Political scientist at
@PennPORES
and election analyst at NBC decision desk | Occasional tweets about social science, cities, philly sports/politics, etc.
Why does economic decline seem to benefit right-wing parties in the U.S. and Europe? In a new paper,
@Jhyun_Lim
and I propose an explanation rooted in the interplay between social arrangements and economic geography.
I went to a protest in Palo Alto last weekend and kept thinking about how many residents of the $3 million homes with BLM signs out front would also protest the construction of a low-income apartment building in their neighborhood.
The white working class has steadily become part of the Republican base while whites w/ college degrees have become Democratic. In a new paper, I study the issue basis of this realignment, showing that both economic and cultural issues have contributed.
Related: this excellent
@kimmaicutler
piece on how institutionalized racism shaped Silicon Valley should be required reading in history classes. It’s impossible to separate the Palo Alto of today from its racist history.
Who put Trump in the White House? In this new paper w/
@justingrimmer
, we document some surprising facts about the sources of Trump's support, including: Trump got fewer votes than Romney among the most racially conservative Americans.
I frequently find myself reading medical research for personal/health reasons, and it never fails to depress me how many common treatments are based on such flimsy evidence.
In middle school (in Pennsylvania) I learned that Levittowns, like Eichler homes in CA, expanded the middle class. I don’t remember learning about the redlining and racial covenants that went along with them, and how the effects are felt to this day.
Happy to share that I'll be a postdoc at Princeton's Center for the Study of Democratic Politics next academic year—can't wait to work (in-person🤞) with the great folks there.
Personally, I'm excited to go back to Philly, closer to family/friends/the burgeoning 76ers dynasty.
How should election analysts, pundits, and researchers characterize election outcomes? In this paper, we propose tools for analyzing elections, with a focus on decomposing the sources of votes across different groups in the electorate.
Excited to see this paper—one of the first I worked on in grad school—published! We formalize the notions of attitude constraint and multidimensionality, design an empirical test, and apply it to public opinion data, roll-call votes, and elite surveys.
The bulk of Trump's increase over Romney didn't come from extreme conservatives. So who did put Trump in the White House? Politically moderate, independent, and low-SES whites.
I haven’t been tweeting much lately, but I have to thank the firefighters at
@SFFDPIO
. I woke up to this massive fire half a block away from my apartment—I could feel the heat from my window. Thankfully the firefighters kept it from spreading to the houses on my block.
p-hacking/publication bias/shoddy research design is frustrating in social science. but it really upsets me when I think about how pervasive it is in medical research, where often the stakes are much higher
In our paper (forthcoming @ JOP),
@ClaytonNall
and I document that both liberal and conservative homeowners generally oppose new housing construction—especially apartments. This Trump tweet is probably politically savvy, even if it annoys Twitter liberals.
I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood...
In my
#MPSA18
paper with Nathan Lee, we show that campaign finance has a large deterrent effect on candidate entry. Paying legislators more can slightly offset this effect. More results in the paper! Comments welcome.
How much does mass partisan polarization filter down to local politics? In a new paper w/
@AmalieJensen_
, Scheve, and Slaughter, we find that there's limited polarization over many policy proposals related to local economic development.
What happened when
@MoSalah
joined
@LFC
?
Hate crimes in the surrounding area declined by 19%.
The # of anti-Muslim tweets sent by Liverpool fans was cut in half.
Evidence (by:
@wpmarble
@a_alrababah
@salma_mousa_
@aasiegel
): "Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice?"
First, the well-known realignment: In 1992, GHWB won 45% of white voters w/o a college degree and 52% of those with a college degree. In 2020, Trump won 65% of non-college whites and just 42% of whites with a degree. The college divide is widening.
3) The relative weight that whites w/o college degrees placed on cultural issues was low until the mid-2000s—limiting the returns Republicans could reap from the WWC's conservative cultural attitudes. Now, the weight placed on cultural issues is identical for the two groups.
2) The white working class has long been more conservative than college-educated voters on cultural issues. But in the past ~20 years, college-educated voters have become significantly more liberal on economic issues as well.
We apply these statistics to CCES and ANES data to examine the voting blocs that contributed to Trump's victory. We find that Trump underperformed among whites with the highest levels of racial resentment, and gained the most among whites with moderate immigration preferences.
Today's
@StatModeling
's post discusses similar themes wrt covid-19 treatment and vaccine trials. What's striking to me is how small trials tend to be, even for common treatments/diseases. Lack of coordination/data sharing seem like part of the problem
I didn't really appreciate how much a problem this was until I came across this
@RyanDEnos
, Fowler, and Havasy paper. Apparently judges interpret "you can't prove a negative" to mean "you can prove X decreases Y." That's totally insane!
These two mechanisms—attitude change on economic issues and convergence in relative issue weights on cultural issues—combine to explain the realignment of white voters along educational lines. These results suggest the new coalitions will be stable into the foreseeable future.
I present a few findings:
1) Ideological constraint has increased dramatically among both college-educated and non-college-educated voters, expanding the possibilities for group-based polarization.
This is a happy result: Even with arbitrary (limited) interference, standard estimators can recover a well-defined & interpretable estimand under many designs. Justifies the common intuition that SUTVA violations usually don't matter "that much."
I didn't really appreciate how much a problem this was until I came across this
@RyanDEnos
, Fowler, and Havasy paper. Apparently judges interpret "you can't prove a negative" to mean "you can prove X decreases Y." That's totally insane!
I use survey data to generate issue-specific ideal point estimates for Economics, Moral/Social Issues, Race, and Foreign Policy. I introduce a framework that enables me to decompose differences in vote choice into different preference distributions and different issue weights.
We replicate findings from
@blfraga
,
@seanmcelwee
,
@_Jon_Green
,
@b_schaffner
that a decline in black turnout benefited Trump. But the vast majority of Trump's improvement over Romney came from white voters.
The framework I use here enables a principled interpretation of the correlation between vote choice and attitudes. There are issues of causality that I discuss in the paper. It's not perfect, but IMO this framework provides important insights into the nature of voting decisions.
Newly revised and retitled paper with
@ClaytonNall
, on how personal interest overcomes ideology in the politics of housing development. Comments welcome!
These results are surprising given a growing consensus that Trump activated conservative racial and immigration attitudes—there was a higher correlation between these attitudes and vote choice in 2016 than in prior elections.
To explain election results the correlation between attitudes and vote choice among those who turn out to vote is insufficient and can often provide incorrect answers about who contributed the most to a candidate’s victory.
I'm thrilled my former student Justine won this award for the final paper she wrote in my undergrad survey research class. She wrote and fielded an original survey assessing people's knowledge of and attitudes toward abortion laws in their state. Congratulations Justine!
Congratulations to Justine Orgel, winner of this year's PAPOR Student Paper Competition! We were pleased to present the award at this year's conference, where Justine is also presenting her work on how misconceptions about abortion's legal status impact opinions on state policy
We don't deny that Trump mobilized some racist/anti-immigrant whites.But focusing on the votes that racial conservatives contributed—rather than just on how they vote once they arrive in the voting booth—provides a different view of how much they mattered to Trump’s victory.
I know things can escalate really quickly, but I didn't have a good sense of what to expect over the next week. So, I used country-level data on confirmed
#COVID19
cases to generate a 7-day projection based on a simple time-series model:
@paloaltoweekly
Unimpressive houses that cost $2 million because residents and their representatives care more about their net worth than other people.
But knowing whether an attitude was activated provides almost no information about *how many* votes came from different segments of the electorate. We also need to consider composition and turnout.
Despite concerns about ideological polarization, increased partisan acrimony, and low engagement among independents, white swing voters comprise an important voting bloc for presidential campaigns and are likely to remain an important voting bloc for future elections.
Researchers are making data on
#COVID19
cases publicly available.
Quick cut at the data: there's significant country-level heterogeneity in the growth of confirmed cases. Much faster growth in Korea and China compared to US—potentially attributable to differences in testing?
We provide a simple set of statistics for inferring how many votes a candidate won or lost among different voting blocs and how that compares to candidates in prior elections.
Important to keep in mind historically high turnout when diagnosing why some heavily Democratic groups (Latinos, city of Philadelphia) swung towards Trump in terms of vote share. Turning out marginal voters means bringing people who are closer to indifferent into the electorate.
-Public transit provides 34 mil. passenger trips per day, compared to <3 mil. on flights
-The median American flies 0 times per year
-Essential workers (health care, grocery store, sanitation, etc.) need public transit to get to their jobs
Very thankful to have such a smart group of friends and colleagues. Our zoom meetings/hangouts have helped keep me sane for the past few months—and really for the last five years of grad school.
Stanford to grad students: remember that residency requirement that you’ve never heard about before? Well we’re enforcing it now
Also Stanford: you must stay in your assigned zone on campus and wear ID at all times
@dataandpolitics
This thread is basically what I think about every day on the train. Especially around Hillsdale when the train track is elevated and you can see miles and miles of single-story sprawl. It’s not even like there’s a lot of pretty green space and nice architecture!
57 Buffalo police resign. The union is upset with treatment of the two officers who were suspended. “Our position is these officers... were simply doing their job. I don't know how much contact was made. He did slip in my estimation. He fell backwards."
Also,
@salma_mousa_
is quickly cornering the market on "soccer and Islamophobia research"—see her innovative experiment that randomizes teammates in a soccer league in post-ISIS Iraq here:
Then check out
@a_abdelgadir
's recently published paper (w/ Vicky Fouka) on the effect of the French headscarf ban on Muslim integration (our cohort's first APSR!)
@HeerJeet
@mattyglesias
i'll let others decide if this is *good* but
@justingrimmer
and I have a paper showing how many net votes Trump got from different segments of the electorate, compared to Romney in 2012
So if I ever have a major emergency, I'll have to go to an ER other than the high-quality one that is only about a mile from where I live. Our health care system is so messed up.
HUD announced it may tie development grants to less restrictive zoning—shifting priorities away from the Obama-era goal of de-segregating housing and towards increasing overall housing supply.
Brief thread on some relevant academic research: (1/N)
The takeaway: celebrities and role models can help to humanize stigmatized groups, increase tolerance, and reduce prejudiced behavior—especially when they're positive contributors to a shared goal.
And with that, good luck tomorrow
@MoSalah
! 8/8
A new study finds clear and convincing evidence that, in sharp contrast to the extreme polarization of national politics and policy, most Democrat and Republican residents see very little difference on local issues, writes
@Richard_Florida
.
For the first time, entire student bodies have been compelled to take all of their classes online. Jonathan Zimmerman says that now is a perfect opportunity to measure how students learn in that medium compared to face-to-face instruction.
This is a cool interview about how the Philly accent is changing, and the parts about how the accent varies in high schools that are elite/non-elite and Catholic/non-Catholic ring very true in my experience.
Spoke to a linguist about how millennials are changing (not killing) the Philly accent. In case you ever wanted to hear the sound clips that academics use to study our strange, beyoodeeful dialect, here they are. Thanks for speaking with me
@betsysneller
!
Glad the new proposal raises the arena floor to accommodate Jefferson Station, but it's hard to tell whether it's enough to save the natural lighting that
@IngaSaffron
has highlighted. Also no word on whether the new proposal would require MSG-style pillars thru the station.
So if I ever have a major emergency, I'll have to go to an ER other than the high-quality one that is only about a mile from where I live. Our health care system is so messed up.
This is a great addition to the project. The amenity effects of a new arena (and🤞additional knock-on development🤞) might cause nearby rents to go up a bit but the new housing supply should more than offset that.
These findings are consistent w/ competitive pressures between localities limiting the scope of polarization (and lack of partisan cues as a result). Our takeaway is that partisanship is likely to be less of a barrier to problem solving at the local level than the national level.
Today’s Switzerland itinerary (courtesy of
@a_alrababah
) showed off the amazing transit here:
tram to Zurich station
train Zurich to Arth
cog train up part of Mt. Rigi
aerial tram up more
hike to summit
cog train down
ferry to Luzern
train to Zurich
All on one ticket!
This is nice paper by
@shom_mazumder
@al_yan1
on workplace governance. In addition, it makes a good case for expanding the horizons of political science research. (No more "where's the politics?" in seminars please!)
Most Americans spend most of their time at work. With
@al_yan1
, we ask what do workers want from work? Using a conjoint experiment, we find that Americans want workplace democracy.
Our results ➡️ that the lack of econ. democracy is not because Americans don't want it.
🧵
The bottom left plots shows that we also find attitudes are activated, but these shifts are not enough to overcome the largely leftward shift in attitudes in the population (bottom right plot). So there are fewer votes to get from racial/immigration conservatives.
This article is bad and
@nytopinion
should feel bad.
Should be obvious to anyone who is accomplished enough to be published in the
@nytimes
, but apparently bears repeating: advocating inaction on the climate crisis no less "political" than advocating action.
The fact that judges aren't trained in and don't understand causal inference/statistics is a big problem. Excerpts from the Harvard discrimination opinion in this thread:
Also, I am impressed with how thorough
@TheEconomist
's fact-checking is. Peer review will be a breeze after answering all of
@J_CD_T
's questions.
[famous last words]