Polarization Research Lab

new (w/ @decustecu): we infer show-level metadata for a large sample of popular politics and politics-adjacent podcasts, then merge it with survey data to characterize political information exposure for their audiences

Place also matters: churches in pro-Trump counties were more likely to engage in advocacy than those in more liberal areas. In R-leaning and swing states, advocacy levels were relatively stable: local partisan context is a stronger driver than national electoral strategy.

87.5% of references to Republicans were favorable, and 71.3% of references to Democrats were in opposition. Donald Trump comprised 52.4% of discussion.

How common is political advocacy from the pulpit? We find it is both more common and more geographically dispersed than previously understood. The American pulpit now functions as a significant channel for partisan base mobilization. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies w 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓

Researchers who study political violence say that the U.S. is in a period of more intense political rhetoric, but there have been far darker periods in the nation’s history spklr.io/6012EzdBM

In increasingly nationalized elections, how do voters use policy information to choose candidates? In a paper just accepted at @The_JOP (with @aaronrudkin), we provide experimental evidence of nationalized information-processing in the electorate, but with a few nuances 🧵1/8

From our FirstView: Partisan Expressive Responding: Lessons from Two Decades of Research by MATTHEW H. GRAHAM doi.org/10.1017/S00030…

“The number of incidents of political violence is small, a couple of dozen, maybe three dozen incidents over the four years ending in 2024. But over the same period, we’ve had more than 9,000 religious hate crimes — about 5,700 were antisemitic — and more than 25,000 racial hate crimes. I would strongly argue that it’s these other cleavages, these other acts of violence that are hurting us.” tinyurl.com/yw6u4cnw

Political violence is not worse now than at other points in US history, nor are we at the precipice of democratic collapse, says @seanjwestwood, who tracks such violence & the reaction to it. An informative & thought-provoking interview by @stavernise. nytimes.com/2026/04/28/us/…

PRL's Sean Westwood interviewed in the NYT about political violence, Americans' support for political violence, and how the fear of violence can be exploited. PRL has continuously tracked support for partisan violence for the past 4 years. nytimes.com/2026/04/28/us/…

@stavernise A counterintuitive take on whether we are in an age of exploding political violence. History says no. nytimes.com/2026/04/28/us/…

The rank order replicates with better data, but the % supporting partisan murder is much lower. Importantly, this is passive support and not willingness to actually murder.

A study conducted by the Polarization Lab run by Dartmouth College, UPenn & Stanford, found that while overall support for political violence was low, those most likely to support it were "young, male, wealthy, non-white, and more educated Americans" prlpublic.s3.amazonaws.com/reports/Januar…

Hear from PRL's Sean Westwood about his Cozzarelli Prize-winning paper: The Potential Threat of AI to Online Survey Research youtube.com/watch?v=opGrIm…

MPSA papers submitted! I will be presenting work with @hmridge on the conditional effect of ascriptive identities on tolerance for democratic transgressions on Saturday. We are very grateful to the @PRL_Tweets for including our experiments in their survey in Germany and Israel!

🚨New Working Paper!🚨 How do Americans mentally map political coalitions? We often talk as if U.S. politics is just two sorted camps. But when people think about which groups go with which, the picture is more complicated. 🧵👇

PRL's Sean Westwood won the Cozzarelli Prize for his work on LLMs in survey research!