New Issue Highlight:

Could better teaching be as simple as giving teachers the right information—no rewards, no pressure, no oversight?

1/
"Silicon samples" are becoming more and more common in research and polling.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

The updated version of this preprint is now online!

THREAD🧵

arxiv.org/abs/2509.13397

👇Staggering results of expansion of early public children on female employment in Germany

📰 Do the effects of partisan media fade quickly or accumulate over time?

➡️ Using multiwave experiments, M Baum et al. show a single exposure can have effects lasting up to a week, while cumulative effects are hard to detect www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView

A fascinating data-driven look at what blocked shipping routes mean for global trade. @economist.com

📄Published Today in Nature:

500 researchers reproduced 100 studies across the social & behavioral sciences to assess their analytical robustness (led by @balazsaczel.bsky.social & @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social).

Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me...

TLDR: 1/11

Screenshot of the articles title "Stratified Scars: social inequality in the labour market consequences of apprenticeship dropout" and the abstract: While the association between apprenticeship dropout and negative labour market consequences is well documented, the causal link and social stratification in this effect are less clear. Using georeferenced German administrative data and a conditional instrumental variable approach that exploits distance between place of residence and large firms, we find negative financial consequences but show that the dropout penalty is entirely concentrated among individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. We further show that these stratified scars partly reflect unequal educational reenrolment rates and unequal employment outcomes among dropouts who do not reenrol. Our results highlight the potential of policies targeting higher graduation rates to reduce social inequality and suggest social advantage buffers the negative financial consequences of apprenticeship dropout, even in institutional settings with strong links between credentials and labour market outcomes.

How costly is apprenticeship dropout—and for whom?

Using an IV approach, our new @europeansocreview.bsky.social article finds strong income penalties, but only for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

My great coauthors patzinaalex.bsky.social & @katymorris.bsky.social 💖

tinyurl.com/tk4nkdb3

Pleased to see this one out in its JOP-formatted version @thejop.bsky.social www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Looking for insights on Open Peer Review - in particular, a person wanting to be open though the journal is not?

For ex: If I publish in a double blind journal, but decide to post the peer review & editorial docs in a space like OSF. Is this unethical, illegal, best practice?

My personal rule for IVs is that, if there's really only one reason why Z and Y are correlated, then you should be able to tell me Z and Y, and I'd be able to figure out what X is without you telling me. (1/n)

We got a paper in @pspolisci.bsky.social l on public administration beyond public administration journals

A substantial share of quantitatively oriented PA research is being produced in top economics journals!

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

@karlemilbendtsen.bsky.social

Five stylized facts:

You and whose economy? Group-based retrospection in economic voting by Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard is now available in Early View. @chdausgaard.bsky.social ajps.org/2026/03/20/y...

Psychology has a whole cottage industry in which people come up with some construct that is essentially "attitudes/beliefs/expectations/feelings about X", and then the central claim is that this construct is a super important determinant of future X outcomes.>

abstract: While attempts to change Americans’ partisanship via persuasive treatments largely fail, partisanship can and does change over time. In this paper, the authors first confirm, via survey and field experiments, that typical campaign messaging in the United States does not budge partisanship. The authors then present experiments in which participants encounter extraordinary hypothetical scenarios (e.g. one party causes economic collapse) before reporting what their partisanship would be under such circumstances. Twelve percent of partisans imagine switching parties in the pro-out-party hypothetical conditions, compared with 5% in the control hypotheticals in which the status quo persists, for a seven-percentage point (SE 1.5 points) difference. These hypothetical shifts are on par with the largest changes in American macropartisanship ever recorded. While the act of ruminating on hypothetical scenarios is not followed by changes in partisanship measured post-treatment, the evidence suggests that extraordinary world events may be able to shift partisan affiliation.

New paper with Don Green and @ethanvporter.bsky.social in the QJPS. After much deliberation, we went with a title that just states the result. 📝

journal: www.emerald.com/qjps/article...

Do conjoint/factorial/vignette experiments reflect choices in the real world?
Are hypothetical scenarios in the artificial survey context externally valid? Do hypothetical bias, intention-behavior gap and social desirability biases undermine validity?

Two cautionary studies on this question:

cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)

he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals

doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

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).

Conditionally accepted at the APSR (w/ @scottclifford.bsky.social & @patrickpliu.bsky.social):

Why does political information so often change beliefs but NOT attitudes? We highlight the role of belief relevance, or the extent to which beliefs bear on attitudes.

When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵

I'm also curious about this!

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

#rstats Here's a useful guide to creating publication-ready #ggplot figures to journal specifications, which is often quite fiddly.

jaquent.github.io/2026/02/crea...

Expanding Paternity Leave: Effects on Beliefs, Norms, and Gender Gaps Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

interesting paper on effect of paternity leave reform on gender beliefs and norms. #WinningHeartsAndMinds
www.nber.org/papers/w34862

Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ...

Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups?

Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com:

tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf

Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects
doi.org/10.1177/2515...

"Acceptable or Not? Understanding Attitudes Toward
Citizens' Discrimination Against Frontline Workers" by @halling.bsky.social, @mathildececchini.bsky.social, & Benedicte Gronhoj shows that language-based requests are viewed as more acceptable than religious ones.

doi.org/10.1111%2Fpa...

dplyr 1.2.0 dplyr 1.2.0 fills in some important gaps in dplyr's API: we've added a new complement to `filter()` focused on dropping rows, and we've expanded the `case_when()` family with three new recoding and re...

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!

- `filter_out()` for dropping rows

- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools

These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!

tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

Is meat consumption becoming political? @willemboterman.bsky.social & @eelcoharteveld.bsky.social examine Dutch surveys showing meat eating aligns with right-wing ideology & climate scepticism. Read OPEN ACCESS: buff.ly/HU5Mdec

@polstudiesassoc.bsky.social #polsky #polsci #FoodPolitics

We’re organizing a workshop at Aarhus University. Please share and consider submitting!

🗓️ 13–14 April 2026 | 📝 Deadline: Mon, 16 Feb 2026 (extended abstract) — junior scholars prioritized

🎤 Keynotes: @stefwalter.bsky.social (Univ. of Zurich) & @hhuang.bsky.social (Ohio State)