Kids in 1996: Yay, school’s closed! Let’s play in the SNOW! Kids in 2026: Yay, school’s closed! Let’s play in our HOT homes because it’s too HOT for school to stay open. (Maybe UK schools need to wrap up the school year earlier, like the US, now that summers are properly hot.)

London in a heat wave: all classrooms in the local *private schools* have *air conditioning* while *state schools* (what Americans call “public”) are having to *close* because it’s too hot.

Keep an eye out for these fantastic early-career scholars working at the intersection of politics and geography. The future is bright 💫

Cèlia Estruch@celiaestruch.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Last week, @charlottekuberka.bsky.social and I hosted our ECR Conference on the Political Dimensions of Place-Based Inequalities in Urban & Rural Life at the LSE. Thanks to all participants, @neillee.bsky.social, @msands.bsky.social, @lseinequalities.bsky.social & @lsegovernment.bsky.social 🎉

In sum, homeowners & renters are “the policy adjacent”—indirect winners & losers of affordable housing. We identify similar groups for other policies (eg, SNAP) & set an agenda for studying the spillover effects of policy on long-term support. Replication: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm... 9/9

Our findings present a trade-off. Renters want local priority, but the FHA limits such prioritization due to entrenching segregation. NYC was recently forced to lower local prioritization via court order, but Jersey City is pursuing 100% local priority by using only local funds. 8/9

But the ability of affordable housing to ⬆️ home values may threaten renters, who are unlikely to receive a unit in the project due to long wait lists. The renter backlash to new affordable housing is driven by gentrifying neighborhoods, where housing instability is greatest. 7/9

Why do homeowners & renters respond differently? New affordable housing often replaces blight, increasing nearby home values. Homeowners like this. To quote a homeowner who had written to his mayor to try to block a LIHTC development: "If they wanted to build another, more power to them." 6/9

We also find null results using a placebo of the “near-far” design. Results consistently polarize by homeownership status, not other block-level traits (e.g., race). We also conduct a bounding exercise to estimate how much of our effect may be driven by residential sorting rather than persuasion 5/9

But affordable housing may be targeted at the micro-level. So, we compare blocks near housing built from '03-'06 to blocks near housing built from '07-'10. These blocks are equally targetable for housing, but only some are treated prior to the '06 bond. Results are comparable. 4/9

Comparing blocks near new affordable housing to blocks slightly farther away, majority homeowner blocks ⬆️ support for the '06 bond by 2 to 3 p.p. In contrast, “renter blocks” ⬇️ support by 1 to 2 p.p. Results are the same if treatment is defined by proximity or # of units. 3/9

In '02 & '06, Californians voted on nearly identical $2+ billion housing bonds. We measure how affordable housing built from '03 through '06 affected support for these bonds at the block-level. Thus, we have pre- & post-treatment behavioral data on how policy implementation ➡️ policy support 2/9

Building affordable housing ➡️ support for funding housing. Nearby homeowners ⬆️ support; renters ⬇️ support. Both are “the policy adjacent”—secondhand recipients & drivers of policy feedback. Forthcoming @ajpseditor.bsky.social ( doi.org/10.1111/ajps...) w/ A. Magazinnik & @msands.bsky.social 1/9

covid is “a vascular disease masquerading as a respiratory one” www.bmj.com/content/392/...

Why covid-19 is “a vascular disease masquerading as a respiratory one”

Covid-19 is not just a respiratory infection. Cardiovascular symptoms are seen in both acute and long covid. Katharine Lang reports on what we’ve learnt since the onset of the pandemic Cardiovascular...

bmj.com

📢 Call for Hidden Papers & Data on Ingroup Favoritism in Dictator Games We look for unpublished and hard-to-access experimental studies for our meta-analysis! Inclusion criteria: no deception, adults, manipulation of group membership of dictator game recipients. All tips and data very welcome!

Early career researchers (especially in Europe / UK, but all are welcome): Apply to present your work on the urban/rural divide (very broadly defined!) @ LSE @lseinequalities.bsky.social @lsegovernment.bsky.social

Charlotte Kuberka@charlottekuberka.bsky.social · 7mo ago

📣 Call for Papers: 🗓️ 23-24 April 2026 at LSE Submit full papers: forms.office.com/e/9qVWeNTK0p Please share with colleagues & early-career researchers!

Can Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) extract features of urban neighborhoods from street-view images? New with Paige Bollen (OSU) and @joehigton.bsky.social (NYU): Sometimes, but the models better recover national assessments that local ones, even w/additional prompting (which can make things worse!)

Political Analysis@polanalysis.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Currently in FirstView: In “Nationally Representative, Locally Misaligned: The Biases of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Neighborhood Perception,” Paige Bollen, @joehigton.bsky.social, and @msands.bsky.social test which populations Generative AI is most representative of.

🚨Job News: Postdoc positions in LSE Government Department 🚨 Apply to work with the brilliant and wonderful Carl Muller-Crepon @carlmc.bsky.social on his BORDERS ERC project at LSE @lsegovernment.bsky.social jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

📢 Call for Submissions UK-based early career researchers in political science, political economy & public policy: apply to our January Early Career Workshop at LSE. 🗓️ Deadline: 28 Dec 2025 🔗 forms.gle/HXU4DnBq9HmX...

LSE - Political Economy and Political Science Early Career Workshop

We invite submissions for the LSE Political Economy and Political Science Early Career Workshop. This workshop is designed to support the development of early-career scholars’ research, including PhD,...

forms.gle

the case for slower, better/more careful research papers in poli sci gets another data point in its favor

2. Popper tells us that we should be our own best skeptics. Unfortunately our professional incentives often make us the opposite. As we conduct research, we should all be self-skeptical and self-questioning and self-doubting. We should expose our own thinking and decisions to close examination.

As I reflect on this, three thoughts: 1. This case is only symptomatic of a bigger problem; increasingly broken incentive structures in our disciplines and industry. Our job is *not* to publish for the sake of publishing. It is to produce and advance *knowledge*. This process is hard and slow.

Certainly comports w/ my personal experience

Eva Hoxha@evahoxha.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Focusing on Sweden, this study finds that PhD students begin their programs with similar psychiatric medication use as other master’s graduates, but usage rises sharply to about 40 percent higher by the fifth year before declining after graduation. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Biased as I am, this is a great paper on the limits of current generative AI models for learning about fundamentally subjective assessments (in this case, evaluating features of neighborhoods from photographs).

#OpenAccess from @polanalysis.bsky.social - Nationally Representative, Locally Misaligned: The Biases of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Neighborhood Perception - https://cup.org/3Kw6VkD - Paige Bollen, @joehigton.bsky.social & @msands.bsky.social #FirstView

New working paper! - zikai.li and I look at the problem of assessing pre-trends using one of the "new" DiD methods - fixed effects regression imputation. tl;dr - don't use the same regression you used to impute post-treatment to also impute pre-treatment. osf.io/preprints/so... (1/14)

Best consumed in it’s entirety in one sitting… like their 1998 album

Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq.@clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social · last yr.

They finally made the milk from that hotel

Excited to share this new project, coauthored w/ @brycejdietrich.bsky.social , a VR extension of our field experiment on racial avoidance on NYC sidewalks.

Centre for Institutions and Political Behaviour@durhamcipb.bsky.social · last yr.

🌐 Final CIPB talk of the year! We’re excited to host @msands.bsky.social (LSE) at Durham for her talk: “Racial Avoidance on Virtual Streets” 🗓️ Thurs 26 June | 🕚 11:00–12:30 📍 M102, SGIA, Al-Qasimi Building, Elvet Hill Rd All welcome! #CIPB #DurhamUniversity #PoliticalScience #SpeakerSeries

PSA: stay👏🏼 home👏🏼when👏🏼you’re👏🏼sick If you can’t stay home, wear a mask. Lots of sickness, including covid, going around. Chances are you have a vulnerable friend, colleague, etc and may not even know it. Do it for them, if not for everyone around who doesn’t want your germs.

RFK Jr’s ACIP pick, Martin Kulldorff, said one of the most disturbing images from the pandemic was a toddler crying about having to wear a mask. I see toddlers cry about everything all the time, and I found it far more disturbing to see refrigerator trucks full of body bags outside of the hospitals…