Dominik Stecuła

Tennessee sheriff defends jailing liberal activist for posting Trump meme about school shooting A Middle Tennessee sheriff is defending the arrest of a man for posting an online meme quoting President Donald Trump.

Call me old fashioned, but I think freedom of speech is good, ackschually, and we shouldn't be jailing people for posting memes. Glad that to see the GOP commitment to free speech was full fledged and unwavering and not at all cynical political theater.

www.newschannel5.com/news/newscha...

Our universities are truly a US superpower. Most states have at least one world class research university that is an engine of the local economy and a magnet for top talent from all over the world. Policies like this are not like stepping on a rake, its like blowing your own head off with a cannon.

in case you missed it when I posted the preprint on acceptance, here's the more aesthetically pleasing, actually formatted (and unfortunately timely) article for your reading pleasure! (cc: Fitz, @stecula.bsky.social, @matthewhitt.bsky.social):

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

Old enough to remember when scenes like this would have been unthinkable in America. (It was 9 months ago)

ICE is not only chasing down every random brown person in Chicago, they have a cameraman following them to film this for social media. Cruelty and inhumanity as content.

Not happening somewhere else. Here. In America. Right now.

Of what year? I'm still trying to finalize some 2023 items myself.

Just lost a paper after an R&R. One reviewer said accept. The other said “At the risk of frustrating the authors, however, I’m afraid the paper is still pretty badly written.” The latter comment, a constructive, intellectual feast of a comment, prevailed. Editor rejected it. Peer review is a joke.

Throwback Thursday!

Let’s take a moment to look back at the 2025 Political Communication APSA Preconference!

The many smiling faces in the selection of pictures show just how amazing the preconference was. You can find more pictures at this link: shorturl.at/EJj3v

New (very timely!) paper with Erin Fitz, @stecula.bsky.social,
@matthewhitt.bsky.social & myself, accepted at Behavioural Public Policy entitled "Mindset to Gain? Framing Effects, Need for Chaos, and the Limits of 'Burning It All Down'"--a thread and a link:

osf.io/preprints/ps...

ABC Pulls Jimmy Kimmel Off Air for Charlie Kirk Comments After F.C.C. Pressure

Trump is launching a full blown attack on free speech while his harem of billionaires buys up every media platform. This is no coincidence. It’s a coordinated attack on your fundamental right to speak freely without worrying if you’ll lose your job or worse.

APSA in Vancouver was a blast, so great to see old friends. See you all next year in Boston.

Vaccine death and side effects database relies on unverified reports – and Trump officials and right-wing media are applying it out of context Anti-vaccine activists are using the side effect reporting system to spread fear and misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines. But the database could also be used as a gauge for public concerns.

Today's ACIP meeting may use VAERS data to make false claims about vaccine injury.

To help sort out what's true from what's false, @stecula.bsky.social and I updated an explainer we wrote several years ago for @us.theconversation.com.

theconversation.com/vaccine-deat...

Unfair comparison to most 13-year-old children

What are we doing here, @nytimes.com? You were obviously not built for covering authoritarianism.

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!

Will is fantastic and you should hire him immediately

Interested in doing a postdoc with me & @dgrand.bsky.social? Consider applying to Cornell's Klarman Fellowship: as.cornell.edu/research/kla...

It involves a competitive internal application process, but it's 3 years of funding @$80k/year

Please email me/Dave if you're interested! Oct 15th deadline

Consider the stark contrast between how Trump and Vance treated Zelensky and Putin. American soldiers, on their knees, rolling the red carpet before war criminal Putin. A shameful day.

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