Dominik Stecuła

Apathy Over Attacks on Higher Education Needs to Change If Americans don’t fight back against efforts to dismantle higher education, the U.S. will lose lifesaving medical research, innovation that spurs our economy and the ability to freely study science a...

Few Americans actively support the Trump admin's attacks on higher ed. But, our data show that many seem to have no problem with it.

@stecula.bsky.social ‬and I discuss why Americans should *demand* that our elected officials stand up for higher ed.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/atta...

Thanks, Neil. Honestly, I had no idea this was happening, and I follow Polish public discourse quite closely. Definitely flying under the radar

🚨🚨 Only a few days left to submit a paper for the Political Communication Preconference at APSA! 🚨🚨

@ashleymuddiman.bsky.social @stecula.bsky.social and I are looking forward to your submissions!

DEADLINE: May 25th, 11.59pm PDT (GMT-7). CFP here: u.osu.edu/apsa2025/

3 more days! Get your applications in and share widely!

Title: Asymmetric Concentration in the Marketplace of Ideas Abstract: Past research argues that competing political coalitions in the United States differ in structure as well as substance: liberals seek to use the government to advance a variety of groups’ policy goals, while conservatives are more homogeneous and sensitive to a smaller set of abstract ideas that motivate blocking or undoing liberal policy. This asymmetry should be reflected in the ideological marketplace: relative to liberal commentary, conservative commentary should be more distinct from the political mainstream and more ideologically homogeneous. I test this expectation by examining the landscape of politics and politics-adjacent podcasts, identifying ideological communities based on the network of which guests appear on which shows. I find that the right-leaning podcast community is more clearly distinct from the political mainstream, clustered in fewer sub-communities, more ideologically homogeneous, and draws from a narrower set of guests than the left-leaning podcast community. These results provide a first-of-its-kind descriptive overview of the structure of political and politics-adjacent commentary in an increasingly important site of political information consumption.

Hierarchical stochastic block model results. Each line connects a guest to a show. Colors reflect terminal (lowest-level) block pairs.

Distributions of normalized left/right rank within each high-level podcast block, among shows with at least ten episodes classified as likely to feature political discussion. Panel (a) shows distributions and block-level medians. Panel (b) shows Wasserstein distance from uniform distribution with bootstrapped 95% intervals.

Edge density and tie distribution between high-level blocks

new working paper (reposted with fixed/public link): osf.io/gbkn5

Reminder that there are 13 more days to apply to the 2025 APSA Political Communication Preconference. Join us in Vancouver!

Please share widely.

Trump University 2.0

Bar chart showing 651 NSF-funded research projects, with total terminated days in dark grey or red, completed days in light grey or red. Red highlights projects listed by Ted Cruz as "neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda".

For #TidyTuesday this week, we're looking at data on terminations of NSF grants 📊

🎨 Using colour to highlight one category
📈 Transparency to highlight the important data
✍️ Annotations instead of a legend for transparency

#RStats #ggplot2 #DataViz

Trump wants the mathematical inverse of this picture of Yeltsin

Reducing administrative burdens for awardee institutions by having them fire 20% of work staff because they can no longer afford to pay them

You really don't need legal scholars to weigh in on it just like you don't need to call an otolaryngologist to check if it is okay to shove a fork in your ear

Inherent Vice: Can America Come Back From Who We’ve Become? At the richest moment in world history, in an unparalleled time of comforts and luxuries, we have elected self-harm and self-pity.

Tour de force from @aselrod.bsky.social:

"Is our civic virtue so spent that we cannot rescue the republic from the sewer it has fallen into? [...]

At the richest moment in world history, in an unparalleled time of comforts and luxuries, we have elected self-harm and self-pity."

It’s been a crazy marathon of a year. But first year at Ohio State is now completed. To celebrate, here is what Chat GPT thinks I would look like if my head was a buckeye.

Check out @stecula.bsky.social’s analysis of the Canadian election and how Carney represents a rebuke to Trumpism

www.usnews.com/opinion/arti...

I never thought I would feel the need to write that Canada is, in fact, a real country—but here we are. Trump's “51st state” talk isn't funny. Americans need to wake up and stand up for Canada and our special relationship.

www.usnews.com/opinion/arti...

🌐 Preconference updates will be posted here: u.osu.edu/apsa2025/

📩 Questions? Contact the organizers: @stecula.bsky.social, @patyrossini.bsky.social and @ashleymuddiman.bsky.social through the email:

PoliticalCommunication2025@gmail.com

#APSA2025 #PolComm

Inherent Vice: Can America Come Back From Who We’ve Become? At the richest moment in world history, in an unparalleled time of comforts and luxuries, we have elected self-harm and self-pity.

I wrote about small-r republican virtue and whether America has enough left to get out of this mess.

Read at @liberalcurrents.com

www.liberalcurrents.com/inherent-vic...

Me sending my manuscript to PNAS before it promptly gets desk rejected

Dobra zmiana po amerykańsku. Jest gorzej, niż myślicie Wielu ekspertów ostrzegało przed groźbą autorytaryzmu pod rządami Trumpa, ale opinia publiczna często wzruszała ramionami, uznając te głosy za przesadzone. Tymczasem to, co dzieje się dziś w USA, wska...

Dzisiaj w @wyborcza.pl piszę o kryzysie konstytucyjnym w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Jest gorzej niż myślicie.

wyborcza.pl/7,75968,3188...

Thank you for joining us, John! It was a fantastic lecture.

Alt-text: Screenshot of The New York Times homepage from April 17, 2025. The lead story headline reads: “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador,” reporting that Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland met with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia after previously being denied access to the prison where Abrego Garcia is held. A photo shows the two men sitting at a table in conversation, with water glasses and coffee cups in front of them. Van Hollen is leaning forward, speaking seriously. Below the main story is a secondary headline: “Dual Orders From Judges Edge Courts Closer to Confrontation With White House."

Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador is a form of embodied protest and helped put Trump’s illegal deportation of Abrego Gracia on the front page of the NYT two days in a row.

As Bayard Rustin once said, “The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn.”

Elite cues + negative polarization = turning progressives into neoliberals

For sure, but unfortunately, a lot of our fellow Americans are seeing what is happening on the immigration front and nodding in approval

Sad that foreign voters are more responsive to Trump's awfulness than American ones

fair enough

Thank god. lets gtfo here

I think a great general rule of thumb is: the more names of judges that an average member of the public can recite from memory, the worse the shape of that country's democracy

MAGAs: lines going straight down is good, ackschually, aRT oF ThE DeAL

The cfp for this year's @polcomm.bsky.social preconference at APSA is now open, and we are also organizing a mentoring scheme for early career scholars not willing/able to travel to Canada this year. Information below!