BJPolS abstract discussing political news consumption. It highlights the dependency of outlets on audience preferences, with coverage focusing on partisan conflict and specialized jargon.

From February 2026 -

The Unequal Challenge of Learning from Under-Informative News - https://cup.org/461vHAT

"findings shed light on the importance of considering heterogeneous preferences along ethnicities within the same racial ‘in-group’"

- @atrexler.com

#OpenAccess

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/...

We’re hiring — help us spread the word! @tnridout.bsky.social @mikefranz.bsky.social

The APSA Political Communication section is accepting nominations for its annual awards. Please send nominations directly to the chair of each committee.

🔎 More details on awards, committee, and eligibility criteria:
politicalcommunication.org/awards/

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about...

🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples?

We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

Survey Associate, Methodology Pew Research Center Organization Overview Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. It conducts publi...

Exciting news! We just posted an opening for a Survey Associate on @pewresearch.org's Methods team! This is an amazing opportunity for someone relatively early in their career to join what is, IMO, the most fun methods team in the business. Full description at the link below.

Acquiescence Bias and Criterion Validity: Problems and Potential Solutions for Agree-Disagree Scales - Political Behavior Political Behavior - Scholars frequently measure dispositions like populism, conspiracism, racism, and sexism by asking survey respondents whether they agree or disagree with statements...

New w/@scottclifford.bsky.social.

Lots of work uses agree-disagree scales, and a lit review shows these are 1) frequently just measured in one direction (agree = higher trait) and 2) correlated with each other.

This has potentially big issues for conclusions.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🚨 Just a handful of days left, DL March 1!🚨

🔥 Walter Lippmann Award for Best Published Article in the field of political communication (2025)🔥

SELF NOMINATIONS WELCOME & EASY: Just send me email with article

@apsa.bsky.social @polcomm.bsky.social @ecpr-polcom.bsky.social @ascor.bsky.social

👇

🚨 New paper out at @ajpseditor.bsky.social 🚨

Do the public hold meaningful attitudes? Using the case of abortion policy preferences, we provide strong evidence that policy prefrences can be coherent, stable over time, and causally explain vote choice.

doi.org/10.1111/ajps...

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm teaching a few survey research courses live and online.
First, a free one hour seminar. Feb 20
instats.org/seminar/surv...
Then a set of two (half) day courses. Not free (sorry!).
-Intro Surveys (Feb 26-27):
instats.org/seminar/intr...
-Advanced Surveys (March 5-6):
instats.org/seminar/adva...

🧵 New paper out in AJPS! "Seeing like a citizen: Experimental evidence on how empowerment affects engagement with the state"

With @lbp2106.bsky.social, @wilsonprichard.bsky.social, @cdsamii.bsky.social, and Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra.

doi.org/10.1111/ajps...

1/11

Congrats @atrexler.com! There is a major disconnect between what newsrooms think people want—often based on metrics about the highly engaged audiences they are currently serving—and what the public actually needs to make sense of political phenomena. Such important work!

Thank you, Ben! Your work has very much been an inspiration for this whole line of my research agenda.

In this work, I provide empirical evidence that favoring flashy coverage that appeals to news junkies both widens inequalities in (functional) access to political info, and even under-informs the news junkies themselves. Shifting coverage to a "public interest" style is a viable path forward.

/fin

Media outlets often justify their style of political coverage as a means of broadening audiences by making things less boring. In a related WP, I show that assumption to be false: it is the most politically active audience that is attracted to politics-as-entertainment. atrexler.com/papers/Trexl...

Figure 4 of "The Unequal Challenge of Learning from Under-Informative News." The figure shows the predicted post-treatment support for norm-breaking policies, conditional on baseline political engagement and treatment assignment. Support for norm-breaking declines among less politically engaged consumers following exposure to "public interest" style coverage.

These findings provide direct evidence that contemporary forms of political news are detrimental to the press's normative purpose in a democracy---informing the public. I also show that they affect norms too: exposure to "public interest" style coverage increases support for key democratic norms.

Figure 2 of "The Unequal Challenge of Learning from Under-Informative News." The figure shows the predicted recall of key information under each time constraint, conditional on baseline political engagement and treatment assignment. The recall penalty is mostly restricted to less engaged individuals under no or a slight time constraint, though substantively large in the latter case. Under a severe time constraint, the penalty is large and consistent at all levels of baseline political engagement.

Importantly, these effects are most severe for less politically engaged consumers, but persist even for highly engaged readers---especially when spending less time with an article.

Figure 1 of "The Unequal Challenge of Learning from Under-Informative News." The figure shows the estimated average treatment effect on information recall following exposure to under-informative news under different time constraints. The estimate ATEs are consistently negative, with stronger effects under tighter time constraints.

I show that readers recall less key info from the "under-informative" style articles than the "public interest" style. This learning penalty gets increasingly severe when engaging briefly, a common feature of media consumption today (i.e., "news snacking").

I expose participants to adapted news articles written in randomized styles. Critically, the info content is identical across treatments---the manipulation is over where different chunks of text appear on the page. Participants see 3 articles w/different time constraints: no constraint, 60s, or 30s.

Table 1 of "The Unequal Challenge of Learning from Under-Informative News." The table displays 5 ways of writing a headline for the same story. "Public interest" style: "Congress approves new military aid package for Ukraine in bipartisan votes." "Conflict" style: "Congress approves new Ukraine funding, delivering Biden victory over GOP objections." "Jargon" style: "Johnson pushes through Ukraine aid bill despite objections from Freedom Caucus." "Prediction" style: "The House Speaker's push to approve new Ukraine funding might cost him his job." "Clickbait" style: "Here's how the House Speaker got around far-right opposition to secure Ukraine aid."

These 4 styles are very common today. I contrast them with a rarer "public interest" style, which puts info relevant for democratic accountability front & center. I argue that most politics stories can be written with any of the 5 styles by making different decisions about info placement & language.

An example clickbait headline: "Here's Why Trump Was Forced to Say He Has Only 'Concepts of a Plan.'"

An example conflict headline: "From Court to Congress to the Mideast, Trump Tallies His Wins."

An example jargon headline: "NOAA confirms investigation into RFK Jr. over dead whale carcass."

An example prediction headline: "Supreme Court seems skeptical of Trump's claim of absolute immunity but decision's timing is unclear."

First, I discuss 5 different styles of political news in terms of how they present info. "Conflict" style: focus on partisan battles. "Prediction": focus on forecasting. "Jargon": convey savviness via wonk language. "Clickbait": hide info behind a click. These 4 styles I call "under-informative."

Very excited to see this out at @bjpols.bsky.social! In this article, I show that contemporary political news coverage makes it challenging for readers to learn information that is helpful for democratic accountability, even for very politically engaged audiences.

A brief summary:

BJPolS abstract discussing political news consumption. It highlights the dependency of outlets on audience preferences, with coverage focusing on partisan conflict and specialized jargon.

NEW -

The Unequal Challenge of Learning from Under-Informative News - https://cup.org/461vHAT

- @atrexler.com

#OpenAccess

Values and Political Preferences in Childhood Christopher Johnston, Martín Opertti, Turgut Keskintürk February, 2026 Studies of youth political development focus primarily on political socialization and salient events, while paying relatively less attention to important individual differences among children themselves, such as values. We administer an original survey to a sample of 10-to-12-year-olds and show that the distribution of their values is similar to that of their parents and a diverse sample of adults; that children's value priorities strongly predict their political preferences; and that one dimension of value priorities continues to predict political preferences even after adjusting for parental values and political preferences. Taken together, our findings suggest that pre-teens already use their own value priorities to organize their political attitudes, which emphasizes the importance of children's independent attributes in their political development, and lends support to the idea that personal values provide a foundation for political ideology.

estimated value positions in Schwartz value space.

the effects of conservation and self-enhancement values on political evaluations and issues.

a new working paper: osf.io/3dq2x_v1!

we administered an original survey to a sample of 10-to-12-year olds, their parents, and a national sample to assess the extent to which values can provide a foundation for political ideology.

we find that values structure political preferences among children.

Call for Proposals: Data Collection for Replication+Novel Political Science Survey Experiments Alexander Coppock and Mary McGrath January 27, 2026 We invite proposals for a survey experiment replication+novel design competition. Se- lected replication+novel design survey experiments will be conducted on large samples of American respondents, quota sampled to match U.S. Census margins and filtered for quality and attention by the survey sample provider Rep Data (repdata.com). Each proposal consists of two parts: (1) a replication study of an existing, previously published survey experiment, and (2) a novel experimental design on a topic of the authors’ choosing. The replication studies and reanalyses of the existing studies will be combined into a meta-paper to be co-authored by all authors of accepted proposals along with the princi- pal investigators (Coppock and McGrath). As a condition for acceptance, authors commit to sharing the data and producing a write-up of the findings from their novel design for submission to a scholarly journal, and public posting of a working paper pre-publication.

🎺 Call for proposals 🎺

1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment
2️⃣ run a novel experiment

on repdata.com

3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies
4️⃣ publish your study

details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_...
applications open Feb 1

please repost!

Voting access reforms and policy feedback effects on political efficacy and trust In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced states to rethink election administration across the United States. To make voting safer, many states expanded mail voting options like no-excuse absentee voti…

BLOG POST!

Explore the latest PSJ blog post examining how expanded mail voting relates to voter access, political efficacy, and trust in government.

By Andrew Trexler, Marayna Martinez & Mallory E. SoRelle

Read here: psjblog.net/2026/01/21/v...

#PSJ #PolicyStudiesJournal

So what you are saying is that survey humor suffers from nonresponse bias.

So cool -> Quebec researchers tracked eye dilation + sweat when showing respondents political issues to see if they aligned with results from standard poll questions on issue importance. They did! And suggest asking people to choose their top issue is most reliable academic.oup.com/poq/article/...