Drew Stommes

A break from book-writing.

A break from book-writing.

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🚨 What if intro political science textbooks were better and cheaper?

We built one:
✅ $1/chapter
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🌐 www.politicsexperiment.com

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

Modi Wants More Indians to Speak Hindi. Some States Are Shouting ‘No.’

“Modi Wants More Indians to Speak Hindi. Some States Are Shouting ‘No.’”

“States worry that the imposition of Hindi, the main language of northern India, would wipe out their cultural heritage.” www.nytimes.com/2025/07/13/w...

Really wonderful to see this. My USIP-Minerva Dissertation Fellowship was absolutely critical for helping me push my doctoral dissertation across the finish line.

What Experts Really Think About Smartphones and Mental Health - The Ringer I’m very concerned about the relationship between smartphone use and America’s mental health crisis. But many researchers don’t see things my way. They insist that there is little to...

I spoke with @dkthomp.bsky.social about scientific consensus on the potential harms of #socialmedia and why it's really, really hard to figure out the consensus about polarized topics based on how they are discussed on social media

You can listen here:
www.theringer.com/podcasts/pla...

Excited to have a new paper forthcoming @cpsjournal.bsky.social – Indigenous Community Recognition and Identity: Evidence from Peru. A first individual-level analysis of a key, widespread public policy, based on years of mapping, data & conversation with colleagues

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

“in recent months [the BNP] has stopped cooperating [with Yunus] over a series of policy disagreements. Mr. Yunus and his officials…want to privatize the country’s largest seaport at Chattogram; to open an aid corridor to war-torn parts of Myanmar; and to split up Bangladesh’s main tax authority.”

“[Yunus’s] aides say he feels thwarted by an emerging alliance between the country’s largest remaining political party and the army, which have criticized his policies and say he is being too slow to plan elections.”

Bangladesh’s Leader Threatens to Resign Over Election Pressure

Bangladesh’s Leader Threatens to Resign Over Election Pressure www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/w...

I’m very much looking forward to this soon-to-be-released South Asian history book—titled Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made—by Prof. David Engerman at Yale. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

I’m very much looking forward to this soon-to-be-released South Asian history book—titled Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made—by Prof. David Engerman at Yale. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

So excited to see this out. Stathis and I presented a first version of this paper at APSA in 2010.

It’s such a fantastic film. One of my all time favorites—I watched it countless times while living in West Bengal for immersive language training.

With a playoff record like that, can we get him to suit up for the Twins?

I am hiring a new Lab Manager to help run the NYU Center for Conflict & Cooperation.

We start reviewing apps on MAY 1st and it pays over $58,000. Please share with anyone who might be interested!

Please apply here: apply.interfolio.com/166620

See more details below:

Many congrats!

Spatiotemporal causal inference with arbitrary spillover and carryover effects Micro-level data with granular spatial and temporal information are becoming increasingly available to social scientists. Most researchers aggregate such data into a convenient panel data format and a...

New paper alert (hey, I can't doom scroll all the time): This one's on doing causal inference with "microlevel data" where we suspect that the treatment has spatial spillover & temporal carryover effects. We illustrate our new approach + package w/ application to US counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq

If your research involves RD designs, check out this important new working paper from Ghosh, Imbens, and Wager: "PLRD: Partially Linear Regression Discontinuity Inference" arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09907

If your research involves RD designs, check out this important new working paper from Ghosh, Imbens, and Wager: "PLRD: Partially Linear Regression Discontinuity Inference" arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09907

Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie

(one of my favorites)

🚨New pre-print! It builds on the State Formation seminar that I teach at Yale, benefiting from rich conversations with brilliant students. The piece tackles state formation, state building, and outlines 3 paths of future research: civil wars, international constraints, and bureaucratic capacity.

New Broadstreet post up!

Highlighting some great work rethinking common assumptions about African borders!

@ricarthuguet.bsky.social @jackpaine.bsky.social and Christy Qiu

www.broadstreet.blog/p/african-bo...

#3 Stommes et al (2023) show that RDDs in political science, many of which are close election RDDs, are "underpowered to detect all but large effects." As with all low power tests, we should be wary not only about large standard errors, but also type M/S errors!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Very happy that my paper has just been published at @apsrjournal.bsky.social!

Do insurgents help or hurt genocide targets? Contrary to common belief, I find that insurgent presence reduced Jewish victimisation during the Holocaust in France.

Here's what I discovered 👇

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I have a new working paper with @aidanmilliff.com and Varun KR which is now available on SocArXiv: osf.io/preprints/so...

This is a working paper, and so comments are very much welcome!

Mechanism analyses indicate that these reductions occurred through these legislators' stronger influence over security forces and were concentrated in constituencies with above-average access to info. and communication technology, which enabled relatively selective counterinsurgency ops.

We draw upon granular evidence from the decades-long separatist insurgency in Punjab, India and, employing a close elections RD design, find that nationally-dominant party (Indian National Congress) state legislators indeed reduced rebel violence within their constituencies.