Inflation Conflation: Rates, Prices, and Politics in the Public Mind Despite the political importance of price inflation in recent years, we know surprisingly little about how citizens think, and process information about, inflation. We report the results of a series...

We're presenting this work at the @mpsa.bsky.social conference next week. Link to the paper below 😁

preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/...

Title: Political Pundits and the Maintenance of Ideological Coalitions Authors: Allison Wan and Jon Green Abstract: Political ideologies help groups advance diverse sets of interests under common agendas. However, it is unclear how these groups maintain their norms regarding what it means to be a member in good standing in a dynamic information environment. Building on theories of “long” political coalitions, we hypothesize that ideological elites’ rhetorical influence on one another will tend to be concentrated and specialized with respect to specific concepts. We find support for this expectation using an original dataset of over 1,000 prominent political pundits in the United States, in which we infer coalition membership and the diffusion of novel language over a range of specific concepts. While pundits may discuss many concepts, they tend to “send” language to other pundits in relatively few, resulting in both concentration and specialization of influence within coalitions. These results clarify conceptual distinctions between political ideologies and political philosophies, and demonstrate real-time dynamics of contemporary ideological coalitions.

Figure 1: Stylized expectations. Each node reflects a hypothetical coalition member, colors denote concepts, and arrows indicate members’ influence on each other. For example, member (a) influences members (b), (c), and (e) with respect to one concept, such as immigration, while member (d) influences members (b), (c), and (e) with respect to a different concept, such as health care. Member (e) acts as a broker, both sending and receiving influence across the coalition. Every member is influential, but influence tends to be concentrated (for any given concept, one member accounts for 3/4 of influence) and specialized (4/5 members are influential on only one concept).

Figure 3: Concentration of influence within concepts, observed network compared to permuted networks. Degree, Community, and Concept denote structural features either are or are not preserved in network permutations.

Figure 4: Specialization of influence within concepts, observed network compared to permuted networks. Degree, Community, and Concept denote structural features either are or are not preserved in network permutations.

extremely happy to share that "Political Pundits and the Maintenance of Ideological Coalitions" is conditionally accepted at @polbehavior.bsky.social
osf.io/8c3fr/files/...

Moulton is not wrong

Wrote a paper with Jim Bisbee on economic evaluations - www.cambridge.org/core/journal... We think it's informative to ask respondents about their personal finances; our analysis of daily Gallup data shows such Qs are relatively less contaminated by partisanship than broader Qs about the economy.

Why Political Alienation Matters (But Not the Kind You Think) Sometimes I like to start my class with a provocative quote relevant to what we’ll be discussing that week.

New on my Substack:

Political alienation matters. But we're looking for it in the wrong places.

zeitzoff.substack.com/p/why-politi...

Fascinating paper on supply-side factors of negativity bias, misinformation and misperceptions. Also interesting measurements of accuracy of reporting and negativity bias of specific media orgs (e.g.
CNN, Fox News).

What Makes Them Tick Why I Study Psychology & Political Violence

My first post on my new Peace & Violence Substack:

“What Makes Them Tick: Why I Study Psychology & Political Violence”

zeitzoff.substack.com/p/what-makes...

Google Trends chart showing interest in commercial coding agents increasing dramatically in early 2026

You can just research things. New from @jatucker.bsky.social & me at @brookings: Coding agents like Claude Code and Codex will likely accelerate research AND undermine institutional structures we built to support it.

Funny but also unlikely

Gallup ends presidential approval polling. There are plenty of alternatives but having one firm back the 1930s was a great continuity. Here is my last update of their series. RIP.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

A lot of smart people have been in denial about AI for understandable reasons:

– the people pitching it can be distasteful
– there’s been a ton of snake-oil hype
– it’s easier not to reckon with a major disruption

Joe Rogan helped Trump with one thing he always wants more of: male voters. @melinamuch.bsky.social expands in our latest episode ➡️ linktr.ee/americanfriction

#JoeRogan #Trump #TrumpElection #USpolitics #AmericanFriction

Stacks of No Option But Sabotage

*No Option But Sabotage* is out in 10 days.

Pre-order links are pinned—thank you for all the support!

OUP Discount Code

Physical Picture of No Option But Sabotage

No Option But Sabotage coming 2/16:

Draws on 150+ interviews & historical data and it examines:

– origins of radical environmentalism

– subcultures & mobilization

– repression & tactical choice

– shrinking space for protest

Pre-order (30% off with @academic.oup.com code ASFLYQ6) ⬇️

Trump made a clear choice: return to petro-imperialism Trump made a clear choice: return to petro-imperialism. To understand what just happened in Venezuela, look at oil politics and U.S. foreign policy.

> Even the controversial 2003 Iraq War offers a revealing case. For all the war’s many problems and deceptions, the United States abstained from seizing Iraq’s oil. Iraqi oil ultimately remained under Iraqi control, even as U.S. forces occupied the country.
goodauthority.org/news/trump-m...

Would be great to chat about this sometime!

Second, we need to distinguish between two kinds of nasty rhetoric:

A) Rhetoric used by marginal politicians or opposition figures to grab attention when they lack agenda-setting power.

B) Rhetoric used by national leaders, and amplified by supporters, to demonize opponents or minority groups.

The Poverty of Moral Foundation Messaging Prominent scholars have argued that reframing political positions and issues in terms of moral foundations that appeal to conservatives or liberals can attract more individual-level support for tho...

I need everyone in the political communications world who found the moral foundations reframing approach promising (which includes me) to read this paper

It doesn't replicate in new research. It just doesn't work.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Please share with all the awesome applicants you know!

Very cool to read this from @kenzonera.bsky.social
and co-authors!

From the abstract: "those low in conspiracy mentality not only believed less in conspiracies but also underestimated their prevalence" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Week 1 of 2026

Mechanisms of Europe’s “Death” since I was old enough to read newspapers:

- Inability to enact “structural reforms”
- Too much public debt
- Excessive focus on curbing fiscal deficits (“austerity”)
- Populism
- Low birth rates
- Absence of a European Silicon Valley
- Migration
- Stagnation

Research shows people dislike and want to block speech they believe is harmful. Wrote for @goodauth.bsky.social about this a few weeks ago: goodauthority.org/news/what-we...

Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute is hiring Postdoctoral Fellows (Deadline Jan 23rd, 2026)! 💫

Reach out and apply if you're interested in working with me! I'm especially excited to work with postdocs on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs.

I pay a similar amount for www.hey.com largely to avoid Gmail or Outlook

Maybe the impact of chatbots on truth is actually greater than the impact of deepfakes (for now)

My latest for @goodauth.bsky.social goodauthority.org/news/what-we...

Mechanisms of Europe’s “Death” since I was old enough to read newspapers:

- Inability to enact “structural reforms”
- Too much public debt
- Excessive focus on curbing fiscal deficits (“austerity”)
- Populism
- Low birth rates
- Absence of a European Silicon Valley
- Migration
- Stagnation

This excellent paper is now out -

Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Code: github.com/kobihackenbu...

A useful summary by @lpargyle.bsky.social: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

.@pettertornberg.com's keynote in Oxford was fantastic.
What comes after the traditional model of social media ends?

1) Algorithmic broadcasting platforms (everything turning into TikTok and Instagram reels)

2) Private and semi-private spheres (like group chats)

3) Chatbots and LLMs as new media