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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 14/09/2026

We are hosting #DemocracyWeek here at @umich.edu -- Hosting a series of amazing events all week across campus to highlight what Democracy means and why it matters: democracyweek.umich.edu

democracyweek.umich.edu

Democracy Week

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Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics @umichstonecid.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

What shapes who runs for office, who becomes a viable candidate, and how does class influence who ultimately governs? Join @noamlupu.bsky.social, @nickcarnes.bsky.social, and @robertocarlos.bsky.social for “Who Runs? Candidacy & Class." Sept. 17, noon–1:30 p.m. Free and open. RSVP: bit.ly/whoruns

Promotional graphic for “Who Runs? Candidacy & Class,” part of Democracy Week at U-M. Thursday, September 17, noon–1:30 p.m., Room 1430, ISR Thompson Building. Lunch begins at 11:45 a.m. with RSVP; the event is free and open to all. Headshots identify panelists Noam Lupu of Vanderbilt University and Nick Carnes of Duke University, and moderator Roberto Carlos of U-M Political Science. Presented by the Stone Center’s SWIPE initiative with support from U-M’s Initiative for Democracy and Civic Empowerment. RSVP at bit.ly/whoruns.

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

National Jewish Survey, Sep 1, 2026 Generic congressional ballot: 67% D, 26% R Approvals JD Vance: -68 MAGA: -59 Donald Trump: -53 ICE: -50 Benjamin Netanyahu: -40 Marco Rubio: -33 "Israeli policy in Gaza": -30 Barack Obama +32 jewishvoters.org/wp-content/u...

jewishvoters.org

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 07/08/2026

Are you sure its not just a very literal understanding of jaw dropping - you see the two times that you really do drop your jaw is when you have to open your mouth to eat and when you finally get to relax into a bed.

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Daniel Drezner @dandrezner.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Sweet Jesus, watch this until the end. After he says "what's new?" it's like he realizes that he's sold off the last bits of his integrity and there's just no point to talking anymore.

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 07/08/2026

The big problem though is that weighted inferential statistics are no longer BLUE - there are reasonable approaches to figuring out how big and consistent the difference is after weighting, but I very rarely see them used. Running the weighted regression, however, is usually not appropriate.

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Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR @cambup-polsci.cambridge.org · 06/08/2026

🚨New Cambridge Element🚨 "American Presidential Campaigns in the Attention Economy" by @cerenbudak.bsky.social, Jonathan M. Ladd, @joshpasek.com, Lisa Singh and Michael W. Traugott, part of the Campaigns and Elections series, is out now and #OpenAccess cup.org/4bvBXUg #PoliSky #Elections

cup.org

American Presidential Campaigns in the Attention Economy

Cambridge Core - American Studies - American Presidential Campaigns in the Attention Economy

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 04/08/2026

Just to be clear, this is what happens in a town that prides itself as being liberal when the DSA candidate is also the NIMBY candidate.

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Dan Cassino @dancassino.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

The critical question of US politics right now is whether the reticence of normally solid Republican voters to pick up the phone and talk to pollsters signals a general disengagement with politics (and thus low turnout in November), or is limited to polling.

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Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News @froomkin.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Now they’re saying “exaggerates”??? Who changed that? Coward.

LIVE
2m ago
Trump Exaggerates Claims About
Election Vulnerabilities in Address
President Trump laid out a purported
effort by China to undermine him. But the
documents posted by the White House did
not back up his claims.
See new updates ›

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Asha Rangappa @asharangappa.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

“Prebunking” has been found to be very effective in neutralizing disinformation

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 08/07/2026

“Weaponized his vehicle” sounds like the ICE version of “It’s coming right at us” www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr0b...

youtube.com

How To Get Around Hunting Laws - SOUTH PARK

YouTube video by South Park Studios

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 04/07/2026

1/ So as is my tradition, I was reading the Declaration of Independence today and I was thinking that instead of asking what it says about King George, it might be more interesting to think about what kind of country the founders were envisioning. A 🧵

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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

To celebrate a rebellion is to know that, from a flawed world, we can make new things. We can hold on, we can find each other, and not just imagine but create a much better America. It is a special 250th – it is ours. Video in link: snyder.substack.com/p/on-tyranny...

snyder.substack.com

On Tyranny — Special 250th Edition

With friends, on video, to recall and to rebel

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 04/07/2026

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 04/07/2026

There’s something quite fitting and ironic about celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday with a two day long power outage. An inspiring anniversary dashed by degraded infrastructure…

Power outage map showing an outage that started at 6 PM on July 3 is expected to be restored at 11:30 PM on July 5.

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 26/06/2026

Just inadvertently discovered that a whole bunch of research on AI responses may be invalid. Apparently, even with memory off, ChatGPT is still giving contextual information, including the name of the user! It used my full name casually in conversation; which means that data is in the model.

I asked: Please write a summary from your perspective as an AI on what happened here and keep it short - Chat response: From my perspective as the AI:

During this conversation, I referred to the user by name even though long-term memory was disabled. I did not retrieve that information from prior chats, but I did have access to hidden contextual metadata that identified the user, and I used it conversationally when I shouldn’t have. That revealed that my responses were conditioned on information beyond the visible transcript. The user pointed out that, regardless of whether the information came from memory, metadata, or retrieval, hidden conditioning changes the effective inputs to the model. For researchers, that creates a reproducibility problem because the conversation transcript alone is no longer a complete specification of what produced the response.

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 26/06/2026

Or maybe it’s his goal: Recall that “Third World” as a term was developed to refer to unaligned nations in the Cold War And Yugoslavia was the original “Third World” country Now, somehow, 2/3 of the official residents of the White House have Slovenian citizenship!

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 18/06/2026

You almost wonder if this was the strategy on Iran all along… youtu.be/njMR9K5BKbA?...

youtu.be

It Could Always Be Worse: A Yiddish Folk

YouTube video by OCPublicLibraries

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 15/06/2026

The distinction between the right parading around masculinity and their desire to masculinize Michelle Obama seems out of left field and self conflicting until you understand the stereotypes at play… as @stewartcoles.bsky.social and I found in our paper. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Highlighted from the abstract: black women were also rated as being less similar to women in general than white women.

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 29/05/2026

Have to give AI some cred on this prediction:

The funniest possible outcome now may be that the event slowly collapses until it’s basically:

* Vanilla Ice,
* Bret Michaels,
* Flo Rida,
* a replacement country act,
* and 14 hours of online commentary about how Vanilla Ice somehow became the last man standing at America’s semiquincentennial nostalgia apocalypse.

—-

Two days later, you guessed it, Flo Rida and vanilla ice are the only originals left

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 28/05/2026

And the grift is so deep everywhere right now that this was more than halfway down the full news scroll on the New York Times homepage.

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 28/05/2026

Definitely telling that this character seems to be one of the more authentic folks that will be showing up…

youtu.be

Vanilla Ice MTV Interview

YouTube video by Thrivers

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CAPTivated Podcast @captivatedpod.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Here are 3 essential takeaways from our latest episode with political communication scholar @joshpasek.com. 🎧 Listen now on your fave podcast platforms here: captivated.buzzsprout.com/2569769/follow #CAPTIvatedPodcast #PodcastRecommendations #DigitalDemocracy #MediaLiteracy #SelectiveExposure

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Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

New in @polbehavior.bsky.social: over the first half of this decade, people came to believe that white people experienced more discrimination and black people less. And Republicans now think that whites are more discriminated against than Black folks (though partisan trends are ~ parallel)

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CAPTivated Podcast @captivatedpod.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

In our latest episode, we sit down with @joshpasek.com, professor of Communication and Media and Political Science at the University of Michigan, to unpack two of the most important concepts in media psychology: selective exposure and motivated reasoning. 🎧 captivated.buzzsprout.com/2569769/follow

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Barb McQuade @barbmcquade.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Can’t amplify this sentiment enough.

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 20/05/2026

So sad to lose Barney Frank, I particularly remember him talking about his role in Freedom Summer, & the risks that he and others entailed to help bring America closer to a true democracy. The story reminds us both why we don’t want to go back and that pursuing what is right is not always welcomed.

pbs.org

Freedom Summer @ 50: The Politician | American Experience | PBS

"I felt morally empowered, but it was very scary," Congressman Frank Barney from Massachusetts.

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 08/05/2026

There are a few places that an Astroturf campaign like this seem less likely to work than here in Ann Arbor. Many people in the know on the issue were tepid on public power prior to this campaign; but I can now name a number of new public power supporters, convinced by DTE making this effort.

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 30/04/2026

Although it’s fair to say that there are a lot of particular challenges for election surveys, the widespread perception that political polls have not changed methods since 2004 is shocking. Far more election surveys are based on the USPS CDSF database than conducted via RDD (true for > a decade)

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Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Israel's hegemonic ideology is Kahanism: pursuing a Jewish non-democratic one state where Palestinians are subjugated, expelled or dead. Some say this is an inevitable continuation of Zionism, others that it is a corruption of Zionism. I disagree with both accounts, but don't mind either. 1/

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 15/04/2026

Highly, ironic that they just closed the city survey on whether to keep the sirens. engage.a2gov.org/siren-review. Good moment for a motion to reconsider #a2council?

engage.a2gov.org

Outdoor Warning Siren System Review

A reivew of the City's warning siren system to determine if they should be decomissioned or maintained

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 13/04/2026

What you really have to admire is the juxtaposition of the incredible attention to detail of the imagery (spokesperson, white jacket, even the slightly too long sleeves despite tailoring), with the absolute disregard for the actual text.

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 31/03/2026

An incredibly shameful action — all the more so given that every major Jewish movement has long condemned the death penalty, and that Israel itself used to assert that the only justification for putting someone to death was for crimes against humanity.

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 22/03/2026

The elite attack on universities has already substantially eroded academic freedom and free speech. People should be hired based on merit. We should avoid any procedure that punishes applicants or faculty based on political views. And no ideological quotas or monitoring of faculty.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Extremely important. Having applied and been on admissions committees, it’s so clear to me that many VERY qualified people aren’t admitted for reasons that have nothing to do with their qualifications. # of spaces, advisor fit, committee makeup, and sheer dumb luck all play a role.

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Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Terrifying numbers in latest annual survey of federal workers from @ourpublicservice.bsky.social. For example, DoD workers' trust in Hegseth is in the toilet. Only 11.5% of Army employees say their dept's political leaders "maintain high levels of integrity." Similar numbers for Navy, Air Force

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Claes de Vreese @claesdevreese.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Just out: the new @vdeminstitute.bsky.social is clear: "The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history" V-dem uses a global dataset on democracy with over 32 million data points for 202 countries, from 1789 to 2025. www.v-dem.net/documents/75...

v-dem.net

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 16/03/2026

These betting markets pose a threat not only to journalists who refuse to comply with bettors' demands, but also to democracy, from journalists who alter what they report in response to bettors' promise to share a portion of the winnings.

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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Important and correct by @polphilpod.bsky.social Toby Buckle at @liberalcurrents.com Liberal Currents. The "all conservatism was always already Trumpist and fascist" line is ultimately a way to normalize Trump, and should be resisted. www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...

liberalcurrents.com

It Wasn't Fascism All Along

Conservatism was a distinct ideology but it is dead and it is not coming back.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 02/03/2026

that they have kept their relationship intensely private to the point that this is how we find out is probably the best sign they might actually make it anyway, rules are rules, here is the exact moment she fell in love

youtu.be

Lip Sync Battle - Tom Holland

YouTube video by Comedy Central Latinoamérica

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 02/03/2026

In this case, strong agree - but I’m not sure one could say the same about the Dalai Lama.

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Joel S. @joelhs.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Almost certainly true, and another opportunity to remember that Netanyahu would willingly trade away the safety of every Jew on earth to save his own political career and avoid going to prison for his crimes.

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Crip Dyke @cripdyke.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

Erin's reporting is, as always, impeccable. What many may not know, however, is that once a license is issued, the holder has a property interest in that license that is protected by the 14th Amendment. This goes back to Bell v Burson (1972). For more, keep reading... 🧵

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Drew Engelhardt @amengel.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

New w/@scottclifford.bsky.social. Lots of work uses agree-disagree scales, and a lit review shows these are 1) frequently just measured in one direction (agree = higher trait) and 2) correlated with each other. This has potentially big issues for conclusions. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

Acquiescence Bias and Criterion Validity: Problems and Potential Solutions for Agree-Disagree Scales - Political Behavior

Political Behavior - Scholars frequently measure dispositions like populism, conspiracism, racism, and sexism by asking survey respondents whether they agree or disagree with statements...

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MdDoogie3 @mddoogie3.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

This is a simply incredible decision from Judge Brasel. Stunning. In that you will be stunned. She captures perfectly the experience of trying to locate and help clients disappeared by ICE. And the stories of detainee’s experience while ICE plays hide-and-seek with their lawyers are soul crushing.

storage.courtlistener.com

Order on Motion for TRO – #95 in The Advocates for Human Rights v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (D. Minnesota, 0:26-cv-00749) – CourtListener.com

ORDER: Plaintiffs' Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order (ECF No. 17 ) is GRANTED IN PART. See Order for specifics. Signed by Judge Nancy E. Brasel on 2/12/2026. (Attachments: # 1 Exhibit A) (RMM) ...

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 13/02/2026

So many to choose from: The poll vault Figures skating Scailing Data diving Box(plot)ing

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