Matt Malis

Feel free to get in touch with any questions (and definitely if you notice any errors!)

I've posted my PhD level Quant I slides, in case they're useful for anyone else:
www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/ysvgl...

The material follows texts by Aronow & Miller, Hansen, and @mattblackwell.bsky.social, covering basic probability through OLS, with a brief intro to causal inference

#polisky

Good try but it’s not landing. You can’t fake conspiracy theorist, it has to come from the heart

as a recent emigre to Real America I’m becoming increasingly resentful of everyone treating a coastal mayoral primary as the center of the political universe

summary of findings

Here's an overview of the paper's findings.

We're planning to release the Key Officers dataset soon, so keep an eye out for that, and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about it.

Another finding: there seems to be an implicit "quota" system in effect, preventing multiple women from serving in leadership roles in the same embassy.

(As one female FSO describes: "I have never heard anyone complain about too many men in the embassy.")

We also find, at all levels, women are assigned to smaller and less important posts.

We find no relationship between host-country gender equality conditions and the gender distribution of US diplomats assigned there.

Women face a large disadvantage in promotion to the low-visibility DCM position, but not the higher-visibility CG. Then, among DCMs, women are more likely to reach ambassador (high viz), but no more likely to reach DAS (low viz).

But our data allow us to look more closely at individual appointment decisions, focusing on 1997-2017.

We compare appointments to two pairs of positions that are equal in status, but differ in visibility: Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) vs. CG, and Ambassador vs. Deputy Assistant Secretary (DAS)

aggregate trends in women's representation in foreign service positions

Top-line finding: women face substantial penalties in promotion into the middle and upper ranks, but only in low-visibility positions.

Looking only at representation in the aggregate, things seem to be trending in a positive direction:

abstract: "Representation Without Influence: Evidence from Gender Disparities in the U.S. Foreign Service"

New working paper!

with @calvin-thrall.bsky.social and David Lindsey, we collect the largest existing dataset on diplomatic personnel, and use it to analyze gender disparities in U.S. Foreign Service assignments

draft here: mattmalis.github.io/files/pdf/LM...

🧵 below

[person who has thought about politics for 17 minutes]: why isn’t there a political party that represents my views, which are all in the center of what I understand the range of political views to be?

Just curious, could you say a bit more? I can see simulations revealing e.g. you’re underpowered or you’re using the wrong SEs, but not obvious to me what sort of “mistake” you would make in the analysis that you wouldn’t also make when simulating the analysis

bluesky is a funny name for the most depressing fucking place on the internet

If the causal chain is X -> Y -> Z, then a regression of Z on X while conditioning on Y is problematic because of collider bias / conditioning on a post-treatment variable. Lots of relevant cites, eg onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

I feel like people aren’t generally aware that this person is laura loomer level insane

Really testing the limits of how far he can go before losing the demographic of my dad

so proud to live in a country where no one serves more than two months in prison for an op-ed 🥲

It’s hilarious and sort of endearing watching this grown man, whose full time job is just thinking and talking ideas, come to a profound realization about rights and civil liberties that most of us arrived at sometime in high school

*in equilibrium

Glad to see that the what Gorka said in the clip is not quite as bad as @meidastouch.com describes. Exaggerating the danger people face for just speaking out about these issues is good social media fodder but it is counterproductive to mounting an effective opposition.

Good thing they had the foresight to fill DOJ with loyalists and make sure this sort of thing never gets investigated. That’s called thinking ahead!

Has anyone collected and published data from the president’s daily diaries? Seems like something a lot of Americanists would be interested in but I can’t find anything on it…
#polisky

But have you considered that this creates disadvantages for certain groups of scholars (people who like to p-hack)

If “doesn’t” means “doesn’t and never will again”, then sure, I guess, but it seems like any meaningful concept of a “norm” has to entail expectations that survive despite short-term deviations

Thanks all for the suggestions!

Polisky: I’m thinking about using one week (total 3hr class time) at the end of my undergrad econometrics class as an intro to ML/AI, with the intended takeaway being “ML/AI is accessible and not scary given what you learned this semester”.

What specific methods/applications would you include?

Thanks Anton!

Q for American Politics polisky

Where can I find a dataset with US state-level presidential votes, along with gdp, population, and other basic indicators, that students can click and download as a single csv file for a class exercise?(Suggestions of your own replication material more than welcome!)