There’s so much interesting research coming from Vanderbilt University Political Science. As dept chair, it is a pleasure to highlight a bunch of it. First, up, Jessica Trounstine and Sarah Anzia in the American Political Science Review on civil service adoption: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

See our No-Spin report on the Baby’s First Years RCT, studying the effects of providing unconditional cash transfers to low-income, new mothers in the US. In brief: This high-quality RCT found no impact on any of the study’s primary child development outcomes at 4y follow-up.🧵

💸 How should scholars measure early money in campaigns? Our new PSRM Journal article in FirstView (w/ Colin Case) offers a theoretical and empirical framework, as well as practical guidance for working with FEC data 🔗doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2…

🚨 New paper with Jie Ma and Keith Schnakenberg: Democratic Accountability with Citizen Coproduction (Link in next tweet) As always: read it, cite it, love it

We are doing it again! Please submit your papers and come see us in Lisbon :)

Our article introducing CampaignView is now officially online! nature.com/articles/s4159…

Again: *vast* majority of university researchers are trying to cure cancer, understand inflation, see why black holes really exist, trace the Bantu migration, etc. But we're being screwed by small number of folks who think public role of the university is something else. 11/11

This looks like a must-read for those who test multiple hypotheses. Beyond Bonferroni: Hierarchical Multiple Testing in Empirical Research "standard approaches [for correcting for multiple hypotheses] typically ignore hierarchical relationships among hypotheses—structures that

#FirstView from Political Analysis - Estimating the Local Average Treatment Effect Without the Exclusion Restriction - cup.org/4fjAykx - Zachary Markovich

Excited that our (apoorva.lal, Yiqing Xu, Gary ziwen_Zu) paper won the Political Analysis' 2024 Editor's Choice award! It was really a lot of work (we started this in 2018!), so nice to see we've had some impact on the field. It's also open access. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

🚨 New paper in Science Advances Can changing how we argue about politics online improve the quality of replies we get? Tobias Heide-Jørgensen, Anne Rasmussen - @annerasmussen.bsky.social, and I use an LLM to manipulate counter-arguments to see how people respond to different approaches to arguments. Thread 🧵1/n

📲✖️Should phones be banned in classrooms? Our study with 17,000 students finds: Removing phones improves grades, especially for struggling students! 🧵 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… (with Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen and P. Choudhury) Half of global education systems have phone bans in classrooms,

BREAKING: new study just dropped that shows compelling evidence that cell phone bans cause student grades to modestly increase. Grade increases are largest among low performing students.

Did you know that 1/5 of the prison population in the U.S. is comprised of former foster children? But (!) it appears that relationship is not causal. This new ReStat leverages quasi-random assignment of kids to foster care in Michigan to show that placement actually

We are pleased to announce the 2025 Editors’ Choice Award for the paper “How Much Should We Trust Instrumental Variable Estimates in Political Science? Practical Advice Based on 67 Replicated Studies” by apoorva.lal, Mackenzie Lockhart, Yiqing Xu, and Gary ziwen_Zu.

I'm on the market! Check out my JMP here: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/73… And additional research and works in progress at: gfoysutherland.com

This paper is a big deal.

UC Davis Political Science is hiring an assistant professor in comparative politics. For more information, please see the description here: recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07299 The deadline is September 15.

Whoa—my book is up for pre-order! Model to meaning: How to interpret Statistical & ML Models in #RStats and #PyData The book presents an ultra-simple and powerful workflow to make sense of ± any model you fit Note: The web version stays free forever. tinyurl.com/4fk56fc8

What happens when the U.S. restricts H-1B visas? Firms don’t stop hiring talent, they just move jobs abroad. For every visa rejection, multinationals add ~0.4–0.9 foreign employees, especially in R&D hubs like India, China, and Canada.