Natan Skigin

We’re accepting submissions for Fall 2025 until August 14.

If you’re on the market, it’s a great chance to practice your job talk with an audience!

We also welcome paper presentations.

Apply here: iu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Thanks Christina!!

ND grad students killing it this year! A 2nd discipline-wide diss prize: The @apsa.bsky.social political psychology award goes to the amazing @natanski.bsky.social Natan Skigin for “Challenging Stigma from Below: How Human Rights Movements Contest Repressive States and Shape Democratic Citizenship.”

The Experimental Research section of the American Political Science Association (@experimentsapsa.bsky.social) invites research proposals from post-prospectus PhD students for its Experimental Research Early-Career Fellowship program. Share this post! @apsa.bsky.social, @poscresearch.bsky.social

position_jitter()

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New visualization tool alert!

The vayr package version 1.0.0 is now on CRAN.

It contains position adjustments for ggplot2 that help with overplotting in pleasing ways. My favorite is position_sunflower().

- install.packages("vayr")
- alexandercoppock.com/vayr

#rstats #ggplot2 #dataviz

1/ I just published a new article titled “Criminal Violence, the State, & Society” in the Annual Review of Political Science, which examines the growing political science research on criminal violence over the past 15 years.

Link 👉https://go.shr.lc/3GnoH7f

Here is a summary of some key insights...

Having published a book recently, I found it sometimes hard to understand how the process worked (and luckily, had very kind mentors who helped).

I have uploaded a short document detailing how my experience went, in case others find it helpful: www.vicentevalentim.com/_files/ugd/a...

Graph showing the rise in number of journalists killed in the wake of the War on Drugs.

New research by @natanski.bsky.social & Guillermo Trejo reveals a stark increase in violence against journalists in militarized regions of Mexico amid the War on Drugs, driven by local government and cartel interests in criminal governance. loom.ly/K5LVzgI

New important research by Guillermo Trejo & @natanski.bsky.social on violence against local journalists in Mexico's drug war.

"Silencing the Press in Criminal Wars: Why the War on Drugs Turned Mexico into the World’s Most Dangerous Country for Journalists"

Link here: bit.ly/4h1R74j

Abstract of article titled "The partisanship of mayors has no detectable effect on police spending, police employment, crime, or arrests"

Are Democratic leaders making cities more dangerous than Republicans? Trump + others have repeatedly made claims like this. New paper in Science Advances w/ @chriswarshaw.bsky.social, Dan Jones & Matt Harvey shows that, in short, the answer is no.

¿Quién democratiza a quién? La sociedad organizada y la lucha silenciosa por el cambio en Venezuela La falta de coordinación sostenida en la estrategia de la oposición ha contribuido a apuntalar al chavismo en el poder

elpais.com/america/2025...
De @maryhenjimenez.bsky.social y Veronica Zubillaga. Muy buena lectura

Happy to share a new working paper "Calculation and Conscience: Motivations for the Substantive Representation of Ethnic Minorities" (with Stepahnie Zonszein, Apurav Bhatia and Will Dinneen). See osf.io/preprints/os...

Program Evaluation for Public Service – Program Evaluation Combine research design, causal inference, and econometric tools to measure the effects of social programs

The course websites for my Spring 2025 causal inference and data visualization classes (both with #rstats) are live!

evalsp25.classes.andrewheiss.com

datavizsp25.classes.andrewheiss.com

In a democracy, when and where should majorities rule? And when should their powers be limited? Steve Levitsky and I propose a framework to think through these questions in a new piece in the January 2025 issue of 'Journal of Democracy'
muse.jhu.edu/article/947880

Silencing the Press in Criminal Wars: Why the War on Drugs Turned Mexico into the World’s Most Dangerous Country for Journalists @poppublicsphere.bsky.social Guillermo Trejo
@natanski.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Just published on APSR First View: "The Vietnam Draft Lottery and Whites’ Racial Attitudes: Evidence from the General Social Survey" by Donald Green and Oliver Hyman-Metzger. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

25 años después, fue el Estado: la Corte Interamericana condena a México por la desaparición del zapatista Antonio González El tribunal internacional sanciona al país por el caso de un miembro del EZLN y del PRD que fue desaparecido por grupos paramilitares en Chiapas en 1999

25 años después, fue el Estado: la Corte Interamericana condena a México por la desaparición del zapatista Antonio González - elpais.com/mexico/2024-...

Massacre in Haiti Ordered by Gang Leader Leaves Over 100 Dead, Rights Group Says The killings in a Port-au-Prince slum, which appeared to target practitioners of voodoo, were ordered by a gang leader, a human rights organization said.

Breaking News: A massacre ordered by a gang leader left more than 100 people dead in Haiti’s capital, a rights group said.

Congratulations to Weatherhead Scholars Program Postdoctoral Fellow @natanski.bsky.social on receiving the 2024 Kellogg Dissertation Award! loom.ly/Oik-ECI

Here’s a starter pack of Kellogg Institute (ND ☘️) Fellows: current and former PhD students, faculty, visiting. 😊 Let me know if you’d like to be added. go.bsky.app/CoZB5N8
And help spread the word. @marcjacob.bsky.social @lgamboa.bsky.social @aperezli.bsky.social

I just gave a guest lecture in @chflachsland.bsky.social's "Policy Process class" on (right-wing) populism. I hope the students enjoyed it as much as I did. Here are my slides -- perhaps they are of interest to some of you. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gho7v...

🎉 Thrilled that my new book, *Creating Partisans: The Organizational Roots of New Parties in Latin America*, is finally out! 🎉 @cambridgeup.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/us/universit...

A brief summary: 1/n

New notebook:

Sample Size Calculations in #RStats : Money and Power

arelbundock.com/posts/money_...

Thanks, Vicente!!

Many thanks to my committee, the Kellogg Institute, my family, grad school friends, and mainly to the families of Mexico's victims of disappearance who fight for truth and justice in the face of unimaginable adversity.

t.co/3Cz6zRfvLz

I am honored to have received the 2024 Kellogg Award for Distinguished Dissertation on Democracy and Human Development.

My dissertation shows how grassroots human rights groups—including grassroots victims' voices—contest repressive states, foster solidarity, and mobilize demands for accountability

British Journal of Political Science open access graphic

From 2025 BJPolS will be a fully #OpenAccess title which means new articles are published as Gold Open Access under a Creative Commons licence.

You can find your open access options here - cup.org/4hWjxxI

And in 2025 BJPolS will publish continuously (no issues).

A good way to support pro-democracy forces in Israel is to subscribe to Haaretz. It can teach the USA mainstream media a lesson or two about having a spine.

Mirrored histogram showing “weird” parts of the population: treated people who were unlikely to be treated, and untreated people who were likely to be treated

Mirrored histogram showing pseudo-populations of treated and untreated people that have been reweighted to be more comparable and unconfounded

Table showing potential and realized outcomes for 9 simulated people

Before we calculate these different treatment effects with the realized outcomes instead of the hypothetical potential outcomes, let's look really quick at the practical difference between the true ATE, AT 1, and ATU. All three estimands are useful for policymaking! The ATE is -15, implying that mosquito nets cause a 15 point reduction in malaria risk for every person in the country. This includes people who live at high elevations where mosquitoes don't live, people who live near mosquito-infested swamps, people who are rich enough to buy Bill Gates's mosquito laser, and people who can't afford a net but would really like to use one. If we worked in the Ministry of Health and wanted to know if we should make a new national program that gave everyone a free bed net, the overall reduction in risk is -15, which is probably pretty good! The ATT is -16.29, which is bigger than the ATE. The effect of net usage is bigger for people who are already using the nets. This is because of underlying systematic reasons, or selection bias. Those using nets want to use them because they need them more or can access them more easily-they might live in areas more prone to mosquitoes, or they can afford to buy their own nets, or something else. They know themselves and understand some notion of their personal individual causal effect and seek out nets. If we removed access to their nets, it would have a strong effect. The ATU is -13.63, which is smaller than the ATE. The effect of net usage is smaller for people who aren't using the nets. Again, this is because of selection bias. Those not using nets are likely not using them for systematic reasons-they live far away from mosquitoes, they've received a future malaria vaccine, they have some other form of mosquito abatement, or something else. Because they can read their own minds, they know that mosquito net use won't do much for them personally, so they don't seek out nets. If we expanded access to nets to them, they wouldn't benefit

From the archives: Have you (like me!) wondered what the ATT means and how it's different from average treatment effects? I use #rstats to explore why we care about (and how to calculate) the ATE, ATT, and ATU #polisky #episky #econsky www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2024/03...

𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚢𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 0.6.1 for #Rstats is out!

It's an ultra simple, super flexible, and 0-dependency package to draw beautiful tables in HTML, LaTeX, Typst, Word, PDF, and PNG.

And for those who ❤️ documentation, 𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚢𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 ships with a billion pages of tutorials:

vincentarelbundock.github.io/tinytable/