Scott Clifford

This paper was a blast to work on. The challenge: present party positions across many issues, in real time, using language voters actually use. 🧵 on why we went with a more involved retrieval-based approach and where I think these tools are headed.

Why moderate voters choose extreme candidates: voter uncertainty as a driver of elite polarization Abstract. Representative democracy depends on elected officials reflecting voters’ policy preferences. Yet, US elected officials are more ideologically ext

Partisan voters can reward candidates who stick to the party line even on unpopular issues. Under uncertainty, voters infer that ideologically rigid candidates are also more likely to back the party's other, more popular positions academic.oup.com/sf/advance-a...

Survey Professionalism: New Evidence from Web Browsing Data | Political Analysis | Cambridge Core Survey Professionalism: New Evidence from Web Browsing Data

They find that survey professionalism is common, but there is limited evidence that survey professionals lower data quality. Professionals do not systematically differ from non-professionals and don’t exhibit more response instability. Read the paper here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Currently in FirstView: In “Survey Professionalism: New Evidence from Web Browsing Data,” Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, @tiagoventura.bsky.social, Tiago Ventura, @jonathannagler.bsky.social, @ericka.bric.digital, & Magdalena Wojcieszak provide evidence on survey professionalism across three samples.

Survey experiments' popularity in political science is getting attention. What is good and bad about them? How can one maximize their benefits and mitigate their downsides?

Greg Huber and I wrote up our thoughts:
Paywalled: doi.org/10.1016/bs.h...
Free: m-graham.com/papers/Huber...

NEW PAPER w/ @cselmendorf.bsky.social & @jkalla.bsky.social:

An under-appreciated reason why voters oppose dense new housing, especially in less-dense neighborhoods: they think it looks ugly and want to prevent that, even in other neighborhoods.

Some of what we think is NIMBYism might not be!

A thread on our recent paper (w/Raihan Alam @raihanalam) in PNAS on why punishment often fails and what it means for crime, cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. I’m super excited for it, it’s the lab’s most extensive experimental work to date. Check it out! 1/
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Do any meta-analyses or other reflection pieces exist that catalog the sorts of mechanisms specifically, and outcomes generally, studied as consequences of providing white Americans information on their declining population share?

(1/10) 🚨Preprint alert!🚨

In this article, I challenge claims of a generational rise of conservative men. In the media and recent academic publications, the so-called ‘youth gender gap’ has been interpreted as a generational phenomenon.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

I still hear reviewer 2 saying "yes but in this case..."

✨New preprint! Why do people express outrage online? In 4 studies we develop a taxonomy of online outrage motives, test what motives people report, what they infer for in- vs. out-partisans, and how motive inferences shape downstream intergroup consequences. Led by @felix-chenwei.bsky.social 🧵👇

The image shows the paper's title and abstract.

New WP on political violence in democracies with the fantastic @dianebolet.bsky.social and @bjarneck.bsky.social. Sadly very topical, but with some positive results

osf.io/preprints/so...

1/

Very few Americans support actual political violence. Many more support intimidation. Almost no one thinks it’s appropriate to kill your political opponents, but many more would dox them.

Very few Americans support actual political violence.

Many more support intimidation.

Almost no one thinks it’s appropriate to kill your political opponents, but many more would dox them.

Read the latest: goodauthority.org/news/very-fe...

After a huge post-election flip in economic perceptions, I thought Democrats and Republicans might be lying to pollsters to send a partisan message — but I was wrong!

New in the Journal of Experimental Political Science (open access): doi.org/10.1017/XPS....

BJPolS abstract discussing the impact of anti-corruption policies in electoral politics with a focus on recent elections around the globe.

#OpenAccess from August 2025 -

Cleaning up Politics: Anti-Corruption Appeals in Electoral Campaigns - cup.org/4msGB8X

"Surprisingly, a clean disciplinary record does not substantively enhance a candidate’s anticorruption appeal..."

- Sofia Vera

A cautiously optimistic result on AI and disinformation.

A week before 2024 UK elections 13% of all voters used AI to ask about political topics. A randomized trial found this may be good: using AI led to similar gains in true knowledge as doing web research, regardless of model & prompt used.

📣 MORAL APPEALS IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 📣
New version of @twidmann.bsky.social and my working paper answering:
* Have moral appeals increased over time?
* Is the tendency to moralize ideologically patterned?
* Are some topics consistently more moralized than others?
osf.io/preprints/os...

Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Abstract for paper: Scholars increasingly conceptualize populism by whether politicians use people-centric and anti-elite appeals that pit a homogeneous people against a corrupt elite. These appeals reflect “thin” ideology because they offer no programmatic content and thus politicians must pair these appeals with more substantive positions, termed their “host” (or thick) ideology, which often consists of nativism on the right (e.g., espousing anti-immigrant positions) and socialism on the left (e.g., prioritizing redistribution). An emerging literature has thus sought to estimate whether populists garner support due to their thin ideology or their substantive host ideology. To date, no research has validated whether populism treatments (1) truly operationalize populist thin ideology, and (2) do so without manipulating host ideology. Results from three conjoint validation experiments fielded in both the United States and the United Kingdom show that thin ideology treatments successfully manipulate the underlying concepts but caution that some operationalizations also affect perceptions of host ideology.

Shows that thin populism treatments shift perceptions of people-centrism and anti-elitism as expected

Shows that thin populism treatments can also affect perceptions of host ideology. In particular, using treatments such as "American people" affects perceptions of a candidate's position on immigration

Shows suggestive evidence that people are less likely to use populist thin ideology appeals as heuristics for inferring host ideology when partisan information is included

New preregistered report @jepsjournal.bsky.social

"Thin" populism treatments manipulate perceptions of people-centrism + anti-elitism

But: some treatments (e.g., "American people") affect perceptions of host ideology, complicating causal analyses of impact of populist rhetoric

cup.org/4n3DvZm

Participating The Evaluation of Publication in Political Research study is open to serious producers and consumers of political research, including faculty in institutions of higher education, doctoral students,…

colleagues in political science. the formal update to the Garand and Giles journal ranking survey is now live. many of you will receive an email momentarily inviting you to participate. in the event you do NOT receive an invitation, please see this website to self-enroll. thanks! sharing = caring!

Now Out on First View: "Can (Thin) Populism be Manipulated without Manipulating Host Ideology? Evidence from a Conjoint Validation Approach"
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New JEPS: Debunking NIMBY Myths Increases Support for Affordable Housing, Especially Near Respondents' Homes www.cambridge.org/core/service...

-correcting stereotypes/misperceptions re: affordable housing increases support for building it
-Effects often *larger* for housing near people's homes

A One-Page Primer on: Statistical Power – Carlisle Rainey Statistical power is the chance to reject the null when it’s false. Why it matters, how to compute it, and why both researchers and readers should care. This is a one-page primer with rules of thumb a...

𝘈 𝘖𝘯𝘦-𝘗𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘗𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘯 Statistical Power

www.carlislerainey.com/blog/2025-08...

The Social Roots of Asian American Partisanship: From Political Learning to Partisan Leanings Abstract. The Social Roots of Asian American Partisanship explains one of the most transformative but puzzling trends in contemporary American politics: st

I expect this to be an important book. Congrats, @tanikar.bsky.social.

academic.oup.com/book/60875

As the U.S. celebrates Labor Day, what do voters think about the working poor?

In POQ, Benjamin Newman shows that most blame structural problems for poverty among workers – but that race and personal experience shape views too.

Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

Logo of the Journal of Experimental Political Science (JEPS) featuring the acronym "JEPS" in large, white letters on a dark blue background, with the hashtag "#OpenAccess" in small letters.

#OpenAccess from @jepsjournal.bsky.social -

Do Immigrants’ Partisan Preferences Influence Americans’ Support for Immigration? - cup.org/4p2Xskp

- @danielmcdowell.bsky.social & David A. Steinberg

#FirstView

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..."

Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ;

We really need more papers on this issue

Some people find politics interesting. Others do not. In a new paper, I show that appealing to MEANING increases political interest. In 6 experiments, connecting what people find meaningful in their lives to politics increases political interest. Link: osf.io/preprints/so...

Making Issues Matter: Local Media and Policy-Based Evaluations of Politicians - Political Behavior Does the media enhance issue accountability? Many argue it does by covering where politicians stand on policy. However, evidence of this process is limited and fails to address two alternatives. First...

Peterson & Jeong find that local media strengthens issue accountability. By reducing uncertainty about legislators’ policy positions, news makes voters more likely to evaluate politicians on issues, not just party lines. #MediaAndPolitics
Read more:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

screenshot of the top of the first page of the fall 2025 experiments section newsletter

There's a new issue of the section newsletter out! This one's on sample considerations in experiments: professional survey-takers, LLM usage, rural contexts, and more!

connect.apsanet.org/s42/newslett...