My annual update to my #Rstats {democracyData} package xmarquez.github.io/democracyData/

Vanderbilt University Political Science Prof & Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science Dean Cindy Kam & Prof Erin York talk about recent expulsion of two representatives from TN legislature on WPLN News - Nashville Public Radio This Is Nashville: This is Nashville: What the expulsion of two representatives tells us about Tennessee wpln.org/post/episodes/…

Very excited to be discussing #MPSA2023 panel "Formal Models of Conflict" today at 4:45pm (LaSalle 2, 7th floor). Featuring papers by Zhaotian Luo, Mei Yu, Haonan Dong, Peter Schram, and Jessica Sun. Plus Brad Smith as the other discussant. Join us for 5 excellent papers!

After all we've done to get people to use open-source software for statistics, it'd be a bit of a shame if the LLM revolution pushed people right back into proprietary, hard-to-reproduce products.

I'm neither overreacting nor posturing when I say this paper is worth your time to read!

What is "gray zone conflict", why does it happen, and should we be worried? My work on this with Erik Gartzke, Jon Lindsay , and Peter Schram is now published in JCR. Gray zone conflict is neither new, nor an indication that deterrence has failed: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00…

From the latest issue of the QJPS: "Ruling the Ruling Coalition: Information Control and Authoritarian Power-Sharing" by Zhaotian Luo and @a_rozenas. A thread.

Daily reminder that most people are actually very normal and if you spend too much time on Twitter you’ll start basing your opinions of humanity on grifters doing performance art and 0-follower fake accounts

New working paper on silicon sampling via LLMs with Vanderbilt University Political Science colleagues James Bisbee, Joshua Clinton, Cassy Dorff, and Jenn Larson. Bottom line: ChatGPT “data” overstates affective polarization, vastly understates variation. Comments/feedback welcome! osf.io/preprints/soca…

A lot of journalistic commentary on publication and personnel decisions in academia deeply misunderstands our enterprise. Which I get — academia is a lot different than journalism! But then it makes me wonder how much I should trust journalistic coverage of other professions.

groundhog is dependency management in R for people who hate dependency management. yeah I wish R were like Python and that R coders were like Python coders — but groundhog is a pretty, pretty good second-best.

Ah! Neat paper. It's figuring out the incentive-effect of rewarding journals with prestige for low acceptance rates (this is something we do in philosophy). The result argued for is: it pushes journals to/selects for journals who do worse peer review.... cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Mellissa's work is novel, careful, and compelling. Read it!

It's great to log into Twitter for the first time in months to see people are *still* arguing about realism in IR and about citation practices in econ. Makes it all the easier to log off again for another few months.

Annual-ish reminder about the Objectively Correct way to upload conference slides: 1. Put PDF in Dropbox 2. Get view link from Dropbox 3. Make tinyurl you can remember 4. Go to tinyurl on conference laptop No fiddly USB sticks. No logging into your email on a public laptop.

I'm back, briefly, to remind you the Objectively Correct way to handle #apsa2024 slides: 1. Upload slides to Dropbox or similar 2. Use URL shortening service to point to public share link for Dropbox 3. Go to that URL No USB sticks, no logging into your email on a rando's PC!