Josh McCrain
@joshmccrain
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Assistant Professor at @UUtah . Political scientist. Local media, policing, public opinion, and public policy.
Salt Lake City, UT
Joined July 2012
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Pinned Tweet
New in
@PNASNews
with
@ylelkes
and
@eunjikim_media
:
Measuring dynamic media bias
Examining cable news from 2010-2021, we find bias varies over time within and across:
- channels
- program times (afternoon/primetime)
- shows
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@stan_okl
I love that Vegas, one of the weirdest places on earth, is used as an example of what Americans are like
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ALERT political scientists studying elections and partisanship, I've found another omitted variable for you
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some personal news!
I have successfully defended my dissertation! PhD!!!
I'm not really sure how to process this
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Some personal news!
My wife and I will be moving to Salt Lake City this summer where I'll be joining the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah as an Assistant Professor!
I'm so lucky to be joining such a wonderful group of scholars in such a great city.
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Excited to share my new project:
Congressional Data in R
This is a comprehensive guide to congressional data, how to work with it, clean it, merge it, visualize it, and model it
A lot of hard-earned experience went into writing this.
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Great now that I have yall's attention I'd like to give my thoughts on the Netflix show The Chair (1/20)
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this
@Andrew___Baker
et al paper on staggered treatment is so good and readable for folks familiar with, but not steeped in, the econometrics literature on this
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@kyleichan
Fwiw, which I mentioned in the interview, it didn't work great! Which is encouraging. I was using this to determine a base rate of the laziest possible uses of chat gpt
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i think i've googled "how to reorder factors in R" a thousand times
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Some personal news now that things are official:
I'll be a post doc next year at Michigan State, working with
@MattGrossmann
in the
@IPPSR
!
I'm incredibly excited to work with Matt and continue doing research while getting more involved in the state politics community
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New, from
@VincentAB
and myself:
Software Citations in Political Science
We document the under citation of open source software, propose citing it in supplemental info as a partial solution, and create an R package to do it!
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@sullydish
"somebody held the door open for me today and wow, the woke left claims another victim"
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@NateSilver538
the kind of person who successfully finishes grad school has to be by definition pretty stubborn
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for folks learning programming for the first time -- I frequently have to go back to tutorials *I wrote* to look something up. that's how this works! constantly having to look stuff up
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never underestimate how valuable your basic data wrangling skills are, fellow PhD students
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Now online!
Software Citations in Political Science
@VincentAB
and I document the under citation of software in political science, suggesting it disincentivizes the creation and maintenance of public goods.
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Got my first econ journal referee request I'm officially an economist now
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hello rich liberals throwing money away on presidential races, please see this
Death of local news has made political divisions worse - Los Angeles Times, excellent piece by
@SarabethBerman
cc
@Sulliview
@susanjakes
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@dylanmatt
It's like reading a book you don't love but you get attached to the characters and then the author gets better at writing in the second and third book
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folks who teach political science grad stats:
how do you break the news to students that nothing is knowable unless through an RCT?
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important advice for new poli sci grad students:
take the past 10 years of APSR (at least), ideally in their print version. physically printed is ok too.
shred them finely, dump them in a tub, then soak in the tub for >= 1 hr to absorb the literature
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this is *really* low
Post/ABC poll on Trump’s approval among Republicans:
July 87%
now 74%
18% of Republicans say Congrese should impeach Trump and remove him from the presidency
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I'm officially turning this into an R package. If you know of any additional datasets (or have other thoughts!) please let me know
Excited to share my new project:
Congressional Data in R
This is a comprehensive guide to congressional data, how to work with it, clean it, merge it, visualize it, and model it
A lot of hard-earned experience went into writing this.
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controlling for diabetes, asthma and heart disease?? really??
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somebody at PLOSONE please draw a DAG
Maybe being obese doesn't actually raise your risk of death
"Body mass index may not increase mortality independently of other risk factors in adults, according to a new study published this week" in
@PLOSONE
.
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Guilt
Academics and PhDs juggling multiple projects: What project management system do you rely on? Notion, Excel, Kanban board, Trello, or other tools?
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folks: what's your favorite book for an intro methods sequence in the social science?
what I've currently got:
Mostly Harmless
Mixtape
Quantitative Social Science (Imai)
Regression and Other Stories
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journals that publish my stuff: good
journals that won't publish my stuff: bad
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New paper with
@MattGrossmann
and
@MartyPJordan
:
The Correlates of State Policy and the Structure of State Panel Data ()
We introduce the Correlates of State Policy Project data, describe its structure and advantages, and use it in an applied setting 1/n
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what a depressing, uniquely American sentence this is
At least 4 people have died and 8 have been wounded in shootings over coronavirus restrictions.
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Day 2 of new
#rstats
tutorials: making gorgeous city maps in R with ggplot and the osmdata package.
I also show how to:
* highlight individual streets by name
* overlay specific locations from Google Maps (like breweries!)
* use custom fonts
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I hereby claim, for purposes of securing a tenure track job, that I now have three new papers, all forthcoming in the American Political Science Review
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Some exciting news!
The
@JawsPoliSci
team has been awarded an
@APSAtweets
grant to host an in-person pre-conference ahead of the 2023
@MPSAnet
annual meeting!
Join our email list () and follow our twitter account for more info and the call for papers!
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i probably would have saved ~50 hours of instruction/office hours time last year if I used RStudio cloud instead of having each student install on their own machine
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somebody smarter than me explain how this isn't misleading given lack of denominator, especially with what we know from South Korea
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imagine studying congress, actually doing academic scholarship on it
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@aguilera1
My dude I am an assistant professor at a large public university in what world would I think this is real
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first national tv thing was super cool and i don't hate myself after watching it
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We're really excited about this package. Our aim was to make it easy to use a massive, comprehensive dataset on state politics and policy. Very little prior R knowledge is needed to get this up and running.
See Matt's thread for some examples!
New R package & web app:
@IPPSR
beta release of the Correlates of State Policy R package by
@joshmccrain
&
@calebjlucas
2,000+ state-year variables:
- quick search by keyword/text
- load & merge in panel & network data
- output citations
- make maps
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If you don't pay legislators you get already-wealthy legislators. If you don't give legislators staff and resources, you get more influence of lobbyists in the legislative process
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"Local News and National Politics" was evidently one of the most "influential" articles of 2019 in APSR and is now open access:
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this is hell; we're all in hell
LOL, DW-NOMINATE, which says AOC is one of the most moderate Democrats in the House, a nonsense measure.
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Now online!
Lobbyists into Government
w/
@BCEgerod
at
@qjps_editors
We find big effects of lobbyists becoming govt officials on lobbying firm revenue ($320k per year)
ungated:
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New
#rstats
tutorial:
purrr: Introduction and Application
* learn basic functions such as `map`, `pluck` and `nest`
* use these in real applications
* see how to create multiple models and visualizations with purrr
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Show me another job that pays me this much for this degree of flexibility
We especially need to talk about salary in academia. I make more money now as a brand new UXR compared to most full professors. This isn't right.
Academia severely underpays and overworks its PhD workforce. No wonder so many tenured faculty are leaving for industry. 7/
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in my department we have very little money for speakers, however if you fly out you can stay with me and i can probably set you up with a talk and then we can go skiing so think about that
Please ask for feedback and frequently present your work at lower stakes seminars and lab meetings. I know it probably feels awkward and difficult but please do your best.
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I finally admitted to myself that I'm not going to read that New Yorker article and closed a tab that's been open for 5 days
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Now online!
Public Support for Professional Legislatures
with
@DavidFortunato
and
@kaylynjackson
at
@SPPQJournal
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New
#rstats
tutorial! A crash course in maps and shapefiles with ggplot.
I show how to:
* load in non-standard geographies (DMAs, in this case)
* join your own data in and use to make a Chloropleth
* work with states and congressional districts
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a little peek into some of the cool data i'm working with:
where do House staff go when their boss loses an election?
they mostly leave the Hill, and very very few end up as lobbyists
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having events canceled because the air quality is so bad that they can't do it outdoors and don't want to move indoors bc of covid is very cool
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I don't know about you guys but I'm just glad we're all upset over banal cabinet picks rather than impending democratic collapse
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New paper!
Now online at
@PSRMJournal
:
A foot out the door: what drives bureaucratic exit into lobbying careers?
with Alex Bolton
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New paper with
@BCEgerod
: Lobbyists into Government
We find:
* when lobbyists become congressional staff or bureaucrats, their previous firms see a 36% ($320k) increase in yearly revenue
* larger increases for congressional staff over bureaucrats
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@SeanTrende
a low-effort behavior that we all know very well at this point is extremely beneficial and saves lives doesn't seem to be something we should be proud of avoiding
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Good to see this getting attention.
I have a paper that highlights the macro labor market for staff:
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i wish i could tell my high school AP calc teacher (i did terribly in that class) that I am now writing calculus and algebra problem sets for PhD students
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oh no people are reading political science from the early 2000s
While looking at Gay's important 2001 paper, I became skeptical of the whole research approach.
I am not a political scientist, and it is possible that I am mistaken. If I am not mistaken, it is such an obviously flawed method, that I don't understand why the paper could pass
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Since we're talking about local news...
Happy to share this newly forthcoming paper in
@PSRMJournal
with Erik Peterson:
"Local Elections Do Not Increase Local News Demand"
pre-print:
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please stop
People who drank moderate amounts of coffee, 1.5 to 3.5 cups per day, were up to 30% less likely to die during a multiple year study period than those who didn’t drink coffee, new research found.
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somebody should really write a how-to guide on MRP with both raw survey data and the post-stratification demographic data, it's really not obvious how to do this!
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People don't know this but 538 got its name because that's how many different taco bells I've been to
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