Scott Clifford

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...

New job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357

Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!

Anyone have favorite options for printing SEM output in R like semTable that work for v4.5.1? My Googling has turned up little.

new in early view at Political Psychology -->

New publication, out in Political Analysis:

There is an increasing array of tools to measure facets of morality in political language. But while they ostensibly measure the same concept, do they actually?

I and @fhopp.bsky.social set out to see what happens.

Also, you don't need to live in Texas to attend! You just need to be willing to travel here!

For Your Syllabus: Statistical Power – Carlisle Rainey Five papers you can assign when teaching about statistical power: power analysis, minimum detectable effects, sample size planning, and design diagnosis.

New Post: "For Your Syllabus: Statistical Power"

Add content on statistical power to your social science courses.

Not just to methods courses.

For substantive courses, Bloom's MDE (i.e., 80% power to detect 2.5*SE) is easy to teach and really helpful!

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

Qualtrics Survey | Qualtrics Experience Management The most powerful, simple and trusted way to gather experience data. Start your journey to experience management and try a free account today.

TAMU will be hosting the Texas American Behavior Conference on Nov. 7-8 this year. Apply by Aug. 31 using the link below. Let me know if you have any questions!
tamu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Qualtrics Survey | Qualtrics Experience Management The most powerful, simple and trusted way to gather experience data. Start your journey to experience management and try a free account today.

TAMU will be hosting the Texas American Behavior Conference on Nov. 7-8 this year. Apply by Aug. 31 using the link below. Let me know if you have any questions!
tamu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Another well-deserved award for Lucia! She's doing fantastic work and is on the market this fall!

Abstract of a paper written by Amanda Weiss and Ekin Dursun and titled "Robust Emotion Manipulation for Surveys: Evidence from Three Experiments." The abstract reads: "A large number of experiments investigate the effects of emotions on critical political outcomes, including policy attitudes, support for authoritarians, tolerance, and political participation. The success of these experiments depends on emotion manipulations: Manipulations must be strong enough to shift one target emotion while also being specific enough shift other confounders only minimally. In this project, we identify emotion manipulations that fulfill these imperatives. First, using causal graphs, we show that in such experiments, emotions are intermediate outcomes of randomly assigned emotion manipulation instruments—not randomized treatments themselves. Then, we present evidence from three experiments (total N = 6, 649) on the effectiveness of vignettes, autobiographical emotional memory tasks, images, and more for inducing anger, gratitude, fear, political anger, political gratitude, and political cynicism. We show that vignettes are reliable instruments in terms of both strength and specificity. We also investigate compliance with emotion manipulation instruments and find that pre-treatment attitudes toward research may moderate treatment effects.

🚨 Updated working paper!

Ekin Dursun and I ask what instruments best manipulate emotions on surveys (osf.io/56h4g).

We find that vignettes really work! They have large effects on emotions of interest & smaller effects on emotions *not* of interest.

But as always, it's complicated.👇

(1/17)

BJPolS abstract from a research paper discussing experiments conducted in Mississippi and Florida on how emotions can impact political behaviors such as voting.

NEW -

Field Experiments Invoking Gloating Villains to Increase Voter Participation: Anger, Anticipated Emotions, and Voting Turnout - cup.org/45KpoSo

- Gregory A. Huber, Alan S. Gerber, Albert H. Fang & John J. Cho

#OpenAccess

Can embarrassment of one's party dampen partisanship and polarization? One would think.

In a forthcoming paper at @poqjournal.bsky.social, Taylor Carlson, @stevenwwebster.bsky.social, and I examine what we call "partisan embarrassment," including looking at the ramifications of these feelings...

🚨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
🧵👇