Last call! Nominate your mentor in Pol Comm by April 1!

Pol comm scholars! Who has had a big impact on your career? Why don't you thank them by nominating them for this great new award? I'm on the committee, so send it my way!

I'm chairing the brand new "Excellence in Mentoring in Political Communication" award, with @lpargyle.bsky.social, Michael Chan and Dan Myers--please nominate scholars who you believe have supported the next generation of scholars through advising and other forms of mentorship!

Looking for a tl;dr for these two excellent papers? I've got you covered: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📢 @lpargyle.bsky.social, @ethanbusby.bsky.social and colleagues discuss in a Perspective the challenges and opportunities related to scientific inference with LLMs in the political and social sciences. www.nature.com/articles/s43... #cssky #PoliSci

🔓https://rdcu.be/eGwK9

Thanks!!

Tagging @lauraknelson.bsky.social for her recs

Our paper! @ethanbusby.bsky.social Alex Lyman, Bryce Hepner, Josh Gubler, David Wingate

Excited to see this excellent collection of papers come out! Many thanks to @thomasdavidson.bsky.social and Daniel Karell

Day 1 keynote - Continuing the LLM conversation, Lisa P. Argyle presented “Arti-fickle’ Intelligence: Using LLMs as a Tool for Inference in the Political and Social Sciences.” Which guidelines do you resonate with the most to establish the failure and success of LLMs? #ic2s2

NLP 4 Democracy - COLM 2025

📣 Super excited to organize the first workshop on ✨NLP for Democracy✨ at COLM @colmweb.org!!

Check out our website: sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.e...

Call for submissions (extended abstracts) due June 19, 11:59pm AoE

#COLM2025 #LLMs #NLP #NLProc #ComputationalSocialScience

Sorry it's rough, hang in there! 💕

Wheatley Seminar on Religion and Politics

Are you a PhD student in Political Science or Sociology interested in religion & public life? Apply for a *fully funded* opportunity to join us this summer (June 16-21) as part of the inaugural Wheatley Seminar in Religion & Politics. Apply by March 31. Details here:
wheatley.byu.edu/religionsemi...

Ok, thread time.

Closed-ended survey responses are efficient and easy to analyze, but limit what respondents can say. Open-ended responses are useful for letting respondents answer with more depth in their own words (as opposed to yours).

Gloria in excel sheets deo

Love working with the brilliant @shugars.bsky.social!

Join us in Puerto Rico to talk AI and Political science! Deadline Friday

SPSA 2025 CWC: Generative Language Models in Political Science Research Apply here for a Conference-Within-a-Conference to be held at the 2025 SPSA Annual Meeting, January 8 - 11 Caribe Hilton, San Juan Puerto Rico. CWC Scope: The topic of the CWC is Generative Language...

Computational Political Scientists:
@EthanBusby
and I are organizing a CWC at
@spsanews
on Generative Language Models. Apply by August 16; Conference in Puerto Rico Jan 8 - 11. Please apply and circulate widely! forms.gle/vJoU2ZaMp773... polisky

This is such a a cool service to provide, and a spectacular team to work with!

Call for teams for the 2024 CES Announcing the 2024 Cooperative Election Study

we just released the call for teams for the 2024 Cooperative Election Study! cces.gov.harvard.edu/news/call-te...

Your execution of your resolution deviated from the pre-registration.

This is such a cool and exciting project!

I got it in 1! 2 days in a row!! Pretty sure my life has peaked and it is all downhill...

Recent study by Lisa Argyle, Chris Bail et al. showing that using an LLM to suggest rephrasings in conversations about divisive topics can improve perceived conversation quality and feelings of democratic reciprocity — without any apparent manipulation of political views.

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Treated conversation flow: Respondents write messages unimpeded until one partner receives a rephrasing prompt for the first message longer than four words, and every other conversational turn thereafter. The chat assistant intercepts the treated user’s message, using GPT-3 to propose evidence-based alternative phrasings, while retaining the semantic content. It suggests three randomly ordered alternatives to the author of the message and presents the opportunity to accept or edit any of these rephrasing suggestions or send their original message. Their choice is sent to their partner and the conversation continues.

Analysis of semantic content of messages. Panel (A) presents a visualization of the topical distribution of messages sent on the platform. Each point is the semantic embedding of a message; points that are close to each other represent messages that are semantically similar. Messages are clustered with k-means, and clusters are automatically labeled by GPT-4

Conversational quality Panel (A) and democratic reciprocity Panel (B) subgroup means and confidence intervals. Higher values signify greater quality/support.

🤖 AI can improve the quality of political conversations online without manipulating policy positions 🤖

Great AI-Mediated Communication (AIMC) study from @lpargyle.bsky.social @chrisbail.bsky.social Busby, Gubler, Howe, Rytting, @taylor-sorensen.bsky.social & Wingate

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2311627120

Repost if you’ve participated in a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science. Let’s get #SICSS Bluesky going!

Political discourse is the soul of democracy, but misunderstanding and conflict can fester in divisive conversations. The widespread shift to online discourse exacerbates many of these problems and corrodes the capacity of diverse societies to cooperate in solving social problems. Scholars and civil society groups promote interventions that make conversations less divisive or more productive, but scaling these efforts to online discourse is challenging. We conduct a large-scale experiment that demonstrates how online conversations about divisive topics can be improved with AI tools. Specifically, we employ a large language model to make real-time, evidence-based recommendations intended to improve participants’ perception of feeling understood. These interventions improve reported conversation quality, promote democratic reciprocity, and improve the tone, without systematically changing the content of the conversation or moving people’s policy attitudes

No better first 🟦 than a new paper! Hot off the press at PNAS: "Leveraging AI for democratic discourse: Chat interventions can improve online political conversations at scale."

Real-time recommendations from an LLM improve divisive conversations.

Open access at: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...