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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 · 19/06/2026
I think it would be useful to think about cases outside the US. How would this theory explain Jimmy Lai? Or Turkish conglomerates (e.g., Doğan) which shuttered or sold rather than cater to the regime?
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Any relevant papers presented at 2025 APSA are welcome @cape-team.bsky.social
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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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Reposted by Max Kagan
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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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Transparency is great! But also some value in people maintaining their own independently customized stack. If everyone is copying someone else’s REVIEWER_SKILL.md there isn’t much marginal value for each new reviewer, but if you build your own there’s the potential for unique contributions.
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Reposted by Max Kagan
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 · 22/02/2026
to be fair though, there should always have been more integration of (a) campaign finance and lobbying literature and (b) studies of US and developing / less institutionalized / more clientalist contexts
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
I think this conflates the money in politics field (can money sway an individual election ➡️probably not) with the lobbying literature (can licit and/or illicit exchange buy favorabel policy outcomes ➡️not sure there's ever been much doubt there)
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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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Reposted by Max Kagan
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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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Yeah—I don’t think any of us can know. Hopefully critical thinking is a lowest common denominator that is valuable regardless of what future emerges. And curiosity feels underrated in discovering how to work in this AI world and in general. But not sure we know how to teach either of these!
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
You can start experimenting with the $20/mo tier, but once you start using it you will quickly find it’s worth it to pay $100 or $200 month so as not to get quickly rate limited. (I say this as a postdoc with a reasonable—but not crazy—research budget.)
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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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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
I also think the potential for replicating papers with Claude Code can be a huge teaching resource for those so inclined. You could imagine building a more practitioner-oriented class around having Claude Code interactively dissect replications to figure out what is good research
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
i.e., it might not be wise to have an undergrad try to "vibe code" a DiD paper, but one could imagine a senior seminar project where students collect original descriptive data at scale
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
The vast majority of undergrads were never going to be RAs, though. For your modal undergrad (i.e., someone who is vaguely interested in law school), this could actually perhaps reduce the gap?
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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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Reposted by Max Kagan
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
I mean "just talk to it" literally! I start every day with a rambling conversation to Claude about what's on my mind: random ideas that span the gamut from "figure out how to run a new robustness check" to "can't forget to pick up milk later," and it makes sense of all of it
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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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Reposted by Max Kagan
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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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Findings aside, it is weird how journalists switch back and forth between percentage points and percentages in the same article
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
This is true and an important note. But it's not just tuition. Yes they provide (generous) financial aid, but it can still be a very weird, lonely, and isolating experience to be in a school where the median student is >90 percentile family income
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
In sum: liberal arts colleges really do offer amazing teaching and opportunity. But the fact that these schools admit more students from the 10% of the income distribution than from the remaining 90% cannot be absent from the conversation. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
Explore How Income Influences Attendance at 139 Top Colleges (Published 2023)
Unlike many elite colleges, most flagship public colleges are “pretty fair in who gets in.”
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
To be clear, I loved Midd. But one of my most abiding memories was someone who wrote an editor to the school newspaper during their senior year asking the career center to stop reminding him to attend job fairs because it was distracting from his enjoyment of his education.
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
But this exists alongside immense privilege. It's no accident that these places skew so wealthy. The community college transfer and first gen students I taught at UCB often to had to balance school with working, supporting family, and finding a well-paid job to pay back loans.
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Thanks for sharing. I loved my experience at Middlebury. But after having been a TA at a very different but no less elite school (UC Berkeley), I have mixed feelings. SLACs provided me with a relaxed way to really explore new ideas, courses, etc. A true liberal arts education.
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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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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
Which model(s) and setup are you using? I don't think most out-of-the-box chatbots are going to do a great job with this sort of task (context window is too small)
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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 · 07/01/2026
Yeah. Although I think if we go down the road of portable reviews, we should just make reviews public and get rid of journals altogether. We already effectively delegate quality metrics to Google Scholar citations, we could change to formal endorsements (maybe Elo-weighted somehow)
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
I don't think submission fees alone could ever be set high enough to actually manage flow. I think it would be worth some sort of cap, e.g., everyone gets e.g., 2 attempts per year, if your paper gets an R&R you get it back, if not you lose your slot
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
FWIW, QuestionPro does everything Qualtrics does at lower prices (for now), e.g. you can directly import QSF files.
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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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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Also assumes real voters have meaningful ideological ideal points
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Max Kagan @maxkagan.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Matching on pre-treatment outcomes, not covariates? It does sort of seem like we are seeing an re-convergence between synthetic control and PSM
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
Measuring the Ideology of Political Parties Worldwide vrollet.github.io/files/Ideolo...
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