Lily Mason

The Human Toll The US is undergoing rapid social, economic, and policy change. If you've been impacted, we want to hear your story! To participate, visit: https://tinyurl.com/thehumantoll Study sponsored under University of Wisconsin-Madison IRB Protocol #2025-1096. PI: Dr. Jessica Calarco Participants must be at least 18 years of age and reside in the US [image of a person with their face in their hands]

How have you been impacted by the changes we've seen under the current administration? What would you want to say to those in charge?

I'm launching a new research initiative to collect and share anonymous stories of the human toll. And I'd be very grateful for your help.

tinyurl.com/thehumantoll

title: Informal (De-)Regulation in the Marketplace of Ideas abstract: Democratic societies face tradeoffs regarding the production, acquisition, and exchange of information and ideas. On the one hand, they benefit from institutions that reduce the transaction costs citizens must pay to acquire reliable information they can use to pursue their goals; on the other hand, those institutions impose conformity costs on citizens’ belief systems. This has traditionally placed civil institutions such as the media, the scientific community, and political parties in the role of informal regulators, which set norms regarding the (combinations of) beliefs citizens should or should not express in lieu of the government setting rules regarding the beliefs citizens can or cannot express. I argue that the interaction of heightened political sectarianism with changes in the structure of the public sphere have weakened these institutions and altered the informal regulations that govern the proverbial “marketplace of ideas.” This framework illuminates recent phenomena of scholarly concern – namely, the health of the political information environment and the evolution of contemporary political ideologies.

new working paper: osf.io/7v4zj

tl;dr: taking the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor seriously requires taking the nuances of actually-existing markets seriously, which means thinking about tradeoffs between transaction costs and conformity costs. applied to misinfo and ideological belief systems.

If you work in/adjacent to Democratic politics, or even if you are an occasional Democratic donor, this new @adambonica.bsky.social piece is the most important thing you can read today.

The Democratic Party cannot build power if it allows scam pacs to thrive

open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

Talk to your neighbour! Start train spotting! Consider tennis! Get a dog and go to puppy classes! What of lawn bowls? What of music lessons! Learn to ceilidh dance! Take French! MY GOD LADS IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE FASCISM.

It is said that in academia, you should distinguish yourself not by being smart (bc hard to do) but by being kind, and @nathankalmoe.bsky.social is notable! Excited to have him offer to join my summer research lab undergrad students today.

You are fooling yourself if you think there is such a thing as a "good" agreement with somebody extorting you.
www.dorfonlaw.org/2025/07/down...

NYPD hails ‘record low’ number of NYC shooting victims for first half of 2025 New York City recorded its fewest number of shooting victims in three decades — and the second-lowest murder rate — in the first half of 2025, NYPD officials said.

For all the talk about violent crime in cities, anarchy in the subways, etc., NYC is on track to have the lowest murder and shooting rates in 75 years.

www.nydailynews.com/2025/07/01/n...

Also, *every* authoritarian goes after universities and the media. These institutions have flaws now - in some cases, very deep ones. But the attacks on those flaws are pretextual. Treating them otherwise normalizes deeply authoritarian acts.

Yes, you need a "big tent" to defeat rising fascism. But for that tent to stand, it must have a pole - otherwise it's a tarp that will simply smother you. You don't run from but rather on your values. And make clear that if you want to know who took your money...it's the people with all the money.

This. Not just the summer, but also the year(s) ahead. I've been having conversations with fellow academics about the push to do the same or more with less (as funding cuts set it). It's not sustainable. At some point we will just have to do less.

We need to decide what is essential, and what's not

theres almost no money out there for progressive content creators, meanwhile this shit goes on

It is fucking insane that we had a decade of people complaining about the dangers of cancel culture, and now literally hundreds of thousands of people are being purged from government jobs for ideological reasons, but that is not cancel culture.

I think some people have trouble seeing fascism as anything other than 1940s Germany.

But I think 'people going to a comic convention needing to have a plan in case the government's goons show up to disappear people' is a pretty good demonstration of what it can look like in 2025.

She talks about that in the article

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

Exactly. They want to keep their kids from encountering the humanity in the very same people they’ve taught them to dehumanize.

So…not antisemitism.

No one promotes their political views in their academic research as much as the conservatives who are setting up these conservative centers on campuses across the country. They accuse other academics who are unbiased in their research of being biased because they’re not biased like they are.

This paper (and @nathankalmoe.bsky.social & @lilymasonphd.bsky.social's online appendix that goes through SO MANY Qs) is so useful for scholars working in this area. It is also just a fascinating combo of under the hood but also big picture on how do we know things in political science.

It is OUT the last (printed) version of Handbook of Affective Polarization doi.org/10.4337/9781...
It is open Access!!!

The HANDBOOK on affective polarization is now out in print ⬇️⬇️

I co-authored a chapter on social sorting (led by @lilymasonphd.bsky.social).

For everyone interested in polarization, there is A LOT to read. A super cool collection of knowledge!

and to be clear, on almost all issues the Dems are in the center of the American electorate. The only issue that has polled badly has been trans rights, and with leadership and effort, that can be changed.

And, yes, the Dems are on the right side of history with that one as well.

Imagine saying this about Democrats while the GOP is out here behaving the way it is

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/o...

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Help us spread the word! @rudalev.bsky.social & I are the editors!

The launch of an important new public resource.

The Anti-Corruption Tracker: Mapping the Erosion of Oversight and Accountability
www.justsecurity.org/117267/anti-...

The Tracker is a living document that will be continually updated.

A screenshot below gives you a sense of the Chart and its data.

No one in charge of anything right now was put there to resist fascism. To the extent that they do, it’s luck. Going forward, we need to think about the qualifications for leadership in a new way, but for now we’re begging cowards to be courageous.

The Democrats, many i the media, business and education leaders—they decline to act as if a crisis is at hand. That has always worked to the advantage of fascists.