Less than 24 hours away!

Investigation into Unlawful "Straw Donor" and Foreign Contributions in American Elections April 24, 2025 MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY               THE ATTORNEY GENERAL               THE COUNSEL TO THE PRESIDENT SUBJECT:

p.s. not in paper, but a DOGE member (Schutt) worked on WinRed's launch before going to CISA. Trump directly targeted ActBlue in a presidential memorandum.

Top-down coordination still ongoing!

www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
www.wired.com/story/doge-c...
projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-do...

Personally think this is my best work yet.

Mixed-methods, months of reading, writing, thinking, wracking my head. Years gathering evidence, lying awake thinking about what it all means. Hopefully an important contribution to theory.

Couldn't have done it without @zhaoliresearch.bsky.social

So back to the theory of parties... is it party elites or extended party network?

✨Path dependence matters!✨

In some situations, the network suffices. In others, the institutions have to step in.

Did it work?

Coordinated? Yes. When FEC individual contribution limits increased, incumbent pages on WinRed adopted almost immediately; ActBlue, not.

Good for the party? Also yes. Candidates saw about a 40% increase in quarterly fundraising after joining WinRed (2019-2020).

Enter President Trump/Rep party leaders.

The party played a key role in coordinating candidate adoption of WinRed relative to rival platforms. Access to WinRed may have served as leverage---Liz Cheney disappeared from the platform after supporting impeachment in mid-2021.

Republicans couldn't work it out *without* top-down party intervention, for a few reasons:

1. a technological gap
2. a different donor base
3. path dependence (intra-competition to build an ActBlue-equivalent)
4. mistrust of party elites' motives

What happened? Why asymmetric results to a symmetric problem?

Well, scope conditions matter!

By showing how the two parties dealt with campaign infrastructure, we show how the conflicting theories of parties can be reconciled/synthesized.

ActBlue for Dems fits the “extended party network” story. Unaffiliated with party/leadership + grew organically from activist groups.

However, WinRed for Reps fits Aldrich's "parties as endogenous institutions" story: office seekers/holders solve collective action problems.

Take the emergence/coordination of online campaign fundraising platforms in the U.S.

As fundraising moved online, both parties needed to quickly coordinate and take advantage of the economies of scale/efficiency gains.

They needed a unified platform.

Keep Winning with WinRed? Online Fundraising Platform as the Party’s Public Good | The Journal of Politics: Vol 88, No 2 What determines the relative importance of extended party networks versus party leaders in parties’ campaign strategies? We synthesize theories of party organizations by highlighting the interplay bet...

Super happy to see this paper finally formatted.

While this paper might seem about political fundraising, it's really about the theory of *parties*: is it a broader network (UCLA school, i.e., Bawn et al. 2012) or elite/institutions-driven (re: Aldrich)?

doi.org/10.1086/735435

서울대 사회과학대학 2026학년도 제1차 교원 채용 공고가 떴습니다. 정치외교학부에서 한국정치 전임교원을 모십니다.

많은 관심 부탁드립니다. 접수기간이 빠듯하니 확인 꼭 부탁드립니다 (해외 계신 분들은 시차 주의!)

social.snu.ac.kr/%EA%B3%B5%EC...

서울대학교 행정대학원 BK 프로그램에서 포닥 1명을 새로 모집합니다. 최근 박사학위를 취득하신 분들께 좋은 기회가 되길 바랍니다.

지원 마감은 다음 주 월요일입니다.
gspa.snu.ac.kr/kr/Board/Det...

New SWERP event alert! Three SNU master’s students will present their research in a lightning-round format.

Join us Apr 3 10 AM KST (= April 2, 9 PM EST) to see Seoul National’s crème de la crème in action. Personally looking forward to this one.

Happening tomorrow evening for US folks--𝐓𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝟑/𝟏𝟐 𝐚𝐭 𝟗𝐩𝐦 𝐄𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧. I genuinely love this topic and hope you can join! 😁

@sysilviakim.bsky.social

New year, new forthcoming book announcement! Very excited to post more about it soon! Link: www.cambridge.org/us/universit...

1. Downgraded from Claude Max to Pro. My mental health has significantly improved. Less feeling like I'm being chased all the time (was whipping myself for higher productivity)

2. Claude>>Codex for me so far

3. Still haven't figured out how best to raise the next academic generation in this era

🚨 Interested in survey experiments? I'll be giving a virtual talk on (false) null results in experiments--and how to protect against them--at SWERP on 3/13 (3/12 8pm EST). Hope to see you there, and thanks to @sysilviakim.bsky.social for inviting me!

Link to join: swerp.netlify.app

I’m having a mini panic attack every day

It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

So happy that my Cambridge Element with @yesolakweon.bsky.social has been published! Free access for the next two weeks!

It’s now official. I’ll be publishing my first book, Respectability Politics, w/ @uchicagopress.bsky.social!

Proud to join a press w/ a strong lineage in Black studies & Black politics, including Cohen’s Boundaries of Blackness, which has deeply inspired my work.

Now to get these revisions done.

p.s. This took ~9 hours of back-and-forth with Claude Code. What an era.

For student or faculty struggling to juggle projects: I've definitely benefited from this approach. I'm not saying this is a magic productivity bullet, but if you need some motivation, create your own for 2026.

PRs/feedback welcome (it's still probably buggy in places)

It supports standard flowcharts (great for academic diagrams) and Gantt-style timelines.

I heavily rely on timeline viz to see where my projects are and where I am. Used this format for 6+ years with my writing group. See attachment for my 2026 timeline and goals.

Just built ✨FlowCraft✨, a free, open-source diagramming app (thanks Claude Code!)

Browser-based, no server, no signup, no tracking, no subscription, no dependencies, and no Internet required. Just open a single HTML file and start diagramming. AGPL.

github.com/sysilviakim/...

Look at the intensity gap in this NYT graph of how voters describe their current feelings toward Trump www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Just published at PNAS (@pnas.org): “Electing amateur politicians reduces cross-party collaboration”

We show that districts electing first-time members of the U.S. House experience substantial declines in bipartisan representation in the subsequent Congress.

🧵1/4

"President Donald Trump and his top aides are using the word 'insurrection' more frequently to describe anti-ICE protests in places like Portland," writes Zachary B. Wolf. https://cnn.it/4pWYmzr

Public/private info on whether you will be doing admissions as usual will also be hugely appreciated!! Thank you