Will Schulz

So proud of this amazing collab w @crobertson500.bsky.social and so many others (see below) -- a labor of love in which we combined two dissertations and made them more than the sum of their parts! Can't wait to hear what you think!

Claire E. Robertson, PhD@crobertson500.bsky.social

Is social media truly making us more politically polarized, or does it simply over-represent our most extreme opinions? In our new preprint, @small-schulz.bsky.social and I present *punishing evidence* that social media systematically overrepresents users’ most extreme political opinions. 1/n

11 Dec 2025

Very proud of this new paper on (the difficulty of...) encouraging more equal participation in online political discourse – an evergreen problem that's only becoming more important as users self-select into new platforms ;)

Lisa Oswald@lfoswaldo.bsky.social

It's out!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.

Will Schulz reposted

Danny Daneri

@dannydaneri.bsky.social

9 Apr 2025

My article, Labor vs. Big Business, is out! it's about efforts of companies like Uber to reform gig worker laws and voter cue-taking from unions and business. TLDR; progressive voters trust union cues to substitute for policy information link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-025-10010-0

1 Apr 2025

Such a pleasure to join with @lfoswaldo.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social on this project! Preprint out now!

Lisa Oswald@lfoswaldo.bsky.social

1/ Excited to share our new preprint “A Collective Field Experiment Disentangling Participation in Online Political Discussions” – osf.io/preprints/so...

Will Schulz reposted

Political Analysis

@polanalysis.bsky.social

3 Feb 2025

Currently in FirstView: In “What Would You Say? Estimating Causal Effects of Social Context on Political Expression,” @small-schulz.bsky.social develops a method for estimating social influence over political expression. He uses an experiment to estimate respondents’ lexical ideology.

bit.lyWhat Would You Say? Estimating Causal Effects of Social Context on Political Expression | Political Analysis | Cambridge CoreWhat Would You Say? Estimating Causal Effects of Social Context on Political Expression

1/ My first sole-authored paper just out in @polanalysis.bsky.social 🎉 I develop & validate a survey method for estimating political self-censorship and preference falsification in the mass public… 🧵 bit.ly/4j2BPNY

5/ and I also derive causal estimates of self-censorship by analyzing treatment effects on a second “outspokenness” dimension generated by my Wordsticks model (details in paper)

6/ reach out if you’d like to try using the WWYS method yourself! I can set you up with the survey instrument and model code. I’m also looking for collaborators to apply in different languages/country settings!

3/ I scale the data using a model similar to Wordfish (but since it’s for ordinal data, I call it WordSTICKS): the ideological content of each phrase is defined by the latent ideal points of the people who use/avoid the phrase

4/ by manipulating the social context in the WWYS question in a between-subjects experiment, I derive causal estimates of ideological “code-switching” caused by liberal and conservative interlocutors (using close-friend speech as a reference/control)

2/ I collect data using the “What Would You Say?” (WWYS) question, which asks respondents whether they would use various politically-charged words and phrases in a given social context (like a conversation with a close friend)

Excited to share my new #JEPS paper with @xiaoxiaoshen.bsky.social introducing ReChat, a research tool for live-text interaction studies! Makes it easy to embed live chats in surveys, opening new possibilities for research on social interaction. Check it out! 🧵👇 #AcademicSky #PoliSciSky #PoliSky

Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR@cambup-polsci.cambridge.org

#OpenAccess from @jepsjournal.bsky.social - Introducing ReChat: A Lab-in-the-Cloud for Text Discussions - cup.org/4gFUahQ - @xiaoxiaoshen.bsky.social & @small-schulz.bsky.social #FirstView #JEPS

github.comGitHub - willschulz/rechat: R package for working with rechat dataR package for working with rechat data. Contribute to willschulz/rechat development by creating an account on GitHub.

… and see how to use the r package we provide to process chat transcripts and merge them to survey data github.com/willschulz/r...

Also, big thanks to @ylelkes.bsky.social @feedkoko.bsky.social and @alvinyxz.bsky.social for sharing their experiences with chat studies that helped guide our decisions from early on in this project!

Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR@cambup-polsci.cambridge.org

#OpenAccess from @jepsjournal.bsky.social - Introducing ReChat: A Lab-in-the-Cloud for Text Discussions - cup.org/4gFUahQ - @xiaoxiaoshen.bsky.social & @small-schulz.bsky.social #FirstView #JEPS

cambridge.orgIntroducing ReChat: A Lab-in-the-Cloud for Text Discussions | Journal of Experimental Political Science | Cambridge CoreIntroducing ReChat: A Lab-in-the-Cloud for Text Discussions

📚 … And read our paper (cup.org/4gFUahQ) where we: - Demo ReChat in a pair of studies on co-partisan chats - Assess how chat samples differ from typical survey samples due to self-selection - Show that strong ideologues say more in political chats (just like on social media)

You can even use our replication code to explore chat analyses... doi.org/10.7910/DVN/...

Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR@cambup-polsci.cambridge.org

#OpenAccess from @jepsjournal.bsky.social - Introducing ReChat: A Lab-in-the-Cloud for Text Discussions - cup.org/4gFUahQ - @xiaoxiaoshen.bsky.social & @small-schulz.bsky.social #FirstView #JEPS

Ever wanted to run a study with real-time, live text conversations? ReChat lets you embed a live chat right in your Qualtrics survey, without writing any code. Perfect for focus groups, deliberation, or taking your survey experiment to the next level by using social interaction as the IV or DV! 🙌