Jeff Ziegler

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

Understanding Maximum Likelihood Estimation A tool to understand maximum likelihood estimation

Do you know any other cool interactive applications that illustrate some statistical concept?
#rstats #stats
@rpsychologist.com

rpsychologist.com/likelihood/

Screenshot of claude just writing a design no trouble

Writing simulations in DeclareDesign just went from "I should do that, but it's kind of a lot of work" to extremely easy

Acquiescence Bias and Criterion Validity: Problems and Potential Solutions for Agree-Disagree Scales - Political Behavior Political Behavior - Scholars frequently measure dispositions like populism, conspiracism, racism, and sexism by asking survey respondents whether they agree or disagree with statements...

New w/@scottclifford.bsky.social.

Lots of work uses agree-disagree scales, and a lit review shows these are 1) frequently just measured in one direction (agree = higher trait) and 2) correlated with each other.

This has potentially big issues for conclusions.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🚨(Software) Update:

In my PhD, I had a side project to fix an annoying problem: when you ask 5 people to label the same thing, you often get different answers. But in ML (and lots of other analyses), you still need a single aggregated answer. Using the majority vote is easy–but often wrong.

1/N

Polling Simulator - How do polls work? Explore how random error and methodological choices shape the results of political polls.

I built this for fun. Not really sure what to do with it. Maybe it will be useful to people trying to understand polling. Might even be a decent teaching example. (Feedback welcome. I am not a web designer, please be kind.)

poll-simulator.netlify.app

Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version?

I made an app you might like: adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/

It all started a few years ago... 🧵

Very interesting new study using CES data from Scott Platte and @bfschaffner.bsky.social new in @psrm.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

As @seanjwestwood.bsky.social's terrifying new PNAS article demonstrates, LLMs can now pass almost every attention check, mirror personas, stay consistent across pages, and systematically bias responses in the aggregate.

So here’s a different angle: verify physical presence, not text.

Many think LLM-simulated participants can transform behavioral science. But there's been a lack of accessible discussion of what it means to validate LLMs for behavioral scientists. Under what conditions can we trust LLMs to learn about human parameters? Our paper maps the validation landscape.
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Cool new tool to check if your references contain retraction risks.

www.retractionrisk.com

I am hiring a post-doctoral fellow (2 years) to work on all things political finance in Africa. There are no teaching obligations, and lots of opportunities for fieldwork. A PhD in Political Science is a requirement. Please spread the word! Happy to answer questions - send them to my LSE email.

screenshot of my post

Big new blogpost!

My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.

--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Survey experiments' popularity in political science is getting attention. What is good and bad about them? How can one maximize their benefits and mitigate their downsides?

Greg Huber and I wrote up our thoughts:
Paywalled: doi.org/10.1016/bs.h...
Free: m-graham.com/papers/Huber...

Lots of concern about ⬆️ of survey experiments as signal of “credible causal evidence”, but I’m genuinely curious: what’s the alternative if we study trends that happen rarely, are hard to measure, or lack data? Causality aside, seems like surveys and/or experiments are an incredibly useful tool?

"The Credibility Revolution in Political Science"

osf.io/preprints/so...

Readable, Reliable, Reusable: A Guide to Clean #rstats Code
jacciz.github.io/portfolio/pr... Lots of good advice in this post. Too bad one (better, I) keeps forgetting about some practices in the process and follow bad practices

handy little data hoarder tool i built and deployed for myself but others might find useful lalten.org/linkpull/

1) academic or govt site with a bunch of hyperlinks
2) write a regex to grab all links matching a pattern in said url, copy and paste into file
3) download with wget or curl

Comparative Constitutions Project Producing data about constitutions. Impacting the constitution-making process. Promoting peace, justice, and human development.

The new Comparative Constitutions Project website is now live! Developed by yours truly. We're also releasing version 5.0 of our Constitutional Chronology and Constitutional Characteristics datasets, updated through 2023. Explore and download: comparativeconstitutionsproject.org

Title page of Research Group Handbook

Poster on building community through a reserach group handbook, presented at the 2025 All-Island Research Culture Network Conference in Belfast.

UCD Graduate Studies and I have produced a Research Group Handbook template for supervisors and researchers.
The template outlines core topics, resources, and policies that groups can adapt to their needs.

➡️ Template and details: www.ucd.ie/graduatestud...

@ucddublin.bsky.social
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⏰ ⏰ Final call! Submit your abstract for PolMeth - Europe 2026 by Nov 15th here: polmeth.eu.

Don’t miss the chance to share your research and connect with other world-class scholars ☺️

testthat 3.3.0 testthat 3.3.0 brings improved expectations with better error messages, new expectations for common testing patterns, and lifecycle changes including the removal of `local_mock()` and `with_mock()`. I...

testthat 3.3.0 out now! This is a massive release with tons of improvements including better failure messages, new expectations, improved snapshotting, new vignettes, and much much more: tidyverse.org/blog/2025/11... Post includes some thoughts on developing an #rstats package with Claude Code.

Conference deadlines have habit of sneaking up. This is your friendly reminder that the call for applications is still open for PolMeth - Europe. Don’t let yourself suffer from FOMO, and come to Dublin this coming May!

Nano-targeting or mass appeal, what makes persuasive climate communications? - Impact of Social Sciences Are nano-targeting tools capable of creating more persuasive climate communications, or broad appeal messages still the best way to move audiences on climate?

🌎New @lseimpactblog.bsky.social: Nano-targeting or mass appeal, what makes persuasive climate communications?

Thomas Robinson, @miriamsorace.bsky.social @simonhix.bsky.social & @fresejoris.bsky.social explore how new tools make targeting individuals at scale with tailored communications possible

👉

"While testing one dimension at a time can yield simple results, those effects may not generalise to richer, real-world contexts."

Read our new POAL Methods Briefs on Conjoint Experiments from Thomas Robinson!

Link: www.poal.co.uk/research/met...

A little less than 2 weeks to submit an abstract proposal for PolMeth - Europe. Join us in Dublin this coming May to share your new political science research using cutting edge methods!!

I cannot stress this enough to my own students, you cannot outsource your own learning!!

Might need to look into this!

Super interesting, wasn’t aware of other elections that put up candidate posters like this during campaigns! I’ve got an ongoing project collecting candidate posters and locations in Ireland, do you know if there’s a similar effort in Denmark?

My own TLDR for the message from this paper:

statsepi.substack.com/p/sorry-what...