Bradley Wood-MacLean
@bradwoodmaclean.bsky.social
PhD student in Political Science at UofT | PEARL Research Fellow | UBC MA 2025 | Interested in: Political Behaviour, Canadian Politics, Place Politics, Communication, Quantitative Methods. 🇨🇦🎷
Pinned
Proud to have presented our coauthored paper @cpsa-acsp.bsky.social on immigration rhetoric in party manifestos. Honoured to work with Salar Asadolahi, @mjdonnelly.bsky.social , @mattpolacko.bsky.social & Marc-Antoine Rancourt. This was truly a team effort! Thanks to everyone who came.
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
You can tell that LotR was written by an academic because Gandalf disappears for like 20 years doing research to answer a single question.
December 26, 2025 at 12:40 AM
You can tell that LotR was written by an academic because Gandalf disappears for like 20 years doing research to answer a single question.
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
This is a really great piece worth reading as an economist. Very clarifying on different perspective of goals for humanistic disciplines.
Also love the title, which i read as a reference to Breiman’s “Two Cultures” piece in 2001 about the fracture between stats and cs regarding Machine learning
Also love the title, which i read as a reference to Breiman’s “Two Cultures” piece in 2001 about the fracture between stats and cs regarding Machine learning
This essay from @bschmidt.bsky.social on how history rejected computational methods, & so "quantitative history" ended up in the social sciences, & "digital humanities" in literature, with no historians doing computational work, is fascinating, & worth a read: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...
![The first is a working paper by three economists—Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu—from 2017. While the authors are economists, the actual contribution—summed up in a title that few historians would think debatable, “Ideas Have Consequences”—is about legal or intellectual history. It presents a powerful and discrete account of the transmission of ideas across social networks through textual analysis. The substance argues that privately funded Manne seminars in law and economics—which were attended by a substantial proportion of the federal judiciary—affected the language, decisions, and sentencing of federal justices who attended them and thus, by implication, allowed large-value conservative donors to capture the federal judiciary. The effect seems robust to a variety of covariates [...]
Reading this paper was exciting, but looking through the tools and tricks and sources also made me feel like someone in a science fiction movie encountering an artifact sent back from a few decades in the future. The extraordinary quality of data that economists can obtain is almost unimaginable to humanists. It is not just a million or so circuit court votes and 300,000 opinions but also the institutional capacity to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get the exact years of attendance for every judge who went to the Manne program and the disciplinary capacity to casually use relatively new methods like word embeddings without spending pages slowly, gently analogizing them to some “simpler” concept. Humanists wandering through algorithms seem to have to justify using an algorithm by first identifying which Borges short story—whether about the Map of the Empire, the analytical language of John Wilkins, or Pierre Menard and the Quijote—it most closely resembles.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:643p6z4ydk2xnwv77maa6eec/bafkreidctt57eseamimgzctkjtu2ly2vmsugcjwcrargerohe5bljg7jie@jpeg)
December 24, 2025 at 6:53 PM
This is a really great piece worth reading as an economist. Very clarifying on different perspective of goals for humanistic disciplines.
Also love the title, which i read as a reference to Breiman’s “Two Cultures” piece in 2001 about the fracture between stats and cs regarding Machine learning
Also love the title, which i read as a reference to Breiman’s “Two Cultures” piece in 2001 about the fracture between stats and cs regarding Machine learning
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
Journal article: “the data are available on request”
The data:
The data:
December 20, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Journal article: “the data are available on request”
The data:
The data:
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
This really is a must read for anyone in academia.
December 7, 2025 at 5:12 PM
This really is a must read for anyone in academia.
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
Political communication research overwhelmingly relies on text. But parliamentary speech is multimodal! In our new @psrm.bsky.social article, Mathias Rask and I show that legislators also signal partisan conflict nonverbally— through changes in vocal pitch during floor speeches. 🧵 1/11 #polisky
December 4, 2025 at 3:19 PM
Political communication research overwhelmingly relies on text. But parliamentary speech is multimodal! In our new @psrm.bsky.social article, Mathias Rask and I show that legislators also signal partisan conflict nonverbally— through changes in vocal pitch during floor speeches. 🧵 1/11 #polisky
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
They should do MyChart Wrapped
December 3, 2025 at 11:10 PM
I took a quick trip back to UBC. MA in Political Science officially complete. Grateful for the mentorship and excited to keep pursuing questions about place, immigration, and Canadian political behaviour.
Thesis: dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0...
Thesis: dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0...
December 4, 2025 at 12:41 AM
I took a quick trip back to UBC. MA in Political Science officially complete. Grateful for the mentorship and excited to keep pursuing questions about place, immigration, and Canadian political behaviour.
Thesis: dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0...
Thesis: dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0...
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
Needed - larger samples, more realism about (the lack of) heterogeneous treatment effects:
-"less than a third of proposed hypotheses were supported... the largest predictor of positive exp. results was sample size"
-"moderation hypotheses were rarely significant"
academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
-"less than a third of proposed hypotheses were supported... the largest predictor of positive exp. results was sample size"
-"moderation hypotheses were rarely significant"
academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
An Audit of Social Science Survey Experiments
Abstract. Survey experiments have become a popular methodology for causal inference across the social sciences. We study the efficacy of survey experiment
academic.oup.com
November 30, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Needed - larger samples, more realism about (the lack of) heterogeneous treatment effects:
-"less than a third of proposed hypotheses were supported... the largest predictor of positive exp. results was sample size"
-"moderation hypotheses were rarely significant"
academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
-"less than a third of proposed hypotheses were supported... the largest predictor of positive exp. results was sample size"
-"moderation hypotheses were rarely significant"
academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
This gets at the fundamentally flawed approach of the federal government: they are trying to find a policy solution to an identity problem.
It is part of the polarized, populist identity to be opposed to an Ottawa and Liberal Canada are not them. No policy will change that, as TMX revealed.
It is part of the polarized, populist identity to be opposed to an Ottawa and Liberal Canada are not them. No policy will change that, as TMX revealed.
Danielle Smith gets booed at UCP convention after mentioning working with Canada
November 29, 2025 at 4:32 PM
This gets at the fundamentally flawed approach of the federal government: they are trying to find a policy solution to an identity problem.
It is part of the polarized, populist identity to be opposed to an Ottawa and Liberal Canada are not them. No policy will change that, as TMX revealed.
It is part of the polarized, populist identity to be opposed to an Ottawa and Liberal Canada are not them. No policy will change that, as TMX revealed.
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
Black Friday is when the media whips people into a frenzy, then does stories where they scold these horrible frenzied people.
November 29, 2025 at 3:09 AM
Black Friday is when the media whips people into a frenzy, then does stories where they scold these horrible frenzied people.
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
November 27, 2025 at 6:25 AM
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
AI presents a fundamental threat to our ability to use polls to assess public opinion. Bad actors who are able to infiltrate panels can flip close election polls for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Models will also infer and confirm hypotheses in experiments. Current quality checks fail
November 18, 2025 at 9:23 PM
AI presents a fundamental threat to our ability to use polls to assess public opinion. Bad actors who are able to infiltrate panels can flip close election polls for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Models will also infer and confirm hypotheses in experiments. Current quality checks fail
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”
A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On
We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”
www.404media.co
November 17, 2025 at 8:15 PM
We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
A detailed report on the pilot experiment is here: drive.google.com/file/d/1IEG6...
The majority of our sample comes from marginalized backgrounds, where the cost of prepping, taking, and sending GRE scores would have the most impact in terms of time and cost. Here is a Likert scale result:
The majority of our sample comes from marginalized backgrounds, where the cost of prepping, taking, and sending GRE scores would have the most impact in terms of time and cost. Here is a Likert scale result:
November 11, 2025 at 9:34 PM
A detailed report on the pilot experiment is here: drive.google.com/file/d/1IEG6...
The majority of our sample comes from marginalized backgrounds, where the cost of prepping, taking, and sending GRE scores would have the most impact in terms of time and cost. Here is a Likert scale result:
The majority of our sample comes from marginalized backgrounds, where the cost of prepping, taking, and sending GRE scores would have the most impact in terms of time and cost. Here is a Likert scale result:
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
AI usage accounted for less than 1% of online activity and “the most consistent predictors of AI use across studies were…Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy,” i.e., dark triad personality traits. Nice. www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Use and Its Psychological Correlates via Months of Web-Browsing Data | Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking
Despite widespread discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on society, little work has objectively measured how often people use this technology in the wild. The present article ...
www.liebertpub.com
October 12, 2025 at 5:43 PM
AI usage accounted for less than 1% of online activity and “the most consistent predictors of AI use across studies were…Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy,” i.e., dark triad personality traits. Nice. www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
Just *published* our paper with @westernupolisci.bsky.social PhD student, Hunter Driggers, on LLM bias from party cues in annotation tasks. We extend a previous study showing annotation bias from human coders in the presence of party cues… LLM show similar bias 🧵:
rdcu.be/eIKCj
rdcu.be/eIKCj
LLMs as annotators: the effect of party cues on labelling decisions by large language models
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - LLMs as annotators: the effect of party cues on labelling decisions by large language models
rdcu.be
September 29, 2025 at 9:04 PM
Just *published* our paper with @westernupolisci.bsky.social PhD student, Hunter Driggers, on LLM bias from party cues in annotation tasks. We extend a previous study showing annotation bias from human coders in the presence of party cues… LLM show similar bias 🧵:
rdcu.be/eIKCj
rdcu.be/eIKCj
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
The killing of Charlie Kirk is part of a grim pattern of political violence in America. This is what the data show econ.st/4nqZysO
September 16, 2025 at 3:01 PM
The killing of Charlie Kirk is part of a grim pattern of political violence in America. This is what the data show econ.st/4nqZysO
I’m very proud to share that last week I successfully defended my Master’s thesis, “The Material Origins of Place-Based Affective Polarization in Canada.” Its now available on the UBC library: open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/c...
August 28, 2025 at 1:07 PM
I’m very proud to share that last week I successfully defended my Master’s thesis, “The Material Origins of Place-Based Affective Polarization in Canada.” Its now available on the UBC library: open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/c...
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
🚨New Publication🚨
Using the entire #Canadian Election Study (1965–2021), I examine voter turnout by class, education, & income over time & test whether the offerings of political parties impact these relationships.
Available #OpenAccess in @cjps-rcsp.bsky.social
#polisky
doi.org/10.1017/S000...
Using the entire #Canadian Election Study (1965–2021), I examine voter turnout by class, education, & income over time & test whether the offerings of political parties impact these relationships.
Available #OpenAccess in @cjps-rcsp.bsky.social
#polisky
doi.org/10.1017/S000...
August 25, 2025 at 7:14 PM
🚨New Publication🚨
Using the entire #Canadian Election Study (1965–2021), I examine voter turnout by class, education, & income over time & test whether the offerings of political parties impact these relationships.
Available #OpenAccess in @cjps-rcsp.bsky.social
#polisky
doi.org/10.1017/S000...
Using the entire #Canadian Election Study (1965–2021), I examine voter turnout by class, education, & income over time & test whether the offerings of political parties impact these relationships.
Available #OpenAccess in @cjps-rcsp.bsky.social
#polisky
doi.org/10.1017/S000...
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
📺Do TV ads sway voters in presidential primaries?
➡R Bird & M Peress develop a new method to estimate ad effects and find that both positive and negative ads boost support—but negative ads work best www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView
➡R Bird & M Peress develop a new method to estimate ad effects and find that both positive and negative ads boost support—but negative ads work best www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView
June 20, 2025 at 1:21 PM
📺Do TV ads sway voters in presidential primaries?
➡R Bird & M Peress develop a new method to estimate ad effects and find that both positive and negative ads boost support—but negative ads work best www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView
➡R Bird & M Peress develop a new method to estimate ad effects and find that both positive and negative ads boost support—but negative ads work best www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
🚨New open access article out at @cjps-rcsp.bsky.social on the (lack of) partisan media echo chamber in Canada as demonstrated with behavioural data. Check it out! 1/
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Evaluating the Partisan Media Echo Chamber Hypothesis in Canada | Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique | Cambridge Core
Evaluating the Partisan Media Echo Chamber Hypothesis in Canada
www.cambridge.org
June 17, 2025 at 2:53 PM
🚨New open access article out at @cjps-rcsp.bsky.social on the (lack of) partisan media echo chamber in Canada as demonstrated with behavioural data. Check it out! 1/
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Proud to have presented our coauthored paper @cpsa-acsp.bsky.social on immigration rhetoric in party manifestos. Honoured to work with Salar Asadolahi, @mjdonnelly.bsky.social , @mattpolacko.bsky.social & Marc-Antoine Rancourt. This was truly a team effort! Thanks to everyone who came.
June 3, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Proud to have presented our coauthored paper @cpsa-acsp.bsky.social on immigration rhetoric in party manifestos. Honoured to work with Salar Asadolahi, @mjdonnelly.bsky.social , @mattpolacko.bsky.social & Marc-Antoine Rancourt. This was truly a team effort! Thanks to everyone who came.
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
Bravo, young man! www.comicsands.com/autistic-boy...
Autistic 4th Grader Goes Viral For Powerful Rebuke To RFK Jr.: 'I'm Not Broken'
Beautifully stated, young man!
www.comicsands.com
May 5, 2025 at 5:45 PM
Bravo, young man! www.comicsands.com/autistic-boy...
Reposted by Bradley Wood-MacLean
Me trying to keep up with the DiD literature.
May 3, 2025 at 10:22 PM
Me trying to keep up with the DiD literature.