Some behavioral evidence: Using monthly TAPS panel data (2012–2017) from WUSTL, more presidential negative partisanship in month t leads to lower co-partisan approval of the out-party in month t+1. Out-partisans’ views don't change—so this is mobilization, not persuasion.

Case, Obama 2009–10: After Democrats lose their 60th Senate seat, Obama’s GOP references nearly triple and become much more negative—exactly as the argument predicts.

Where? Less so in major national addresses like the State of the Union. Out-party references are prevalent in rallies and campaign-style remarks—consistent with an electoral (not legislative) goal.

Sentiment? References are more negative in competitive periods and during divided government.

Frequency? Out-party references rise with (a) "insecure majorities" i.e., 1947–1956 and 1981–2024 (Lee 2016), (b) during divided government, and (c) as elections approach.

The story starts in February 2024: a conservative-leaning border package looked viable. Then Republicans backed away. McConnell called it “weak,” and one House Republican said he refused to help Democrats in an election year.

edition.cnn.com/2024/01/03/p...

4️⃣ Making slide images: Sometimes you want a custom graphic. AI image generators can produce playful illustrations—think “I’m Just a Bill” for bureaucracy—that make slides memorable and keep lecture-writing fun.

2️⃣ Synthesizing literature: Early LLMs hallucinated citations. With “deep research,” they search for 10–20 minutes and produce a report summarizing real sources. I use these reports to orient myself, spot gaps, and decide what to read next.

Dems in…array on GOP’s CR? This copy-paste messaging strategy aligns with my research with Gechun Lin (WUSTL): minority parties are consistently better at staying on message than the majority.

Trump 2.0. Making Neustadt (1960) great again.

With class starting Monday, I was running out of time to update the vignettes from my 2023 Intro slides on collective action problems in Congress. Turns out, procrastination pays off!

We develop a novel measure of intra-party message discipline in the Congressional Record (1973-2016) using topic models and contextual embeddings. Our approach generates a score for how much rank-and-file members "sound like" their leaders within each issue, every day, for over 40 years.

Reviewing the literature on party discipline, we extend several prominent theories to generate competing hypotheses focused on:

- Institutional power (i.e., majority and White House control)
- Party coalitions
- Electoral marginality

🚨 New year, new working paper 🚨

"In Control but Incoherent: Institutional Power, Electoral Politics, and Message Discipline in Congress" with Gechun Lin (WUSTL). Available here: benjaminnoble.org/files/papers...

Read on for the 🧵 version…

Thanks to UCSD's Graduate and Professional Student Association for inviting me to participate in their career night panel on "making the most of your time in grad school" last week! My advice: make time to build relationships—inside and outside academia. It can't be all research all the time.

I really liked this plot @mirya.bsky.social posted on her latest newsletter showing time from project start to journal acceptance (and of course, her advice is awesome and you should subscribe).

miryaholman.substack.com/p/timing-is-...

Definitely bad for accountability, but probably helpful to Republicans. My research with @stevenwwebster.bsky.social and @ajreeves.bsky.social finds white Americans decrease approval of Dem. presidents more than Rep. presidents when they are worried about crime.

academic.oup.com/poq/article/...

I'd never heard this story before (from Kernell et al., The Logic of American Politics textbook). Apparently, divided government was so unusual in the 1940s that Sen. Fulbright called for Truman's resignation and a bipartisan cabinet to run the country instead! Truman's response is also good.

Hi polisky. It's Early View week for my new AJPS article "Presidential Cues and the Nationalization of Congressional Rhetoric, 1973-2016" (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...)!

I put together a thread-style summary of the article here if you want to read more: benjaminnoble.org/blog/preside...