has made me a much happier reader of reviewer reports. Every typo, weird punctuation choice, and grammatical error is a heartwarming signal that a real, imperfect person used their human mind to evaluate the work of their peers.
Here’s a blog post version of my recent paper in BJPS on coal dominance and local government capacity. Thanks, USAPP, for the opportunity to share a more accessible version of this work!
We're excited to release version 1.0 of the Dynamic Democracy website. It includes updated data on state policy, public opinion, mass ideology, and representation. The website enables you to see how these measures are changing overtime across states and within states.
www.dynamicdemocracy.us
Thank you, Chagai!!
And if you just can’t get enough of this, stay tuned for my book coming out early next year! It traces how this dysfunction leaves voters cynical and mistrustful, even after coal companies have left town. Plus many more stories of wild company town corruption: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
Out today! I argue companies that dominate local economies can durably shape the capacity of local governments. Read on if you’re interested in business power, local political economy, or (for some reason) how coal companies were (not) taxed by early 20th century local governments.
🚨We analyzed 138 million geocoded property tax records to quantify how municipal boundaries spatially overlap onto economic segregation in every US metro area—creating disparities in localities’ ability to fund public goods. And we made an interactive map of our results! [1/16]
What a comparison! By the way, with coal in the news this morning...if you're interested in learning more about how the 20th century coal industry's dominance of local governance hollowed out mining areas' faith in institutions, I have a book you can pre-order!
Excited to see this out! @hanslueders.bsky.social & I develop a concept & measure of place attachment, distinct from place identity. We show local attachments are similarly strong in urban & rural places, and they predict engagement in local (vs. national) politics. link.springer.com/10.1007/s111...
📢 The APSR is opening a new Research Notes track!
Authors may now submit directly as Notes—or, with editor agreement, have papers reclassified during review. Notes should be ≤7,000 words (excl. refs/appendices).
🚨 “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
We are extremely pleased to announce the preliminary release of the combined pre-election and post-election dataset for the ANES 2024 Time Series Study!
The data and documentation can be downloaded from the ANES website at: electionstudies.org/data-center/...
Best,
The ANES Team
I'm excited to present this today at UAA. If you're in Vancouver, it's at 9:50am at Pavillion B.
Overlapping CI's do not tell you if 2 estimates are significantly different from one another. These packages in R and Stata can help with this common visualization problem. Fan-freaking-tastic.
My book is now officially out! How Politicians Polarize introduces and documents the concept of "negative representation" – when representatives focus on the other side rather than their own.
Some key findings: 🧵
www.amazon.com/How-Politici...
Image description Partisanship and Trust in Personal Doctors: Causes and Consequences Abstract In the first decades of the twentieth century, the gap in age-adjusted mortality rates between people living in Republican and Democratic counties expanded; people in Democratic counties started living longer. This paper argues that political partisanship poses a direct problem for ameliorating these trends: trust and adherence in one’s personal doctor (including on non-COVID-19 related care) – once a non-partisan issue – now divides Democrats (more trustful) and Republicans (less trustful). We argue that this divide is largely a consequence of partisan conflict surrounding COVID-19 that spilled over and created a partisan cleavage in people’s trust in their own personal doctor. We then present experimental evidence that sharing a political background with your medical provider increases willingness to seek care. The doctor-patient relationship is essential for combating some of society’s most pressing proble
Figure 1. Line graph with three panels showing trends in attitudes toward Education, Medicine, and the Scientific Community from 1988 to 2020. Each panel displays two lines: one for Democrats (light blue) and one for Republicans (red), with vertical error bars. Y-axis values range from 1.75 to 2.5. In all panels, Republican ratings decline more steeply over time, especially after 2010. Democrat ratings remain relatively stable or increase slightly, particularly in the Scientific Community panel after 2010.
Figure 2. Dot-and-whisker plot showing treatment effects (Treatment – Control) on three outcomes: “Trust Own Doctor,” “Adhere Doc Advice,” and “Conf. in Medicine.” Three groups are plotted: Vote Biden (light blue), Vote Trump (red), and Biden–Trump difference (gray). The y-axis ranges from -0.5 to 1.0. For “Trust Own Doctor” and “Conf. in Medicine,” the Biden group shows positive treatment effects, while the Trump group shows negative effects. The Biden–Trump difference is positive for all outcomes, with error bars indicating uncertainty. A horizontal dashed line at 0.0 marks no treatment effect.
Image description Figure 3. Dot-and-whisker plot with four panels showing Average Marginal Component Effects (AMCE) for Democratic (light blue) and Republican (red) respondents across different attributes: Male, Ivy League, Far Away, Democrat, High Rating, Medium Rating, Black, and Hispanic. Panels display results for All Respondents, Female Respondents, Black Respondents, and Latinx Respondents. The x-axis ranges from -0.25 to 0.50 with a vertical dashed line at 0.0 indicating no effect. Each dot represents the AMCE estimate with horizontal error bars indicating uncertainty. Some estimates differ by respondent group, and not all attributes have data points for both political affiliations in all panels.
Despite trust in personal doctors becoming a partisan issue, experimental evidence suggests that sharing a political background with one's medical provider increases willingness to seek care, finds @obrian.bsky.social & Bradley Kent in @bjpols.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S000...
🚨 New paper (with Kasey Rhee & Nico Studen). We use a new within-precinct design to isolate how ideology affects vote choice holding turnout fixed, analyzing 3.4M precinct observations across state & fed elections (2016-2022).
tldr: Ideological moderation affects vote shares, but not by much. 🧵⬇️
In case anyone needs a break from reality (me, by 9 a.m. every day), my coauthor Anna Berg and I have a new, open access essay out in Perspectives! buff.ly/4gN6cFR. We describe the marginalization of qual methods in the study of American political behavior and make a case for their revival.
When Queen Victoria’s mourning disrupted the "London Season" (elite marriage market), peer-commoner intermarriage rose by 40%, marital wealth sorting fell by 30%, and peers' political power declined as a result. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
New in POQ from Stephen Jessee, Neil Malhotra and @mayasen.bsky.social, new empirical research on why you should write shorter survey questions
academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
Just looked through this checklist for a survey experiment I'm working on this morning!
being bused to an inner-city school significantly increases White support for the Democratic Party and its candidates more than forty years later
www.nber.org/papers/w33365
We have a new report out. Do Won Kim, Xilin Yang and Do-Hoon Kim reproduce "The Effects of Racial Diversity in Citizen Decision-Making Bodies" by Karpowitz et al. @thejop.bsky.social. Link to the report and author's response below.
We see these findings as helping to explain a pattern we described in earlier work: white jurors' preferences have more influence over their jury's final decision. scholar.google.com/citations?vi...
Excited to see this out! We study several hundred mock jury deliberations and find that white deliberators speak more, raise their own preferences more, and step in at more pivotal times in the discussion than deliberators of color. Inequalities persist even in more diverse groups.
🚨 New year, new working paper 🚨
"In Control but Incoherent: Institutional Power, Electoral Politics, and Message Discipline in Congress" with Gechun Lin (WUSTL). Available here: benjaminnoble.org/files/papers...
Read on for the 🧵 version…
The Public Sphere in Private Spaces: Politics, News, and Misinformation in Personal Messaging Applications
Data & Procedure
Committee group picture
Abstract
Very happy to say that I passed my PhD dissertation defense, "The Public Sphere in Private Spaces: Politics, News, and Misinformation in Personal Messaging Applications." Grateful for my advisor, committee, and everyone at Stanford
https://shorturl.at/zQ8bJ
New paper published @ajpseditor.bsky.social
Showing that reduced access to public services fuelled far right support in 🇮🇹
Existing work on far right highlights globalization & migration grievances, what about people’s experiences with the state?
We use 🇮🇹 reform to find out
shorturl.at/zQ8bJ
