Peter McLaughlin

Federal spending is *up* under Trump according to the Wall Street Journal. Chaos is not actually the same as cost savings.

Actual budgeting is a kind of actual policy-making and takes real work spread over real time. Running around breaking stuff isn't that.

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Model to Meaning: How to interpret statistical models with marginaleffects for R and Python

📚😅🎉

Yay!! I just submitted the complete manuscript of my upcoming book to the publisher!

Learn to easily and clearly interpret (almost) any stats model w/ R or Python. Simple ideas, consistent workflow, powerful tools, detailed case studies.

Read it for free @ marginaleffects.com

#RStats #PyData

‘We are all waiting for a reply.’ Countries say White House hasn’t responded on tariff talks. The lack of engagement is one signal the White House is still far from reaching substantive trade deals ahead of the midnight deadline for stepped-up global tariffs to kick in.

Authoritarians struggle to make effective policy in part because they have a bottleneck of attention. If no one but the king can make decisions, every decision must wait in line. Meanwhile, things get missed and errors accumulate.

Thank you Mike! And congrats to Nathan!!!

This is a fantastic list of papers on properly dealing with control variables (and other related methodological issues) in social science (and #polisky specifically)! I put it all in a public Zotero group library here www.zotero.org/groups/59433...

Really cool datasets and accompanying papers

The National Elections Database www.nationalelectionsdatabase.com

Paper: academic.oup.com/restud/advan...

Digitally Accountable Public Representation (social media posts of US officeholders 2020-2024)
sites.psu.edu/dapr/

Paper: osf.io/preprints/os...

NEW: Friends of Neri Alvarado, rotting in a Salvadoran prison on Trump's orders, made a video highlighting his volunteer work helping neurodiverse children learn to swim. Neri was sent there after someone at ICE thought his autism awareness tattoo was a gang tattoo.

Vid posted by Noah Lanard on X.

Second Image (Bar Chart) Title: Percentage Ruling Against Trump by Judge Ideology Description: A bar chart comparing the percentage of judges ruling against Trump across ideological groups. • The x-axis categorizes judges as Liberal, Centrist, or Conservative. • The y-axis represents the percentage of rulings against Trump, ranging from 0% to 100%. • The three bars show similar rates of ruling against Trump: • Liberal judges: 84% (27 out of 32) • Centrist judges: 86% (6 out of 7) • Conservative judges: 82% (9 out of 11) • The chart suggests that ruling against Trump is relatively consistent across ideological lines.

2/🧵 Here is the breakdown by ideological groupings. While liberal judges heard more cases (due to geography and venue selection), the consistency of rulings across ideological lines demolishes the narrative that judicial decisions against Trump reflect political bias.

Mandatory high school civics class that isn’t just like “how a bill becomes law” or whatever but also “how NOAA powers your phone’s weather app” and “NIH helped make your asthma inhaler”

The average American voter thinks that the government is too big but that it should spend more money on everything it does. This explains a decent share of the political chaos of this country.

can't be stressed enough how stuff like this makes policymaking so much more difficult in the future. think you passed a bill appropriating funds over ten years? maybe you did, maybe you didn't!

I can't speak for others, but I used to be like this. One thing that the 6+ year grind to earn a PhD and develop real expertise on a subject gave me was a respect for others doing the hard work to develop domain-specific expertise.

From our new issue: "The Distributive Politics of Grants-in-Aid" by Leah Rosenstiel. #ASPRNewIssue https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/distributive-politics-of-grantsinaid/222CF971123CED4D22ACDF2033D37E9A

A great @psjeditor.bsky.social paper from Lewallen, Park and @seanmtheriault.bsky.social examines when members of Congress use hearings to grandstand.

They find more grandstanding in solution (legislating) oriented hearings, with variation across topics.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

New CongressData update with its r packages & web app:
cspp.ippsr.msu.edu/congress/

We now have 1,000 variables at the district-member-year level, including 9 new data sources with area crosswalks, activist presence, primaries, environmental data, broadband, & legislative style

Screenshot of research article entitled "More Money, Less Credit? Legislator Gender and the Effectiveness of Congressional Credit Claiming" by Peter T. McLaughlin Abstract Bringing home federal spending projects to the district is a common reelection strategy for members of the U.S. Congress, and congresswomen tend to outperform congressmen in securing district spending. However, for legislators to turn distributive benefits into higher approval and electoral rewards, constituents must recognize that public spending has taken place in their community and attribute credit to the correct public official. I theorize that congresswomen face a gender bias when claiming credit for federal projects, and I test this theory through an online survey experiment. Contrary to expectations, I find no evidence that legislator gender influences the public’s reaction to congressional credit claims, indicating that congresswomen can effectively use distributive politics to counter gendered vulnerability in the U.S. Congress. This research advances the literature on gender and politics by investigating whether a gender bias in credit claiming prevents congresswomen from turning their representational efforts into electoral capital.

🏅In one of our most read articles this week - "More Money, Less Credit?" - @pmclaughlin44.bsky.social utilizes survey experiments to investigate potential gender bias in congressional credit claiming.

Available 🌟 #OpenAccess 🌟

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