Alex Coppock

Social desirability bias is smaller than most people assume. In Blair, Coppock and Moor's (2020) metanalysis found clear effects only for (1) Support for auth regimes (in autocracies) and (2) vote buying. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New working paper with Matt Blyth, Marco Aviña, and @semrasevi.bsky.social ! paper: alexandercoppock.com/coppock_etal... shiny: anonymouspoliticalscientist.shinyapps.io/afcp-explorer/ Answer to the title question: effects of partisanship and policy are much bigger than demographics or experience

It's really true! Y_post - Y_pre ~ Z almost ALWAYS has worse precision than Y_post ~ Z + pre (compare teal "difference-in-difference" to gold "ols" in plot below)

Seems pretty amazing for multi-country experiments...

Our large-scale study of phone bans just came out in Science. We randomized phone-free classrooms for 16,000+ students across 10 institutions in Odisha, India. Students deposited phones in a box at the start of each class, for a full semester.

New from Hainmueller and Laitin on the causal effects of becoming a citizen on wages. Short story: the observational ests overstate the premium relative to the experimental ests. Authors conclude "observational averages should not be used as causal forecasts for policy" doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

When oh when will polling outfits stop asking "more/less likely" questions? No way does this promise make 27% of the country *much less likely* to vote R, No way does this promise make a different 11% of the country *much more likely* to vote R!

Applications are open for EuroWEPS Berlin.👇There is also some change in the EuroWEPS organising committee. @pavisuri.bsky.social is taking a step back, while @aalrababah.bsky.social & @ewirsching.bsky.social are joining starting with this edition. A big thank you to Pavi & welcome to Ala and Elisa!

Not on the committee but happy to chat!

Northwestern poli sci is hiring in quant methods! I'm not on the committee, but I AM excited to welcome new junior colleagues. We're also hiring in IR -- separate search, same amazing department (and university!)

Northwestern is hiring in quant methods (assistant level, tenure track) Please repost and share with those you think would be good candidates, thank you! polisci.northwestern.edu/about/facult... #psjobs #psjminfo #poliscijobs

Just an enormous difference in Russian support for the war when comparing direct question estimates with experiments from list experiments. Also, peep those CIs! sensitivity bias has to be HUGE (which it apparently is in this case) to be detected with Direct - List

I'm thrilled to share that my dissertation has been selected as the co-winner of the Best Dissertation Award from the APSA Women, Gender, and Politics Section. Many thanks to the award committee, and to mentors and colleagues who offered support along the way!

I really hope that Sociology reforms. My main work is reanalyzing other scholars' experiments in service of meta-analysis. It's only possible because transparency is embraced so thoroughly by our political science community. Most exps are posted; i'm getting ~80% when I email for the rest.

We have a new paper out on what the large conjoint literature tells us about public opinion on immigrant characteristics:

🚨NEW PUBLICATION🚨 in Science Advances. We meta-reanalyze 100 conjoint experiments to assess which immigrants citizens prefer around the world. Our evidence reinforces existing findings, identifies novel insights, and provides a basis for future research 1/n www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🌟 New article 👥 Eelco Harteveld, Lars Erik Berntzen, Andrej Kokkonen, Haylee Kelsall, Jonas Linde & Stefan Dahlberg 👉 The (alleged) consequences of affective polarization: A survey experiment in nine democracies 📗 European Journal of Political Research 🔗 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Thrilled this is finally out in its JOP-formatted version! Hope it's useful to anyone working on LGBT politics, (electoral) discrimination, status differentials within & across identity categories, and non-textual experiments. Main findings in quoted thread. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....

He talked about description as well, including the specific recommendation to avoid associational language, simply because it has become so ambiguous (so not "is SES associated with Y" but rather: do people of different SES differ on average in Y).>

Read this #OpenAccess article by Amanda Sahar d’Urso in American Political Science Review, "What Happens When You Can’t Check the Box? Categorization Threat and Public Opinion among Middle Eastern and North African Americans"

this is so interesting, i think this is basically a kind of ecological study

Climate change impacts are here, but public support for action remains polarized. Which climate messages move people? In a ~13,500-person megastudy, we tested 10 of the most-cited messages. Six increased pro-environmental attitudes in the U.S.—but only by 1–4 percentage points. 🧵

Once again asking people not to post about poll results without links to the surveys, and not to repost anything that cites poll results without links to the surveys. This is not (primarily) about credit, it's a data credibility check.

Friends, you've been submitting great proposals for this project and we're now coming up to capacity. We're closing proposals on April 15th; please send yours in!

Nice new entry in the persistence literature

🧵1/ Our first meta-science paper (with 350+ coauthors) is published today in Nature. It presents one of the largest-ever reproducibility projects in economics & political science. Here’s what we found 👇

From our FirstView article: What Happens When You Can’t Check the Box? Categorization Threat and Public Opinion among Middle Eastern and North African Americans by @asdurso.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

Psychology has a whole cottage industry in which people come up with some construct that is essentially "attitudes/beliefs/expectations/feelings about X", and then the central claim is that this construct is a super important determinant of future X outcomes.>

I'm hiring a postdoc! @goetheuni.bsky.social Focus: CSS, political behavior, political communication & transforming information environments. 📍 Frankfurt | ⏳ 3 years | 📅 Deadline: 14 April 2026 Full job ad here: www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794987/Zen... (search for “political behavior” to find it)

P.S. Pre-post differences are *not* valid treatment effect estimates. Why? Here's a post by @statsepi.bsky.social: statsepi.substack.com/p/one-simple..., here's a post by me: www.the100.ci/2025/01/22/r... >

Reminder to register (no fee) for the Rebecca Morton experiments conference at NYU taking place next week. Join us: nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Per protocol analysis strikes again! Folks, if you randomize but then don‘t analyze some of the people who got randomized (maybe because they didn’t adhere to instructions, maybe because they dropped out), randomization will no longer do all the heavy causal inference lifting.

me typing "claude"

*maybe* this journal mistakenly thought the author submitted a registered report (or similar). But if the position is "papers must not be pre-registered" I'd love to hear the justification.

Thank you for all the support and reposts! We've gotten a steady stream of inquiries and submissions for this competition, but also some ANXIETY that the window will close before people have a chance to submit. We're nowhere near that! We'll update on here when we've allocated 50% of the capacity.

Very excited to see this out at @bjpols.bsky.social! In this article, I show that contemporary political news coverage makes it challenging for readers to learn information that is helpful for democratic accountability, even for very politically engaged audiences. A brief summary:

Penelope Van Grinsven and Lilly Zuckerman curate Above Board Ceramics -- this year's show is now live and is fabulous. www.aboveboardceramics.com [disclosure Penny and I are married!]