Elsevier purchase SSRN: social scientists face questions over whether centralised repository is in their interests

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN), an online repository for uploading preprint articles and working papers, has been recently acquired by publishing giant Elsevier. Thomas Leeper looks at what this purchase, and for-profit academic services more generally, mean for the scholarly community. Many regular users may not be aware that SSRN has been run by a privately held corporation since its founding in 1994

The informational basis for mass polarization

If nothing else, democratic politics requires compromise. Mass polarization, where citizens disagree strongly and those disagreements magnify over time, presents obvious threats to democratic well-being. The overwhelming presumption is that if polarization is occurring, a substantial portion of it is attributable to the fragmentation attendant an increasingly choice-laden media environment where individuals expose themselves only to opinion-reinforcing information. Under what conditions does mass opinion polarization occur? Through two over-time laboratory experiments involving information choice behavior, this paper considers, first, the effects of slant in one’s information environment on over-time opinion dynamics and, second, the moderating role of attitude importance on those effects. The experiments reveal that, despite similar information search behavior, those with strong attitudes are dogmatic, resisting even substantial contrary evidence; those with weak attitudes, by contrast, hear opposing arguments and develop moderate opinions regardless of the prevalence of those arguments in their environment. Evaluations of information, rather than information search behavior per se, explain why individuals with strong attitudes polarize and those with weak attitudes do not. Polarization therefore seems to require more than media fragmentation and, in fact, a more important factor may be the strength of citizens’ prior attitudes on particular issues

The world is right to be concerned by Donald Trump’s unwarranted praise of Russia

Thomas Leeper reflects on the US-Russian relationship and how this relationship may change under a Trump presidency

What can social scientists learn from convenience samples? More than you might think

Following the recent publication of his latest study in The Journal of Experimental Political Science, Dr Thomas J. Leeper discusses his research into convenience samples and considers whether such analysis should really be trusted in political science

Vice Presidents are a heartbeat from the Oval Office, but matter very little.

Last night Virginia Senator Tim Kaine and Indiana Governor Mike Pence met in the only vice-presidential debate of the 2016 election. But how important are vice-presidents and vice-presidential debates? Thomas Leeper argues that neither are of much consequence during elections and as part of presidential administrations. While the position can often be a stepping stone to the presidency, he writes, it has little budget and no formal powers – an irrelevance that is baked into how the office was defined by the Constitution

Am I a methodologist? (Asking for a friend)

The early part of an academic career frequently entails processes of social identification: am I an Americanist, a comparativist, a theorist, or an international relations-ist (is that a word?); a positivist, a constructivist, or something else; a “quant” or a “qual”; a pluralist, a Perestroikan, an experimentalist; a teacher, researcher, pundit, “alt-ac”, data scientist, or what? Who am I and what am I an expert in? Outside pressures like job applications, conference attendance, funding applications, and teaching responsibilities all drive each of us to answer these questions, in essence to decide who we are as academics and how we want to be seen by our peers. Academic “branding” as part of the process of professional development can thus partially be understood as an exercise in self-categorization, or the act of choosing a role or identity (Turner et al., 1987). One identity that an academic might adopt—and one which carries a variety of connotations—is “methodologist.” In what follows, I discuss “methodologist” as an academic role and the functions thereof, the diversity of those functions, and finally the challenges of wrestling with “methodologist” as an identity and how one might come to decide if they should adopt it

For voters, the 2016 election campaign is a marathon with verylimited choices

While there are now only six weeks remaining before the 2016 presidential election, the election campaign has been underway for more than 18 months for some candidates. Thomas Leeper writes that despite this long-lead time, voters do not seem particularly interested in the election, with many put off by its negativity. He argues that the day-to-day activities of campaigns (including gaffes) often do little to shift the needle towards one candidate or another; this campaign is little different, with Hillary Clinton having been the favored candidate to win since the beginning

How does treatment self-selection affect inferences about political communication?

Ecological validity is vital to experimental research because designs that are too artificial may not speak to any real-world political phenomenon. One such concern is treatment self-selection: if individuals in the real world self-select treatments, such as political communications, how well does the sample average treatment effect estimate the effects of message exposure for those individuals who would — if given the choice — opt-in to and out of receiving treatment? This study shows that randomization masks effect heterogeneity between individuals who would select different messages if given the choice. Yet such selections are themselves complex, revealing additional challenges for realistically studying treatments prone to self-selection. The evidence of effect heterogeneity raises questions about the appropriateness of random assignment experiments for studying political communication and the results more broadly advance our understanding of citizens’ selection into and responses to communications when, as they often do, have choice over what messages to receive

Trump owes his victory to America’s unique Electoral College system

Despite winning the popular vote, Democrat Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Republican candidate Donald Trump. This was made possible by America’s unusual method of picking a president, namely through its “Electoral College” system – which as Thomas J. Leeper argues, has serious consequences for the strength of Trump’s mandate and could reignite debate over electoral reform in the United States

Crowdsourced data preprocessing with R and Amazon Mechanical Turk

This article introduces the use of the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) crowdsourcing platform as a resource for R users to leverage crowdsourced human intelligence for preprocessing “messy” data into a form easily analyzed within R. The article first describes MTurk and the MTurkR package, then outlines how to use MTurkR to gather and manage crowdsourced data with MTurk using some of the package’s core functionality. Potential applications of MTurkR include construction of manually coded training sets, human transcription and translation, manual data scraping from scanned documents, content analysis, image classification, and the completion of online survey questionnaires, among others. As an example of massive data preprocessing, the article describes an image rating task involving 225 crowdsourced workers and more than 5500 images using just three MTurkR function calls