Businesses increasingly embrace polarizing political messages. AI-driven algorithms reward emotional engagement and selectively amplify messages among sympathetic audiences—turning polarization into a profitable competitive strategy. #ISRNextGeneration scholar Jun Fang presents at #MPSA2026 #Polisky
NEW SHIFT KEY
Why didn’t the Inflation Reduction Act survive? I spoke to @agazmararian.bsky.social, the coauthor of a buzzy new paper on the subject, about why the law failed to create a coalition to protect it — and what that means for future US climate policy. heatmap.news/podcast/shif...
New paper @jhppl.bsky.social (w/ Michael Shepherd & Alee Lockman) where we find Americans who grew up (socialized) in rural areas are more likely to own guns, support the NRA, & hold more conservative firearm policy attitudes over the lifespan, even after moving away. 1/
doi.org/10.1215/0361...
🚨 the best state policy & public opinion database is now online. ~200 (!!!) state policies and 80 public opinion series on abortion, labor, taxes, environment, guns, education…
dynamicdemocracy.shinyapps.io
Massive public goods provision from @devincaughey.bsky.social & @chriswarshaw.bsky.social
Presenting methodological advances at #MPSA2026: elections forensics expert Walter Mebane and #ISRNextGeneration alum Fabricio Vasselai present an R package that implements nearly all proposed techniques to detect election fraud. Follow @umisr.bsky.social for leading research on democracy.
👀 Using GPS data from 200,000 smartphones, Adam Rauh shows Republicans have smaller, less-diverse activity spaces and spend more time in politically, racially and economically similar neighborhoods, suggesting the existence of asymmetrical echo chambers. #MPSA2026.
#ISRNextGeneration scholar Katie Nissen, an expert on framing, narratives, and environmental communication, presents at #MPSA2026 on the effect of optimism and pessimism on climate policy attitudes.
CPS postdoc Heonuk Ha, expert on AI-related rulemaking, will present new work using descriptive & computational text analysis, with @dschiff.bsky.social at #MPSA2026-- analyzing how ideology, authority, and capacity shape the scope and content of AI governance.
Listening to interesting talk by @joshpasek.com on motivated reasoning
Dear ANES community, the link below introduces our new Board of Advisors, led by Jamie Druckman. Jamie follows John Aldrich, who deftly chaired the Board for nearly 2 decades. This new group will guide us through the 2028 election cycle. Our deepest thanks to outgoing and incoming Board members!
@agazmararian.bsky.social: Federal leadership can be lost in the "fog of messaging." Gazmararian et al find Biden-Era clean energy investment policies had limited political returns: Voters overwhelmingly attributed new clean energy projects to their governors. news.umich.edu/voters-credi...
Michael Traugott: The historical pattern in the House is that the incumbent president’s party loses seats in the midterm election.The president’s party gained seats in only 2 midterms after WWII-- after Clinton's impeachment and the 9/11 attacks when Bush was in office. cpsblog.isr.umich.edu?p=3590
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.
"Revisiting Ideology Measures in Political Surveys" by Ken Kollman and John E. Jackson. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Join us for Research Ethics Day! Today we're featuring session 3, Ensuring Research Integrity in a Changing Environment.
Speakers:
Dr. Kimberly Kirkpatrick @umnresearch.bsky.social
Dr. Arthur Lupia @umichresearch.bsky.social
Dr. Susan Garfinkel (Research Integrity Partners)
z.umn.edu/RED26s
You are invited to join us for a conversation with Dr. Cesi Cruz of the University of Michigan, centering on efforts to counter political polarization with a focus on her research in the Philippines. Lunch will be provided. Register now! bit.ly/4tA463R
Scholarship applications the 2026 ICPSR Summer Program close Sunday! Over $400k in scholarships available! Apply by March 1. For more details: myumi.ch/ICPSRscholarships
#SumProg26 #ICPSR #QuantitativeMethods #ScholarshipOpportunities #GraduateStudies #DataScienceEducation #ResearchTraining
Are Americans polarized in their attitudes toward higher education? 🤔
Using some @electionstudies.bsky.social data, the answer seems to be: Yes, but not dramatically so, and there's a tendency for more experience with higher ed. to be associated w/ more positive ratings. 👍
Tomorrow!
🇵🇷 Nearly 4 million Americans live in Puerto Rico without formal representation in institutions that determine their laws and budgets. @maraceci.bsky.social et al will amplify PR's political voice with the island's first large, representative panel survey:
racialjustice.umich.edu/research-eng...
There is a very good chance that Democrats will gain control of the House after the Midterms. Elections expert Michael Traugott explains the forecast and presents historical data on incumbent party gains and losses in the latest blog from CPS: cpsblog.isr.umich.edu?p=3590
Edgar Franco-Vivanco presents evidence from Mexico describing how "jurisdictional havens"—areas where royal and religious authority competed and overlapped-- enhanced local autonomy and shaped the long-term persistence of group identities. Political Economy Workshop: sites.google.com/umich.edu/pe...
Thank you to the new International Hub psc.isr.umich.edu/research/int... @um-psc.bsky.social
🍭🌲Congratulations to Julia Lippman, winner of our holiday candy jar contest, a long-standing CPS tradition that honors Barb Opal. James Morrow submitted his annual outlier estimate and Julia won with an exact hit of 108. @profpjones.bsky.social
A new release of the ANES Cumulative Data File is now available for download. Over 200 variables have been updated to include data from the 2024 Time Series. Visit the study page to download data and documentation:
electionstudies.org/data-center/...
🚨FELLOWSHIPS AVAILABLE! @umisrcps.bsky.social has seven #ISRNextGeneration awards open to UM graduate students and postdocs advancing research on comparative politics, political opinion & behavior, and more. Explore, share with students, and apply by Feb 9! cps.isr.umich.edu/fellowships/
I used the panel release from the @electionstudies.bsky.social to look at how votes and views have changed across the 2016, 2020, and 2024 election. There isn't a lot of analysis here but there are lots of plots and data.
Liberal positions seem to be more consistently held (sort of)
OPINION TODAY featured podcast —
Dealing with Selection Bias in Surveys, with Rod Little, @randridge.bsky.social and @bradytwest.bsky.social
(@aapor.bsky.social)
opiniontoday.substack.com/i/180586526/...
Was on Civic Forum with @rorytruex.bsky.social talking about US democracy. We talked about political inequality & minority rule in the US, with a focus on my research on the states. But then talk about what's new in the more acute democracy crisis of 2025
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbxC...
How do people form beliefs about complex topics?
Happy to report our Bayesian model of the psychology of Bayesian updating is out in @ispp-pops.bsky.social! (w/ Gabriel Li & Krosnick)
If you gloss over the Greek, it's a new model for how to assess the impacts of information on summary judgments.
