Leo Ahrens

Like I get three reviews and one of them is obviously low effort and misses the mark.I still feel forced to react to such reviews in good faith even though it might actually make my article slightly worse, imo.

None of this is to downplay your role as an editor Per, please don't take this the wrong way! Eg when you recently asked me to reivew on a paper ( I think you know what I am talking about).

At the same time, (and this does not apply to you), I have so often wished for more editor activism.

One implication is that rejections per se are only a weak signal for your paper being bad. I guess more than anything this model helps me to make sense of all the rejection I have had to face as an academic.

Of course me as a writer can influence the writing quality, but apart from that I cannot control the reviewer pool. So a lot of variance (i.e. getting rejected even though "I have the best project ever") is expected due to who gets to review.

I would be able to destroy the best papers in a review; I could also let through the worst ones. So my subjective stance is very important.

Why the fishing in the pond metaphor? I think publishing has a very large variation, and you have to fish for the "right" reviewers.

I would like to subject my personal review process model to the test: publishing is like fishing. You can influence two things. (1) the pond (i.e. the journal quality = acceptance rate) and (2) fishing skill = manuscript quality. Getting accepted is a game of probability.

I originally meant to write much more but got sidetracked, so here it is:

Without having read this thread first, I would like to subject my personal review process model to the test: publishing is like fishing. You can influence two things. (1) the journal (i.e. the journal quality/acceptance rate) and (2) manuscript quality. Getting accepted is a game of proportions.

YouTube video by hara kiri2 Chayenne Theme (1 hour version)

Try this www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWbu...

This is the first time I see one of my packages used in an actual journal article. Cool stuff! This is the fedistr Stata command for those wondering.

Free eprints for my JEPOP article
www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JN5C9...

Frank and I have a new-ish chapter out reviewing the electoral politics of welfare state reforms. A preprint is available on my website (leoahrens.eu/publications).

doi.org/10.4337/9781...

I don't quite understand why you are not happy / what you mean by these examples.

My command uses heatplot internally. Takes one line in Stata instead of many to make things look professional. I needed to fiddle with heatplot for a long time to get what I wanted. But I think now that this may be too marginal for a package release.

Thanks for the suggestion! That should be easy to implement.

My package is essentially a wrapper for heatplot. It uses heatplot but cuts away all the setup and figure layout so you can just type one line and it will look fine.

I drafted a correlation heatmap package for Stata. Does something like this already exist? I want to make sure before I put more work into this.

Today at 2 and tomorrow at 12, these two panels take place at @apsa.bsky.social. The papers are so intriguing that I finished reading them pre-arrival! 😱 @leoahrens.bsky.social & me also present. Including work on the class biases in pledge breaking

#APSA2025 #polisky @apsainequality.bsky.social ‬

I feel the same! At the same time, it has lead me to believe that policy preferences are not as important as suggested by the literature.

What do you think about Achen/Bartel's Democracy for Realists? I really liked the book but its implications are dire for my research field (& my past research), which commonly relies on the "folk theory" of democracy

1/3) 📣Out in Party Politics:
We trace the equal rights and economic equality positions of 69 center-right and far-right parties since 1970 in 12 countries. We find that center right parties did not react to/address equal rights concerns and economic inequality

journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

📬🚩
Our article on parties' programmatic responses to inequality - and more often the lack of responses - will come out in APSR!

Here is the @excinequality.bsky.social working paper:

kops.uni-konstanz.de/bitstreams/4...

with @klueserthan.bsky.social & Martin Haselmayer 🧗🙏

Just like Economists are unaware that multilevel models exist!

I'll leave this here

Did German left parties abandon economic equality in favor of equal rights, as the diagnosis of the "Lifestyle-Left" suggests? Analyzing party programs since 1970, we caution against sweeping claims in Unequal German Democracy (open access). 3 key qualifications👇
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

That would be much appreciated! Thank you

data from a wide variety of countries.

more credible identification to lend credibility to the theory. Even in this optimal world, the cross-sectional analysis still has value—it offers evidence supporting the claim that the credible causal effect estimates from, say, an experiment are “replicated” in observational

I am fully aware of the weaknesses relating to causal identification of the present paper, but it can show that real-world data is consistent with the presented theory. Optimally, further people will do connected research and use a different approach with