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Max Kagan

@maxkagan.bsky.social
361 followers 1.2K following 143 posts

Postdoc at Columbia Business School studying partisan sorting at work. www.maxkagan.com

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Reposted by Max Kagan
Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
www.nature.com/articles/s41... "Republicans experience higher exposure to Democrats than vice versa: the average Republican’s coworkers are 50% Democratic versus 32% Republican for the average Democrat."
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
📅Last minute reminder: nominations for the @apsa.bsky.social Dorothy Day Award for Outstanding Labor Research are due on May 15 for research presented at last years' annual meeting and can be submitted to me via email. Self-nominations encouraged; looking forward to reading!
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Omar Wasow @owasow.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
“Writing is hard.” Thrilled to share that this simple idea led to a new paper in Political Analysis! Where most text methods focus on content, I test if expression is also effortful action. I find simple measures like character counts reveal attitudes and predict voting. cup.org/4cUmoXi 1/
Text as Behavior
Text as Behavior published in Political Analysis

by Omar Wasow

Abstract

Text analysis typically focuses on content—such as sentiment or topic—but expression is also a form of effortful action. Building on this insight, I propose using simple features of open-ended tasks to study text as behavior. This approach treats expression, such as writing, as cognitively, emotionally and temporally “costly” for subjects but inexpensive for researchers. I show basic statistics like the number of characters can approximate effort and significantly improve estimation of quantities of interest, including candidate choice, the probability of turning out to vote and psychological states about which a subject may not be fully aware. Further, these methods can convert nonresponse into informative data; validate survey instruments; serve as mechanism checks; be hard for a subject to “game”; work across different languages and analogize well to real-world situations. In sum, text as behavior can help address a range of issues related to quantifying attitudes and actions.
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Seo-young Silvia Kim @sysilviakim.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Super happy to see this paper finally formatted. While this paper might seem about political fundraising, it's really about the theory of *parties*: is it a broader network (UCLA school, i.e., Bawn et al. 2012) or elite/institutions-driven (re: Aldrich)? doi.org/10.1086/735435
doi.org
Keep Winning with WinRed? Online Fundraising Platform as the Party’s Public Good | The Journal of Politics: Vol 88, No 2
What determines the relative importance of extended party networks versus party leaders in parties’ campaign strategies? We synthesize theories of party organizations by highlighting the interplay bet...
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Yiqing Xu @yiqingxu.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
1/🧵 A major update to our paper: "Scaling Reproducibility" w/ Leo Yang [Cross-posted from X] We move beyond reanalyzing a single design to (almost) full-paper replication! Paper: bit.ly/repro-ai
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Brian Schaffner @bfschaffner.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
in conjunction with this report, we are also today releasing the data for the 2025 CES common content. includes interviews with 17,000 American adults conducted in late 2025. dig in! doi.org/10.7910/DVN/...
doi.org
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Vincent Pons @vinpons.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
What explains the rise in geographic partisan segregation in the U.S.? While most studies focus on residential mobility, generational change and Democrats leaving their party explain a much larger share of that trend. See our @voxeu.org column 👇👇 and our paper: www.vincentpons.org/partisan-seg...
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Just now noticing a very interesting write-up by @ryanburge.bsky.social which makes use of our #VRscores data from the Politics at Work project with Justin Frake and @reubenhurst.bsky.social. Tremendously exciting to see how people are making use of the data to uncover new insights!
graphsaboutreligion.com
The Most Republican Jobs in America? Start with the Church.
An incredibly new databases opens up all kinds of possibilities for analysis.
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Reposted by Max Kagan
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
8. But insisting in the face of the evidence that LLMs are useless and that everyone who says otherwise is a dead-eyed cultist - well, it _absolutely_ does provide evidence of who is clinging to a cult's organizing prophecies after the eschaton was supposed to happen but didn't, and who is not.
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Alexander Kustov @akoustov.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Besides, scholars furious about reviewers uploading manuscripts to AI, but fine with Elsevier paywalling them for $50 so 12 people can read them, have a very interesting definition of "consent." Weren't we supposed to be using taxpayer money to make publicly funded research actually read and used?
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Meanwhile, Wiley journals do not allow peer reviewers to use AI to evaluate manuscripts.
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 27/08/2025
Just made a manuscript/PAP feedback GPT built from 150+ previous peer reviews - identifies problems and provides actionable feedback on the points that I raise most frequently chatgpt.com/g/g-68af4d19... Anyone can use - try it out! (Editors/authors: feel free to cut me out of the loop 😉.)
chatgpt.com
ChatGPT - Manuscript review assistant
A conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges
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Reposted by Max Kagan
Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 11/02/2026
When I pitch academics on my paper on nulls one common and understandable reaction is "but they're probably noisy and thus uninformative nulls." This is true, but it misses the key realization that WE PUBLISH THE RESULT WHEN THE NOISY TEST IS P<0.05.
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Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Also see Jon's comment, which expresses my feelings about this really well. If you look at the paper and think about what *kinds* of tasks RAs would be asked to do for this, you'll see there are much better uses of their time (for both learning and productivity objectives). bsky.app/profile/jonm...
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Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
There are solutions to the problem of null results and we know them. One of them is the widespread introduction of Registered Reports across journals. It is not that we lack solutions but that we lack the will to change things (and accept a potential decline in the IF that we all love so much)
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Reposted by Max Kagan
Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 11/02/2026
I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
It must be very hard to publish null results
Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.
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Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Check out the new paper! And please please please send us both gut reactions and harsh criticism.
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Hans Hassell @hjghassell.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
This short thread is worth a read, but this stands out to me. I've found that null results often elicit a "yes, but what about..." response. Yes, we don't find any effect of x on y, but obviously (despite previous assertions by others) the real effect of x is on z.
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
@causalinf.bsky.social nails the experience of using Claude Code and how it is so different from what has come before. People want to know "how do I use the AI" and the answer is simple: "just talk to it!"
It’s the same with Claude Code. You just have to use it, you just have to trust that in the limit — and trust me, you reach that long run limiting point within no time, seriously — it will figure you out. That’s the thing — it won’t be you figuring out Claude Code. It’ll be Claude Code figuring you out! So you just have to do it. You don’t start with starter kits. You start with directories. I mean it! You start with this:

Please look around this directory and tell me what the hell is going on in here. It looks like a hoarder’s nest! Please help me make this deck of slides for my class! I’m overwhelmed with work. Use beamer, and install it if it’s not installed. I don’t even know how to use that frankly. Do the whole thing for me. I am anxious about the class, and I am anxious about the research project, and I am anxious about you. I need help. So please make a beautiful, beautiful deck based on this chapter, on this thing we’re doing in class, and here — here’s last year’s exams, here’s last year’s homework. Here’s a couple of papers. Just please read them, and come up with a beautiful deck. Make my life easier, not harder. I am living on my budget constraint and if you can help me, I will really appreciate it.
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
On the "does ideological moderation help candidates win debate?": - candidates' ideology reflect strategic choices (endogeniety) - perceptions of candidate ideology are related to candidate quality (endogeneity) - favorable race dynamics attract higher-quality candidates (endogeneity) 🤔🤔🤔
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Florian Hollenbach @fhollenbach.org · 03/02/2026
🧵 New version of our paper (@bcegerod.bsky.social) is finally online: "How Many is Enough? Sample Size in Staggered Difference-in-Differences Designs" We show that even well-identified DiD studies are often underpowered; sample sizes needed are surprisingly large Paper: osf.io/preprints/os... 1/6
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Grant McDermott @gmcd.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Things are grim. But in more frivolous news... @jamesbrandecon.bsky.social and I have been chipping away at `dbreg`, a 📦 for running big regression models on database backends. For the right kinds of problems, the speed-ups are near magical. Website: grantmcdermott.com/dbreg/ #rstats [1/2]
grantmcdermott.com
dbreg
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Alex Coppock @aecoppock.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on repdata.com 3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_... applications open Feb 1 please repost!
Call for Proposals: Data Collection for
Replication+Novel Political Science Survey Experiments
Alexander Coppock and Mary McGrath
January 27, 2026
We invite proposals for a survey experiment replication+novel design competition. Se-
lected replication+novel design survey experiments will be conducted on large samples of
American respondents, quota sampled to match U.S. Census margins and filtered for quality
and attention by the survey sample provider Rep Data (repdata.com).
Each proposal consists of two parts: (1) a replication study of an existing, previously
published survey experiment, and (2) a novel experimental design on a topic of the authors’
choosing.
The replication studies and reanalyses of the existing studies will be combined into a
meta-paper to be co-authored by all authors of accepted proposals along with the princi-
pal investigators (Coppock and McGrath). As a condition for acceptance, authors commit
to sharing the data and producing a write-up of the findings from their novel design for
submission to a scholarly journal, and public posting of a working paper pre-publication.
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
SV needs to pick up Polanyi (more of a slog than James C. Scott, but worth it). AI will be disruptive but the idea that it will inescapably accelerate inequality only follows if you assume societal institutions are not themselves likely to be disrupted. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/why-...
wsj.com
Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying
Silicon Valley fears this is the last chance to amass generational wealth before AI makes money worthless.
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Reposted by Max Kagan
John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
“These findings provide clear evidence that data collected on MTurk simply cannot be trusted.”
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 23/12/2025
Bookmarking this for the next time I someone cites Ansolobehere et al. 2003 to claim that FEC donation records reflect ideological consumption and are thus a good measure of ideology for corporate elites www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
Hundreds of Big Post-Election Donors Have Benefited From Trump’s Return to Office
Well into his second term, the president and his allies have continued aggressively raising money. Many donors have interests before his administration, The Times found.
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Reposted by Max Kagan
Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
Measuring the Ideology of Political Parties Worldwide vrollet.github.io/files/Ideolo...
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
🎉 Tremendously excited to announce the release of VRscores—an open-source dataset for researchers and journalists interested in studying the political lean of different employers.
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Matt Grossmann @mattgrossmann.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Companies are hiring many more internal policy specialists than lobbyists; it is a much larger investment in politics and internal expertise www.andrewbenjaminhall.com/HallSun25.pdf
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Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 16/09/2025
Proposal for how to fix family wise error rates. For every uncorrected p value you must add an extra letter to the claim. “Eating chocolate maaaaaaaaay be associated with lower rates of stroke”
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
New York City is the Riyadh of America www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/n...
nytimes.com
Talks Between Adams and Trump Adviser Center on Saudi Ambassadorship
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
Excellent reference for those, like me, who can always benefit from a refresher on statistical power
osf.io
OSF
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Rachel Porter @rachelporter.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
📢 Thrilled to share our new article introducing CampaignView—a comprehensive open-source dataset of congressional candidate campaign bios and policy platforms (2018–2022). Paper + data here: campaignview.org & doi.org/10.7910/DVN/... 🧵1/4
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
Wild times for those of us who study corporate sociopolitical activism
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
Constitutional questions aside, it isn’t clear to me what the net partisan electoral effect would be? CA and NY would presumably lose representatives (and thus electors), but so would FL and TX?
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
Much of my recent research has been thinking critically about whether it is always reasonable to use public campaign finance records as a good way to understand corporate executives' political ideology. So it is pretty striking to see someone "saying the quiet part out loud!"
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Jennifer N. Victor @jenvictor.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
In the political literature this is known as donating for access. It’s very common. Campaign donations should be interpreted as strategic manifestations of political goals, not expressions of true preference.
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Zhao Li @zhaoliresearch.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
Going to #AOM2025 and working on #nonmarket strategy or know someone who is? Join our PDW on Research Frontiers in Nonmarket Strategy — now in its 8th year! 🗓️ Sat, July 26 | 11:00AM–1:30PM 📍 Bella Center, Auditorium 12 📝 Pre-register by ***July 1***: umdsurvey.umd.edu/jfe/form/SV_...
umdsurvey.umd.edu
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.
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APSA @apsa.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
Measuring and Modeling Neighborhoods Measuring and Modeling Neighborhoods By Cory McCartan, New York University, Jacob R. Brown, Boston University and Kosuke Imai, Harvard University Granular geographic data present new opportunities to understand how neighborhoods are formed, and how they…
politicalsciencenow.com
Measuring and Modeling Neighborhoods
Measuring and Modeling Neighborhoods By Cory McCartan, New York University, Jacob R. Brown, Boston University and Kosuke Imai, Harvard University Granular geographic data present new opportunities to understand how neighborhoods are formed, and how they influence politics. At the same time, the inherent subjectivity of neighborhoods creates methodological challenges in measuring and modeling them. We develop an open-source survey instrument that allows respondents to draw their neighborhoods on a map.
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Stefan Müller @stefanmueller.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
📄 @fgilardi.bsky.social created this template for writing abstracts several years ago, and I’ve tried to follow Fabrizio‘s suggestions ever since. PDF: fabriziogilardi.org/resources/pa...
Everyone agrees that this issue is really important. But we do not know much about this specific question, although it matters a great deal, for these reasons. We approach the problem from this perspective. Our research design focuses on these cases and relies on these data, which we analyze using this method. Results show what we have learned about the question. They have these broader implications.
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G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · 02/06/2025
Americans who report paying “a lot of attention” to news (everyone on this platform) are (a) in the minority of voters and (b) very, very prone to assuming the other side of the aisle is all extremists. This is counterproductive to broader party efforts at persuasion. I have sources: 🧵
gelliottmorris.com
Not all Trump voters "voted for this"
Trump’s policy agenda is very unpopular, including with many of his supporters. To win the next election, Democrats need to welcome regretful Trump voters back onto their side
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G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · 02/06/2025
Most people consume less than 1 hour of news per day (Pew). The result of this is that they are simply not or are ill/mis-informed, and do not have hard preferences on policy or parties. About 15-20% of voters can correctly identify positions as belonging to the left or right (Kinder and Kalmoe, 17)
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
Some of us have been saying this for years.
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Eunji Kim @eunjikim.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
After years of doubt, drafts, and disbelief, my first—and likely last—book is finally out. It’s about how entertainment shapes American politics. If you preorder (a.co/d/ctGUWkZ), I’d love to send a small token of thanks: forms.gle/1YrkYX2t2nPC...
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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
Wow! Three scholars at Columbia, Michigan, & Maryland just introduced a measure of the partisan leanings of employers in the U.S. The data is constructed by linking voter registrations to online worker profiles. VRscores capture the political affiliations of 21.8M workers across 2.6M employers.
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Joe Noonan @joenoonan.se · 02/04/2025
He was trying to summarize the recent DiD literature.
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Sean Westwood @seanjwestwood.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
I am looking for a post-bac (Dartmouth language for a pre-doc) researcher to join our team studying elections and democracy. If you (or someone you know) have expertise in data science or political science, please apply or share this opportunity! polarizationresearchlab.org/hiring/
polarizationresearchlab.org
Hiring
Visit the post for more.
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
1/ Excited to share our new paper on measuring workforce politics with @reubenhurst.bsky.social and Justin Frake, where we measure the partisan composition (Democrats and Republicans) for over 3.5 million companies and nearly 28 million workers.
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Alisa Liu @alisawuffles.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
We created SuperBPE🚀, a *superword* tokenizer that includes tokens spanning multiple words. When pretraining at 8B scale, SuperBPE models consistently outperform the BPE baseline on 30 downstream tasks (+8% MMLU), while also being 27% more efficient at inference time.🧵
Segmentation of the sentence "By the way, I am a fan of the Milky Way" under BPE and SuperBPE.
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
Things are definitely going great over here, why do you ask?
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