Scott Clifford

🚨Pre-print alert🚨

Research shows citizens in many Western democracies are increasingly affectively polarized––they feel warm toward their own party but quite cold toward opposing parties.

But how does it feel to “feel warmly”?
@katharinalawall.bsky.social, @mtsakiris.bsky.social & I asked.
🧵1/8

Inflation was a big issue--maybe even *the* issue--in 2024.

But do citizens understand how to interpret inflation rates?

Using some new data from @verasight.bsky.social, the answer seems to be largely: no.

On top of that, Republicans show significantly less understanding than Democrats.

New preprint! We developed new measurement tools to examine moralization in ~2B Twitter/X & Reddit posts and ~5M traditional media texts.

Key finding: moralization increased markedly on social media from 2013-2021; more than traditional media; associated with multiple user dynamics
🧵👇

New paper. What happens when a presidential candidate steps way out of line, not only with the public, but even with his own voters? And on a highly salient issue? Candidates typically don’t do that—they’re too strategic. But Trump isn’t. He’s good for social science. 🧵

How Features of Policy Design and Misperceptions Shape Public Opinion Housing vouchers are both effective and widely supported, yet the housing vouchers program is underfunded. This may be due to American’s conflicting views about housing assistance. Recent scholarship ...

Congratulations to Lucia Lopez on receiving a Russell Sage Foundation Dissertation Research Grant! 🎉

Lucia will be on the academic job market this year. You can learn more about her research at www.lucia-lopez.com.

www.russellsage.org/awarded-proj...

I've seen editors of journals say this before but being on the other side can confirm: the easiest zero-cost way to speed up the review process is to quickly turn down requests to review that you can't do.

Using Nonnaive Participants Can Reduce Effect Sizes - Jesse Chandler, Gabriele Paolacci, Eyal Peer, Pam Mueller, Kate A. Ratliff, 2015 Although researchers often assume their participants are naive to experimental materials, this is not always the case. We investigated how prior exposure to a t...

There's some lit on professional respondents but this is probably the most relevant paper journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Contributing to the  lit on where to place moderators in an experiment (shoutouts 🧵), @tabithabonilla.bsky.social, Genni and I consider whether items measuring prejudice are subject to unique considerations. Does asking these questions pre-treatment affect the experiment? @psrm.bsky.social

Felt it useful to update my work on the bidirectional link between whites' partisanship & their views of Black folks with the recent ANES panel taking the tests to a new context and a new method to better tease out individual change. Results persist. We should stop treating racial attitudes as exog.

Things I've recently seen academics use AI for, all of which failed miserably:
1. Writing a journal review
2. Power analysis
3. Generating references.
Please don't do this.

BJPolS abstract discussing scholars' investigation into polarization and logical comparisons across party entities, cultural priming in economic discussions, and the effect of cultural debates on political discourse.

NEW -

Beyond Observational Relationships: Evidence from a Ten-Country Experiment that Policy Disputes Cause Affective Polarization - cup.org/3Zvgchx

- @noamgidron.bsky.social, James Adams, @rwillh11.bsky.social & @ttichelbaecker.bsky.social

#OpenAccess

📢 The final piece of my dissertation is out in @polbehavior.bsky.social! Does being an ideologue matter for political disagreement—beyond how many issues are involved? It does, shaping both animosity and how people engage. 🧵https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-025-10049-z

The Experimental Research section of the American Political Science Association (@experimentsapsa.bsky.social) invites research proposals from post-prospectus PhD students for its Experimental Research Early-Career Fellowship program. Share this post! @apsa.bsky.social, @poscresearch.bsky.social

And 1 and 2 are overlapping! Persuasion is not so much about convincing people immigration is good, for example, but this is a bad method of enforcement and we could do better

🚨🚨 NEW PRE-PRINT 🚨🚨

Prominent theories in political psychology argue that threat causes increases in conservatism. Early experimental work supported this idea, but many of these studies were (severely) underpowered, and examined only a few threats and ideological DVs. 1/n osf.io/preprints/ps...

Currently in FirstView: In “The Limits (and Strengths) of Single-Topic Experiments,” @scottclifford.bsky.social & @carlislerainey.bsky.social examine the generalizability of single-topic studies, focusing on how often confidence intervals capture treatment effects from a larger population of studies

Are you worried at all that these questions are contributing to the spread of misinfo since most people haven't heard it yet? Is there a debrief? www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Political Divisions and Morality: An Interdisciplinary Conversation - Consortium on Moral Decision-Making This event will bring together researchers in psychology, political science, communications, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology to discuss political divisions and moral decision-making. The event...

I'm excited to announce a hybrid Expanding Empathy event on Political Divisions & Morality, next Friday April 25 from 11am-5pm EST, in person at Penn State & on Zoom. This event will bring together researchers in psychology, political science, communications, philosophy, sociology, anthropology. 1/n

Sure, there are several big problems but I think this is an important one for the interpretation that's going around

Another failure of agree/disagree scales. Better to ask *how many* would be better off

Yes, respondents get mad about this. But can't you just adjust foreground contrast?

Very important, thorough, and careful new paper strengthens Clifford, Sheagley, and Piston's (2021, APSR) evidence that pre-post designs don't attenuate treatment effects very much relative to the shrinkage in the standard errors.

Measure outcomes before and after the treatment!

New working paper with two great coauthors!

Heard different advice. Very skeptical of priming worries. But better to lead with interesting, engaging content

Survey was done only about a week ago. Results make sense because Ds focusing on who has the most power. With Ds out of power, less clear for Rs who is doing harm

These are from open-ended responses so they could type in anything. The graph only shows the most popular responses

When Push Comes to Shove: How Americans Excuse and Condemn Political Violence - Political Behavior What factors do Americans find most important when evaluating acts of political violence? Normatively, details regarding the violent act (e.g., the target and violence severity) should determine the p...

Out now and open access at @polbehavior.bsky.social! Which factors do Americans use to evaluate episodes of political violence? link.springer.com/article/10.1... (with Kal Munis, @nicolehufman.bsky.social, Arif Memovic, and Jacob Ford) 🧵

Some new data in on support for political aggression and violence... First, we asked people who they think is doing the most harm in American politics. Clear agreement among Democrats but more variation among Republicans - and some surprising responses.

Great question! We actually have a better way to test this. After these questions, we randomly picked one out-partisan that they rated less than 40 on a feeling thermometer and asked the same outcomes. The correlation here is -.22 instead of -.24. Pretty similar!

For more on our measurement approach, see this paper, which is now conditionally accepted at POQ scottaclifford.com/wp-content/u...