Nico Napolio

YouTube video by Animated Politics Pivotal Politics: Simulating the US Congress

Here's a video explaining Pivotal Politics that's appropriate for anyone with some familiarity with basic spatial models that I made for my honors "Theories of American Political Institutions" class this fall

Let me know if you find it useful!

youtu.be/Ofn6ueuNkSo?...

The full video with explanations and audio is coming soon!

I've had a lot of fun this summer animating classic (but technical) political science theories for a class I'm teaching this quarter

These two figures confused me a TON when I first saw them in Pivotal Politics as a first year grad student

Hurricanes can bring disaster. Presidents can help – or not. The White House has weakened FEMA’s ability to respond to natural disasters.

Hurricanes can bring disaster. Presidents can help – or not.

Are we playing politics with disasters?

Read the latest from @nicholasnapolio.bsky.social: goodauthority.org/news/hurrica...

Check out this new @bjpols.bsky.social article from Asst. Prof. @nicholasnapolio.bsky.social: “Executive Policymaking Coalitions, Veto Activation, and Collective Action Problems.” The article explores how agency coalitions activate veto points and leverage congressional collective action problems.

Here's the link: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Instead, they can amplify gridlock between electorally induced changes in partisan and ideological coalitions by collaborating with other agencies to create ideological divisions among existing overseers

Existing theories of multiple principals overseeing the bureaucracy have ignored strategies agencies can use to exploit legislative collective action problems. Bureaucrats do not always have to wait for gridlock in Congress resulting from biannual elections.

I use a simple spatial model to show the conditions under which agency coalitions allow agencies to induce collective action problems.

I then test the implications of the model with decades of data and dozens of federal agencies.

The final paper from my dissertation is now out in
@bjpols.bsky.social!

I argue that federal agencies collaborate in the policymaking process in order to induce collective action problems in Congress and to pit oversight committees against each other so that agency policies stick.

BJPolS abstract discussing the influence of federal agencies on collaborative oversight and legislative actions in the U.S., analyzing agency cooperation problems, the role of veto points, and the impact on policy-making. The background is light green with the text highlighted in white.

NEW -

Executive Policymaking Coalitions, Veto Activation, and Collective Action Problems - cup.org/3UNAjok

- Nicholas G. Napolio

#OpenAccess

They'll be featured at @goodauth.bsky.social too!

bsky.app/profile/good...

YouTube video by Animated Politics One Dimensional Spatial Politics: The Median Voter Theorem

I've spent part of my summer working on a series of videos designed to introduce students to the workhorse spatial model of politics.

If you teach spatial models of politics, feel free to use! Any suggestions on content or presentation are very welcome as I haven't tested these with anyone yet.

Animated Politics, a new teaching resource. This video series explains the logic, math, and science behind politics.

🚨 RESOURCE ALERT! 🚨

We have a new teaching resource for you: Animated Politics.

This video series explains the logic, math, and science behind politics.

Watch and share: goodauthority.org/news/animate...

🚨New publication in JPIPE🚨

I scale executive agencies along a liberal –conservative dimension using LLMs to produce dynamic measures of ideology spanning 1949–2020.

Estimates and pre-print available on my website, linked here: nicholasnapolio.com/research

Really happy to share my paper "Executive Policymaking Coalitions, Veto Activation, and Collective Action Problems" has been conditionally accepted at the BJPS!

Thanks, Mike!

Photo from this year's USC graduation! 2025 PhD graduates @alcocerjj.bsky.social & @rcenteno.bsky.social alongside 2023 Phd @nicholasnapolio.bsky.social, who was visiting campus! Jose is off to Harvard, Raquel is off to Caltech, and Nico is tenure-track at UC, Riverside! #USCgrad
@usc.edu

In the paper, I develop a formal theory of legislator preferences for enforcing the separation of powers, describe theoretically derived measures of those preferences, and estimate them using ~1.3 million individual legislator decisions between 1973-2024.

Please DM if you'd like to see the draft :)

Very excited to share a new project I've been working on.

MCs have a statistically detectable preference for enforcing the separation of powers, but it is rarely big enough to dominate their policy preferences and affect their roll call vote choices.

Very early project - open to all feedback!

Looking fwd to Jeff Jenkins' PIPE workshop on 4/15 at @priceschool.usc.edu w/ @nicholasnapolio.bsky.social as discussant.

I'll present a new @usc-clear.bsky.social paper on the impact of genAI on the U.S. fed civil service (arxiv.org/abs/2503.09637).

Congratulations to all the graduate students who presented work at #MPSA2025! We had an amazing showing from our department. #polisky

My inaugural Good Authority post!

Coming to MPSA 2025!

I've organized a conference-within-a-conference on the separation of powers. We've got a great lineup of scholars working at the intersection of legislative and executive politics.

And I'm very grateful to the @dfadcoalition.bsky.social for sponsoring the CwC!

Excited to join the team! I’ll be writing about one post a month on American political institutions and current events.

Conclave being about spatial voting with a valence dimension?? Best picture, now.

Any time!

You're welcome! I wanted to see whether agencies publish rules more frequently on pro forma vs normal legislative days. I don't have the underlying data anymore (dead hard drive...) but these were my super rudimentary models.

It also tells you when they met and adjourned, which at one point I had scraped and had a measure of how many minutes each chamber was in session, but that's on a hard drive that died :(

GovInfo Official Publications from the U.S. Government Publishing Office.

I did this once for a project that didn't go anywhere, but I got the Daily Digest (www.govinfo.gov/app/collecti...) for each day from the GovInfo API. If one chamber is in session and the other isn't, it will say that that chamber was adjourned that day. So you can automate that by scraping the text