iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Unfortunately there is a significant tension between (i) the increasing partisan attachment of academia to the left and (ii) the expectation that broad audiences will listen to us

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Working on a paper on this with @anthlittle.bsky.social and @carloprato.bsky.social. Would welcome suggestions for papers that explore similar point.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

I’m sure there are (bad) people who think this, but this post is not a good depiction of actual objections to changes in hiring criteria in the past 10 years. The first time in my life I heard explicit identity preferences in hiring was for anyone but a white man. That really happened and it’s bad.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Responsible parties theory posited responsibility to a system, which is why it was always a waste of time. If the system doesn’t provide incentives for the required elite behavior, then it’s not a theory, it’s a wish list. It’s like theorizing that everyone should have a pony.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

I’m sorry this is not true. It actually is unfair in a transparent sense to say “we will not hire a white man for this position” and that is a real thing that people said and say. DEI is not just one policy but not all of them are good and I don’t think saying that is racist or anti-integration.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

I did not expect McNollgast to be the progressive position and Kagan (2001) to be the conservative one

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

I see erudite, thoughtful posts like this and I think there’s just no chance I will ever understand causal inference. An identification problem *is* a measurement problem and vice versa. Survey experiments are both inferring and measuring causal effects, of the prime on the survey response.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

I don’t see how you can exclude survey experiments from the credibility club in a principled way. They are very clear about the assumptions you must accept to believe that the prime has a causal effect on the outcome, which I thought was the meaning of credibility.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

This is an interesting paper. I continue to sense that we as a field have concluded, either you have an identification strategy as defined here, or you don’t have a valid causal claim. And that is really not true.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Notably, he wasn’t ashamed of his actions — which he didn’t forget all these years since taking them — but of being caught.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

The filibuster is bad when it constrains the good guys but good when it constrains the bad guys

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

What is the point of democracy in this world?

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

This sentiment is more common in my field than I expected when I entered it. In this line of thinking, what is the role of a demos in a democratic system?

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Grumbach is external validity pilled, it's happening

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

I'm sympathetic to Dave's points, but also wonder what did we collectively expect? The political actors doing this stuff do not see academia as a non-ideological truth machine, and I'm not sure we make a convincing case that they should. It's easy to find colleagues who explicitly reject that model.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Students are entering a world where Gen AI will be widely available. We must teach them to use it as a complement for the skills we teach, not resist it as a substitute. A corollary is, we must teach skills that AI cannot reliably replicate reasonably well. Being honest, we often don't.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

This is true. But it’s also true that SS/HUM defines literatures, fac lines, and whole fields in ways that appeal to progressives and reinforce their worldview. It’s not healthy for academia, intellectually or politically.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Bednar is providing great content and clear voice on administrative problems under Trump. This is essential reading.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

I wish this were true. I don't think it is.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

It’s unfortunate that Defund was such a profoundly bad idea, that it now takes up all oxygen in conversation about parties and law enforcement. It’s also not a serious argument whether the D party is full top to bottom of electeds and allies that favor less robust law enforcement and prosecution.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

One thing I always wondered about work on extremism penalties is, how to better account for strategic choice of platforms by candidates. If candidates chose to maximize e(vote share), then any randomly assigned deviation should make them do a little worse, but locally, its effect should be small.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

People will literally say "I don't do formal theory, that's just making stuff up" and then use polity scores

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

This is giving strong doomsday clock vibes. Building a scientifically credible measurement scale for socially important events takes a very special kind of disposition, and I do not think this is it.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

I do not see how this is *not* about policy disagreement. The reason to upend constitutional order is to change what the government does, I.e. policy.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

GOP presidents take different (legal) actions to control the executive branch, not because they have stronger will, but because they face a more acute problem of control. The agency loss for a GOP president is larger than for Dem presidents, and the difference is growing.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

This is as good a time as any to post a paper I've been working on with @LindseyGailmard: The Persistence and Fragility of Bureaucratic Capacity. We ask: what makes bureaucratic capacity persist, and what makes *threats* to bureaucratic capacity hard to reverse?

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

Why are critics of social media companies so interested in the personal status of their CEOs? Who cares if Mark Zuckerberg is a pathetic nerd, you don’t have a personal relationship with him.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Not a FB user, but I am glad they are getting rid of fact checking. It seems pointless at best -- the shared commitments that support a healthy polity are not really about neutral referees -- and often does seem to favor Democrats in specific cases. The study below is not convincing to me.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

This is all true, but there are deeper problems than not *pulling* punches. Much of academia has a strong ideological slant, which makes it hard to think of a full range of critiques of a given piece of research in the first place. We think of the ones that educated liberals are inclined to notice.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

My dispatch from way down in the termite mound: Chatbots in academia seem something like having a research assistant that is extremely diligent, cheap to the user, and about as capable for many tasks as a college junior (+/- ). I guess I don't know if that's good or bad...

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

I won’t opine on what constitutes real economics, but one good reason to impugn the rationality of individuals in politics is to justify ignoring their inconvenient demands.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Occasional reminder that formal modeling is free

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

I’m afraid that part of the problem is we make the attacks very easy. My university published a sample DEI rubric which downgraded applicants who aspired to treat all students equally. This isn’t a “liberal value” I recognize and it creates an exposed right flank.

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Reposted by Sean Gailmard

Pavithra Suryanarayan @pavisuri.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

I made an HPE starter pack, please join in if you are here for HPE and Broadstreet!

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

I simply do not think it's an assault on democracy for the president to appoint people who will do what he wants, even if they are bad people or bad at their jobs. An assault on democracy is when the president cannot be held accountable for maladministration, because they subvert elections.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

My hottest disciplinary take is that the comparative-American separation in US departments exists for the protection (and benefit) of the former, not the latter.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Stoked for this. Looks like an incredible book.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Math ensures two things: that stated claims actually follow from premises, and all implications of the same premises can be found. If it’s done correctly, in equilibrium you don’t need to read the math in detail to get the ideas. That doesn’t mean the math is irrelevant.

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Reposted by Sean Gailmard

Benjamin Blumenthal @bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Tried to put together a list of pol econ people (both theory and empirics) on bsky: go.bsky.app/UhWxdmh Probably missing a lot of names: let me know who I should add!

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Haha no serious discipline would use a quantitative index to measure major sociopolitical change to such a precise degree without a transparent connection to the underlying variables that generate it oh wait

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

Agree with this. Collective faculty statements are different from statements by administrators. There may be rationale for administration to implement "institutional neutrality" on itself, which I don't mind. Admins as such do not have academic freedom. But...

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 27/03/2024

Thoughtful piece here. I feel that much of empirical social science at present is aimed at gaining control in the world. I wonder what will happen when we all have to realize we cannot have it.

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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 20/12/2023

Coming in 2024! Cover art day is a good day. There are also blurbs and you can even order a copy: tinyurl.com/4e35mjef Intro chapter: www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~gailmard/em...

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