Jill Laufer

@jilllaufer.bsky.social

Postdoc @ Stanford GSE Youth Politics | Policy & Politics | Civic Engagement Media & Framing | AI & Tech | Art & Space UC Davis PhD BKLYN in OAK 🖖

The big news outlets (NYT, ABC, etc.) often dismiss their critics, particularly people who use social media. But the coverage of last night's speech was actually pretty honest---and therefore scathing. People on here and other places demanding less false equivalence/both sides are getting results.

I cross-referenced my database of candidates against credible voter fraud cases. GOP politicians are implicated at 50x–38,000x the general public's rate. Yet even if every American voted with the integrity of a GOP candidate, it still wouldn't come close to justifying making voting one iota harder.

Bar chart titled "Voter fraud among Republican politicians vastly exceeds the public's. That rate is still just 1 in 850." The chart shows that 0.118% of Republican politicians (17 out of 14,442 DIME candidates from 2016–2026) have been credibly implicated in voter fraud. This rate is represented by a tall red bar that dwarfs the microscopic rates for the general electorate, making the politicians' rate 50x to 38,000x higher than the documented rates for everyone else.

We have a new version of this paper out. The headline results are the same—political science must filter results heavily for statistical significance—but we've added many extensions and rewritten much of it in response to feedback (thank you!). A quick thread on updates 👇

Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 7mo ago

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

It must be very hard to publish null results
Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.

In a case that revealed the inner workings of DOGE, a federal judge ruled that the agency did not have the authority to cancel National Endowment for the Humanities grants, which made up more than $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds.

Judge rules DOGE’s cuts to humanities grants were unconstitutional

A federal judge said more than $100 million in cuts to NEH grants were discriminatory, ruling in a case that revealed the inner workings of DOGE.

washingtonpost.com

Today is a reminder that except for a brief period running roughly from Brown v. Board to Roe v. Wade, throughout its history the Supreme Court has been a reactionary force protecting the wealth of the wealthy and the power of the powerful, almost always hostile to equality and justice.

Justice Kagan: "I dissent. The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—'one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation's history.'

The billionaire tax has made it to the California ballot for a vote November. With 1,550,000 signatures, it nearly doubled the amount of signatures necessary to get on the ballot

Legislators in Maine passed the nation’s first statewide ban on large data centers, part of a growing backlash to the energy-intensive facilities that fuel the rise of artificial intelligence.

Maine lawmakers pass nation’s first statewide ban on large data centers

The bill would block new data centers that draw more than 20 megawatts of power until the fall of 2027. It also calls to study their impact on the electrical grid.

washingtonpost.com

To give a concrete example: California paid for 70% of the UC budget and 90% of the CSU budget until the 1980s; now it’s down to roughly 10% and 40% rsp. Students pay most of the difference. One has to get paid a lot of money, as an ed economist, to not know this www.npr.org/2026/04/12/n...

Families across the U.S. are getting college acceptance letters — and tuition bills

NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks with economist Judith Scott-Clayton about the cost of college in the U.S. They discuss the difference between sticker and net price and the opaqueness of tuition costs.

npr.org

New study out in Nature Human Behaviour: 37 million US users were exposed to deceptive networks on Facebook & 3 million on Instagram during the 2020 elections—roughly 15% and 2% of active users. 🧵

“Jonathan Caravello, 38, faced up to 20 years in prison if he was convicted of the charge. The verdict is the latest blow to the Trump administration, which has thrown baseless assault charges at people who protest its mass deportation operations — but has repeatedly failed to secure convictions.”

Trump Admin Dealt Another Blow In Court After Professor Found Not Guilty

California philosophy professor Jonathan Caravello, who was arrested while protesting an immigration raid, faced up to 20 years in prison.

huffpost.com

RESULT: The right took over the Francis Howell school board, a large MO district in the St. Louis suburbs, earlier this decade; followed book bans & restrictive policies on LGBTQ students. Tonight, the slate endorsed by the teacher's slate swept, and the last remaining conservative was ousted.

I am ecstatic. All three of the Moms for Liberty backed candidates lost in my local school board election tonight. Even this deep red Waukesha County, WI community doesn't like conservative politics in our schools. 🇺🇸🏫🗳

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