Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston.
Houston, TX
Joined August 2008
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Just posted: newly available aggregate state legislative chamber ideology and polarization estimates! Based on a decade plus of work with @Nolan_Mc. New data covers 1993-2022, and now contains 2,730 chamber-years. Let us know how you use our data! dataverse.harvard.edu/datase…
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Forecast estimates for House and Senate seats from @johnmsides in the Good Authority newsletter
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Political science forecasting models expect clear Democratic House control but are mixed on Senate outcomes:
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
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I guest lectured in two friends' course at Stanford last week, and my same material took 50% longer to cover than the prior year because they implemented a no tech in class rule, which led to a big jump in student engagement and questions.
Higher standards = More learning.
It’s the most brutal class at Harvard—and suddenly everyone wants in. No AI, no finance. It's a big dose of western civ and classics.
Great to see.
wsj.com/lifestyle/harvard-cl… via @WSJ
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Fascinated at the idea that Gelman has to be encouraged by external forces to write a "take down piece" on bad statistical inference. He does it for free, every day, for pure love of the game.
Meta had an internal PR plan to try and discredit Jon Haidt because he was a critic of social media.
Meta was going to recruit academics, like Andrew Gelman, to write take down pieces. They were trying to turn academics against one another through a "whisper strategy".
This is a very serious problem for open academic debate. If academics who share negative evidence about a platform are targeted by campaigns to smear our credibility, we are in deep, deep trouble.
This creates a very serious conflict of interest for anyone who is paid to do this.
law360.com/articles/2542517/…
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We interrupt our usual programming to inform you that I was never hired by Facebook to do a hit job on Jonathan Haidt.
statmodeling.stat.columbia.e…
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1/3 🌟 UH Political Science Job Market Spotlight: Meet Songeun Emily Lee (@SongeunEmily), a Ph.D. candidate in methodology and American politics. Her dissertation studies how race and gender shape entry into local elections, voter evaluations, and careers in Congress.
ALT Portrait of Songeun Emily Lee at left. Navy panel reads “University of Houston Political Science,” “Songeun Emily Lee,” “American Politics · Race & Gender,” “Political Methodology,” and “Job Market Spotlight.”
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1/3 🌟 UH Political Science Job Market Spotlight: Meet Shiladitya Kumar (@ShiladityaKuma1), a Ph.D. candidate in comparative politics, political economy, and methodology. His dissertation examines candidate wealth and electoral competition in India.
ALT Portrait of Shiladitya Kumar at left. Navy panel reads “University of Houston Political Science,” “Shiladitya Kumar,” “Comparative Politics · Elections,” “Political Methodology,” and “Job Market Spotlight.”
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Missouri, October 17th, 1863.
My Dearest Margaret,
Today, across the blood-soaked fields, I beheld my brother. Though we stood beneath opposing flags, Providence had bestowed upon us the same magnificent whiskers.
The war has divided our nation, our family, and our very souls.
But not our barber.
Yours in sorrow,
Ezekiel
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"Everyone knows" social media gives a distorted view of public opinion (...right?). But how?
In a new paper, we trace the process of self-selection in who posts to social media, which of their opinions they choose to post about, and how this is perceived. See ⤵️ to learn more
Social media discourse is driven by false #polarization
Analyzing 1.7 million social media posts, a series of controlled experiments, and a large global survey covering 40 countries (total N = 49,222), we find that
(1) strong ideologues post their opinions significantly more often than moderate individuals
(2) extreme attitudes are posted more often than moderate attitudes.
(3) This general pattern replicates robustly across 40 countries
(4) the opinions that users post are more hostile and toxic than the beliefs they keep to themselves.
Across studies we find extreme opinions are overrepresented on social media by at least 6% and up to 22% compared to their true prevalence in our samples.
osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/7z…
This project was led by @small_schulz and @ClaireRobertson and includes @H_Sjastad @AshuAshok @LisaFOswaldo @junghwanyang @simonsaysnothin and @andyguess
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Every college syllabus should include these graphs.
Use AI for homework, you will get it done faster and get a higher grade, and then get crushed on the exam.
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I'm thrilled to be joining @AnthropicAI to research the political economy of superintelligence. AI is progressing fast, and we have a rare opportunity to build it in ways that make free societies stronger.
I'll be conducting new research with the Rule of Law team to understand how we can design AI that bolsters democratic self-governance and enhances individual liberty. I'll be running novel agentic experiments, analyzing large-scale data, and studying what makes AI trustworthy for citizens and policymakers alike.
We’re only beginning to understand the political economy of increasingly capable AI, and there’s a much broader research agenda to develop around it. I’ll continue to run the Free Systems Lab and publish my Substack to help advance that work.
Today is my first day, and I can't wait to dive in!
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Political science journals: You should do this too! Maybe even (gasp) before sending out for review or as part of the review process!
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"Out of Step, Out of Party: Party Switching in American State Legislatures" by @bshor (@UHouston)
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
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I’ve always found people who bristle at “American exceptionalism” kind of… weird. Not because I lack self-awareness — I’ve spent my career cataloging every way this country fails to live up to its own rules. But that’s exactly why I love it so damn much. We built a system designed to be shamed by its own founding documents, and it still delivered one of the most spectacular, world-altering runs in human history. A genuine force for human flourishing.
I also found the argument against American exceptionalism to be historically illiterate. Here’s a sample of what we were first at:
• The first large-scale democratic republic in human history — not a city-state, not a monarchy with a parliament bolted on, but a bold continental experiment in self-rule, popular sovereignty, and ordered liberty.
• A written Constitution (1789) with separation of powers and checks & balances — still the oldest national constitution in force anywhere.
• The Bill of Rights (1791): the first time a nation wrote “the government cannot touch these” into supreme law and actually meant it. A dare the world copied — from later rights charters to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Public land-grant universities and mass higher education (Morrill Act), opening college to ordinary people no aristocracy would have let near the gates. (but don’t get me started about what happened after we started. Massively federally funding it.)
• Kitty Hawk, 1903 — first controlled powered flight.
• The Moon, 1969 — still the only ones who’ve been there.
• The world’s largest economy since ~1890, powering unprecedented prosperity through grit and genius.
• The assembly line, skyscraper, transistor, personal computer, ARPANET — the backbone of the modern world.
• Telephone, phonograph, GPS — connecting and powering daily life.
• Surgical anesthesia, polio vaccine — saving and transforming millions of lives.
• Jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll — brand new American art forms that conquered the globe.
• Hollywood’s dreams, blue jeans, bourbon, and a culture so open a kid like me could devour sushi, burritos, stuffed cabbage, and tabouli in the same week and rightfully think of it all as American.
That’s the part that fills me with genuine love and pride: not just the power or the wins, but the appetite for freedom, creativity, and reinvention. The audacity to say “We the People” and keep trying to live up to it.
What do you love most about this truly exceptional country? 🇺🇸
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1/ I rebuilt the classic @Voteview animation for my fall Parties & Elections course: every member of Congress since 1789, one dot per member, in motion. 237 years in two and a half minutes — and the 119th shows the widest party gap in the whole series. Links/summary in replies! ⬇️⬇️⬇️
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New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies w 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓
ALT Scatter plot of 38 countries plus China showing the proportion of LLM responses favorable to the regime in the local language vs. World Press Freedom Index score. Lower press freedom predicts more regime-favorable responses; all production models pooled.
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How partisan is voting in US local elections? Our new preprint covering everything from state legislature down to hundreds of school board and local referendums: osf.io/preprints/osf/db3mj
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AI will make the current version obsolete. It was always a mistake to elevate higher education over the trades. But there is still real value in learning how to think critically and in understanding science.
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Sharing a video based on my recent @SociologicalSci article: youtu.be/5OAXBmBmQEY?si=bY5R… via @YouTube. The prominent finding that U.S. policy ignores average citizens and lower income groups results because of Simpson’s paradox. More here: medium.com/p/b60d0440e756.