Daniel Weitzel

Extract from the Charlemagne column in the Economist, reading: "more working means more money, and more money means added clout in global affairs. Until the 1960s Europeans toiled longer hours than Americans, and mattered somewhat more in the world. That is no coincidence"

And the freestyle causal inference top Play of the Week goes to the @economist.com Charlemagne piece on Europeans needing to work more

Picks, Shovels, Superstars, and Poachers: Explaining the AI Investment Boom Standard real-options theory makes a clear prediction: when technology advances rapidly, costs fall steeply, and technical approaches remain uncertain, firms should wait. The option value of deferring...

I have long puzzled about the AI investment boom. Here's a model for it: www.gojiberries.io/picks-shovel...

No representation without reservation: The long-term limits of gender quotas in India New research finds that exposure to 15+ years of women’s quotas in rural local elections does not boost women’s representation when quotas are lifted.

voxdev.org/topic/instit...

I wrote a whole paper about revisions! They are a statistical best practice but can erode public trust in institutions. Governments don't revise their data unless they're forced to - which is why revisions are more prevalent among democracies (see Ireland, Greece)

www.iasmingoes.com/papers/Goes-...

just like buying a new empty notebook, switching todo apps will *definitely* make me more productive

This was a fun paper to write and we are very grateful for the recognition!

Yes, we had a lot of partial dependence plots initially! I'll update the code and produce some today.

Asked ChatGPT how to expand a data frame with a categorical variable and count.

Thought it was hallucinating when it suggested `uncount()`, but nope! It's a legit #tidyverse function. Reverse a count with grouped `uncount()`.

Love it!

If you want to study 'TV news' (for which ideally you should get the images), here are the transcripts from archive.org

github.com/notnews/arch...

Happy 25th anniversary to R 1.0.0! 📊👩‍💻⌨️🎉🍾

Congratulations! So well deserved!

10 maps of Germany for each month from January to October 2024. 268 points on each map represent the DWD weather stations active since 1961. The points are colored by the deviation of the monthly average temperature in 2024 from the long-term monthly average between 1961 and 1990. There’s hardly any station which had an average in any month that was below the reference period. Highlights: February 6.2 °C above the reference period; March 4.0 °C, August 3.4 °C.

Yesterday brought 18°C in Cologne (DE), which is 3°C above the previous record temperature for a 24th of November. This made me revisit a map I made last year.
Most of 2024 has been warmer than the long-term average for Germany from 1961-1990.

#30DayMapChallenge Day 25 Heat #rstats #ClimateChange

Good morning colleagues. CSU Political Science is hiring in American Politics/Political Communication. App deadline is 9/8. Tell your friends.

Here's the APSA eJobs listing: members.apsanet.org/CAREERS/eJobs/…

Or direct to CSU: jobs.colostate.edu/postings/148354

Happy to answer questions.

These are pictures from my commute to campus. We've hired a lot of junior faculty recently, you'll be part of a young, dynamic, and growing department!

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

Assistant Professor of American Politics The Department of Political Science at Colorado State University invites applications for an entry-level tenure-track Assistant Professor position in American politics with a specialization in politic...

Hey #polisky, we are hiring in American Politics at Colorado State!

Great colleagues, wonderful state, 350 miles of bike lanes, and over 300 days of sunshine. We have a great group studying AP, behavior and CSS more generally. There also is an HPC available!

jobs.colostate.edu/postings/148...

This figure shows the value of EMBI Global spreads for Ecuador (top), in basis points, and the amount of sovereign debt issued by the central government of Ecuador (bottom), in billions of constant US dollars. The period of investor optimism discussed in the article (after December 2008) is shaded in grey. During this period, EMBI spreads declined, but so did bond issuance.

When oil revenue is high, Latin America has easier access to credit. You'd think states would seize this opportunity to borrow more. In a forthcoming World Development article that is open access until June 26, Stephen Kaplan and I show that they don't authors.elsevier.com/a/1j2gk,6yxD...

Guyana Act No. 12 of 2019. Natural Resource Fund Act 2019. Signed by President David Granger on 2019-01-23. AN ACT to establish the Natural Resource Fund to manage the natural resource wealth of Guyana for the present and future benefit of the people and for the sustainable development of the country, and for connected matters.

Polisky! In a new ISQ piece, Terry Chapman and I look at the effects of IMF surveillance on natural resource governance. We find that developing countries like Guyana are more likely to create natural resource funds when the IMF advises them to do so doi.org/10.1093/isq/...

#polisky Friends, I'm collecting job market resources for social science undergrads. I want to include examples of jobs that students can have with a social science BA, an intro stats course, and R coding skills.

What are successful stories or job ads that I should include?

now tallying libraries used in replication files of **34** social science journals + support for python

github.com/recite/softv...

if stata mavens know how to tally imports in stata, let me know. (ssc install is not used frequently)

w/ @danweitzel.net

Are you interested in democratic backsliding?

With @honoratam.bsky.social and Joep van Lit we are organizing a workshop on "Early Signs of Democratic Recession in Established and Backsliding Democracies"

Join us at the @ecpr.bsky.social joint sessions

polisky

ecpr.eu/Events/Event...

Polisky, check out this super cool resource: demscore.se

"An innovative e-infrastructure providing free access to harmonized data from several of the world’s largest datasets on Democracy, Environment, Migration, Social Policy, Conflict, and Representation"

Oh, very cool. Thanks for sharing this!

New Polisky working paper here: github.com/soodoku/part...

GitHub - soodoku/partisan-gaps: How do (biased) guessing encouraging features and guessing agnostic ... How do (biased) guessing encouraging features and guessing agnostic coding techniques affect the partisan gap? - GitHub - soodoku/partisan-gaps: How do (biased) guessing encouraging features and ...

You can find the most recent version of our working paper on GitHub: github.com/soodoku/part...

The most up to date PDF is here: github.com/soodoku/part...

Our results paint a mixed picture of democratic competence. Smaller partisan gaps are partly a consequence of the fact that the average respondent doesn’t know the facts. It is mostly partisan guessing masquerading as partisan gaps. 6/7

This working paper sheds light on the source of the partisan gap as well. Our results suggest that the gap is not due to partisan cheerleading of the knowledgeable but by motivated guessing of the politically ignorant. 5/7

Removing these inflationary features from survey questions produces knowledge estimates that are more strongly associated with established predictors of political knowledge, such as interest, participation and education. 4/7

We find that common features of commercial polls like not asking don’t know, inserting a partisan cue, and treating unconfident answers as knowledge inflate the partisan gaps by up to 50%. 3/7

In a new working paper @soodoku.bsky.social, Lucas Shen, and I find that commercial polls inflate the partisan gap and that a big chunk of the partisan gap is not founded in differences in beliefs but an artifact of survey design! 2/7

How much do Republicans and Democrats disagree about political facts? In the news, we can frequently find reports of large gaps in how partisans perceive the world.

Wide and widening partisan gaps have serious implications for the functioning of our democratic systems! 1/7