James Bisbee
Biographic Data
| ID | 1047428 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Bisbee |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Bisbee |
| SIGNATURE | BISBEE J |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3334-2416 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 149 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 19 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Ex Ante Immigration Policy
Scholarly work on the politics of immigration in the U.S. has focused primarily on the influence of local demographics. Less understood are the ways in which local governments respond to demographic changes beyond the city limits. We hypothesize that local governments anticipate future influxes of immigrants from neighboring localities and adjust policies ex ante in order to constrain their movement before it can occur. We predict variation in an…
Evaluating Echo Chambers, Rabbit Holes, and Radicalization Pathways on YouTube
To what extent does the YouTube recommendation algorithm push users into echo chambers, rabbit holes, or radicalization pathways? Using a novel method to estimate the ideology of YouTube videos and an original audit design, we demonstrate that YouTube users are in mild ideological echo chambers, but this is primarily driven by user behavior. We also demonstrate that the recommendation algorithm prioritizes content that is similar to what the user…
Yellin’ at Yellen
Labeling social media posts
The increasing multimodality (e.g., images, videos, links) of social media data presents opportunities and challenges. But text-as-data methods continue to dominate as modes of classification, as multimodal social media data are costly to collect and label. Researchers who face a budget constraint may need to make informed decisions regarding whether to collect and label only the textual content of social media data or their full multimodal conte…
Economic evaluations and partisan faultfinding
This paper introduces a simple approach for assessing which survey questions are more likely to elicit political identity-influenced responses. We use daily data from Gallup to test which survey self-reports exhibit more or less susceptibility to politicization, finding the highest likelihood of politicization for societal-level questions. Conversely, we show that self-reported assessments of personal finances are less sensitive to partisan motiv…
Antiglobalization sentiment
Individuals with heightened labor market insecurity express more protectionist, xenophobic, and isolationist sentiment. We construct a novel measure of labor market insecurity that combines an individual's industry‐based exposure to import competition with an occupation‐based measure of job immobility. Immobility captures the similarity of an individual's job to others in the economy, weighted by their prevalence. The holder of a job that is diss…
The Vibes Are Off
Twitter has been a prominent forum for academics communicating online, both among themselves and with policy makers and the broader public. Elon Musk’s takeover of the company brought sweeping changes to many aspects of the platform, including public access to its data; Twitter’s approach to censorship and mis/disinformation; and tweaks to the affordances of the platform. This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk’s …
Estimating the Ideology of Political YouTube Videos
We present a method for estimating the ideology of political YouTube videos. The subfield of estimating ideology as a latent variable has often focused on traditional actors such as legislators, while more recent work has used social media data to estimate the ideology of ordinary users, political elites, and media sources. We build on this work to estimate the ideology of a political YouTube video. First, we start with a matrix of political Redd…
Synthetic Replacements for Human Survey Data? The Perils of Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) offer new research possibilities for social scientists, but their potential as “synthetic data” is still largely unknown. In this paper, we investigate how accurately the popular LLM ChatGPT can recover public opinion, prompting the LLM to adopt different “personas” and then provide feeling thermometer scores for 11 sociopolitical groups. The average scores generated by ChatGPT correspond closely to the averages in ou…
Political Geography and Firm Strategies
Among the many promises made by politicians to their constituents, job creation is universal. Do firms strategically use job creation to exert influence? We take this question to the universe of firms in the United States between 1997 and 2018, linking each subsidiary to a congressional district. We find that firms open subsidiaries in more competitive districts, suggesting that firms employ politicians' constituents as a political strategy to bu…
Geographic Boundaries and Local Economic Conditions Matter for Views of the Economy
The link between objective facts and politically relevant beliefs is an essential mechanism for democratic accountability. Yet the bulk of empirical work on this topic measures objective facts at whatever geographic units are readily available. We investigate the implications of these largely arbitrary choices for predicting individual-level opinions. We show that varying the geographic resolution—namely aggregating economic data to different geo…
Barp
Polisci Twitter
Knowledge creation is a social enterprise, especially in political science. Sharing new findings widely and quickly is essential for progress. Scholars can now use Twitter to rapidly disseminate ideas, and many do. What are the implications of this new tool? Who uses it, how do they use it, and what are the implications for exacerbating or ameliorating existing inequalities in terms of research dissemination and attention? We construct a novel da…
Flight to Safety
The relationship between anxiety and investor behavior is well known enough to warrant its own aphorism: a "flight to safety." We posit that anxiety alters the intensity of voters' preference for the status quo, inducing a political flight to safety toward establishment candidates. Leveraging the outbreak of the novel coronavirus during the Democratic primary election of 2020, we identify a causal effect of the outbreak on voting, with Biden bene…
Objective Facts and Elite Cues
American politics scholars disagree on the extent to which voters use policy information to evaluate politicians versus relying on partisan cues to evaluate policies. We demonstrate the coexistence of both of these perspectives, by studying the degree to which objective facts (measured with local COVID-19 cases) and partisan cues (measured with President Trump’s tweets about the virus) influence differences in the social distancing behaviors in D…
Decompensating domestically
The rise of populism across advanced industrial countries presents a challenge to the institutions and norms that make up the current global order and threatens to undo the global system that has enabled decades of free trade and investment. We outline in this paper a domestic political economy account of the contemporary crisis of the global order, rooted in disenchantment with the redistributive bargain between globalization's winners and loser…
The Millennium Development Goals and Education
Precise international metrics and assessments may induce governments to alter policies in pursuit of more favorable assessments according to these metrics. In this paper, we explore a secondary effect of global performance indicators (GPIs). Insofar as governments have finite resources and make trade-offs in public goods investments, a GPI that precisely targets the provision of a particular public good may cause governments to substitute away fr…
Barp
Multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) is the current gold standard for extrapolating opinion data from nationally representative surveys to smaller geographic units. However, innovations in nonparametric regularization methods can further improve the researcher's ability to extrapolate opinion data to a geographic unit of interest. I test an ensemble of regularization algorithms and find that there is room for substantial improvemen…
Testing Social Science Network Theories with Online Network Data
To answer questions about the origins and outcomes of collective action, political scientists increasingly turn to datasets with social network information culled from online sources. However, a fundamental question of external validity remains untested: are the relationships measured between a person and her online peers informative of the kind of offline, "real-world" relationships to which network theories typically speak? This article offers …
Decompensating domestically
The rise of populism across advanced industrial countries presents a challenge to the institutions and norms that make up the current global order and threatens to undo the global system that has enabled decades of free trade and investment. We outline in this paper a domestic political economy account of the contemporary crisis of the global order, rooted in disenchantment with the redistributive bargain between globalization's winners and loser…
Objective Facts and Elite Cues
American politics scholars disagree on the extent to which voters use policy information to evaluate politicians versus relying on partisan cues to evaluate policies. We demonstrate the coexistence of both of these perspectives, by studying the degree to which objective facts (measured with local COVID-19 cases) and partisan cues (measured with President Trump’s tweets about the virus) influence differences in the social distancing behaviors in D…
Synthetic Replacements for Human Survey Data? The Perils of Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) offer new research possibilities for social scientists, but their potential as “synthetic data” is still largely unknown. In this paper, we investigate how accurately the popular LLM ChatGPT can recover public opinion, prompting the LLM to adopt different “personas” and then provide feeling thermometer scores for 11 sociopolitical groups. The average scores generated by ChatGPT correspond closely to the averages in ou…
Flight to Safety
The relationship between anxiety and investor behavior is well known enough to warrant its own aphorism: a "flight to safety." We posit that anxiety alters the intensity of voters' preference for the status quo, inducing a political flight to safety toward establishment candidates. Leveraging the outbreak of the novel coronavirus during the Democratic primary election of 2020, we identify a causal effect of the outbreak on voting, with Biden bene…
Barp
Multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) is the current gold standard for extrapolating opinion data from nationally representative surveys to smaller geographic units. However, innovations in nonparametric regularization methods can further improve the researcher's ability to extrapolate opinion data to a geographic unit of interest. I test an ensemble of regularization algorithms and find that there is room for substantial improvemen…
Testing Social Science Network Theories with Online Network Data
To answer questions about the origins and outcomes of collective action, political scientists increasingly turn to datasets with social network information culled from online sources. However, a fundamental question of external validity remains untested: are the relationships measured between a person and her online peers informative of the kind of offline, "real-world" relationships to which network theories typically speak? This article offers …
Polisci Twitter
Knowledge creation is a social enterprise, especially in political science. Sharing new findings widely and quickly is essential for progress. Scholars can now use Twitter to rapidly disseminate ideas, and many do. What are the implications of this new tool? Who uses it, how do they use it, and what are the implications for exacerbating or ameliorating existing inequalities in terms of research dissemination and attention? We construct a novel da…
The Millennium Development Goals and Education
Precise international metrics and assessments may induce governments to alter policies in pursuit of more favorable assessments according to these metrics. In this paper, we explore a secondary effect of global performance indicators (GPIs). Insofar as governments have finite resources and make trade-offs in public goods investments, a GPI that precisely targets the provision of a particular public good may cause governments to substitute away fr…
Estimating the Ideology of Political YouTube Videos
We present a method for estimating the ideology of political YouTube videos. The subfield of estimating ideology as a latent variable has often focused on traditional actors such as legislators, while more recent work has used social media data to estimate the ideology of ordinary users, political elites, and media sources. We build on this work to estimate the ideology of a political YouTube video. First, we start with a matrix of political Redd…
Geographic Boundaries and Local Economic Conditions Matter for Views of the Economy
The link between objective facts and politically relevant beliefs is an essential mechanism for democratic accountability. Yet the bulk of empirical work on this topic measures objective facts at whatever geographic units are readily available. We investigate the implications of these largely arbitrary choices for predicting individual-level opinions. We show that varying the geographic resolution—namely aggregating economic data to different geo…
Antiglobalization sentiment
Individuals with heightened labor market insecurity express more protectionist, xenophobic, and isolationist sentiment. We construct a novel measure of labor market insecurity that combines an individual's industry‐based exposure to import competition with an occupation‐based measure of job immobility. Immobility captures the similarity of an individual's job to others in the economy, weighted by their prevalence. The holder of a job that is diss…
Yellin’ at Yellen
The Vibes Are Off
Twitter has been a prominent forum for academics communicating online, both among themselves and with policy makers and the broader public. Elon Musk’s takeover of the company brought sweeping changes to many aspects of the platform, including public access to its data; Twitter’s approach to censorship and mis/disinformation; and tweaks to the affordances of the platform. This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk’s …
Political Geography and Firm Strategies
Among the many promises made by politicians to their constituents, job creation is universal. Do firms strategically use job creation to exert influence? We take this question to the universe of firms in the United States between 1997 and 2018, linking each subsidiary to a congressional district. We find that firms open subsidiaries in more competitive districts, suggesting that firms employ politicians' constituents as a political strategy to bu…
Barp
Testing Social Science Network Theories with Online Network Data
To answer questions about the origins and outcomes of collective action, political scientists increasingly turn to datasets with social network information culled from online sources. However, a fundamental question of external validity remains untested: are the relationships measured between a person and her online peers informative of the kind of offline, "real-world" relationships to which network theories typically speak? This article offers …
The Millennium Development Goals and Education
Precise international metrics and assessments may induce governments to alter policies in pursuit of more favorable assessments according to these metrics. In this paper, we explore a secondary effect of global performance indicators (GPIs). Insofar as governments have finite resources and make trade-offs in public goods investments, a GPI that precisely targets the provision of a particular public good may cause governments to substitute away fr…
Barp
Multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) is the current gold standard for extrapolating opinion data from nationally representative surveys to smaller geographic units. However, innovations in nonparametric regularization methods can further improve the researcher's ability to extrapolate opinion data to a geographic unit of interest. I test an ensemble of regularization algorithms and find that there is room for substantial improvemen…
Decompensating domestically
The rise of populism across advanced industrial countries presents a challenge to the institutions and norms that make up the current global order and threatens to undo the global system that has enabled decades of free trade and investment. We outline in this paper a domestic political economy account of the contemporary crisis of the global order, rooted in disenchantment with the redistributive bargain between globalization's winners and loser…
Objective Facts and Elite Cues
American politics scholars disagree on the extent to which voters use policy information to evaluate politicians versus relying on partisan cues to evaluate policies. We demonstrate the coexistence of both of these perspectives, by studying the degree to which objective facts (measured with local COVID-19 cases) and partisan cues (measured with President Trump’s tweets about the virus) influence differences in the social distancing behaviors in D…
Polisci Twitter
Knowledge creation is a social enterprise, especially in political science. Sharing new findings widely and quickly is essential for progress. Scholars can now use Twitter to rapidly disseminate ideas, and many do. What are the implications of this new tool? Who uses it, how do they use it, and what are the implications for exacerbating or ameliorating existing inequalities in terms of research dissemination and attention? We construct a novel da…
Flight to Safety
The relationship between anxiety and investor behavior is well known enough to warrant its own aphorism: a "flight to safety." We posit that anxiety alters the intensity of voters' preference for the status quo, inducing a political flight to safety toward establishment candidates. Leveraging the outbreak of the novel coronavirus during the Democratic primary election of 2020, we identify a causal effect of the outbreak on voting, with Biden bene…
Political Geography and Firm Strategies
Among the many promises made by politicians to their constituents, job creation is universal. Do firms strategically use job creation to exert influence? We take this question to the universe of firms in the United States between 1997 and 2018, linking each subsidiary to a congressional district. We find that firms open subsidiaries in more competitive districts, suggesting that firms employ politicians' constituents as a political strategy to bu…
Geographic Boundaries and Local Economic Conditions Matter for Views of the Economy
The link between objective facts and politically relevant beliefs is an essential mechanism for democratic accountability. Yet the bulk of empirical work on this topic measures objective facts at whatever geographic units are readily available. We investigate the implications of these largely arbitrary choices for predicting individual-level opinions. We show that varying the geographic resolution—namely aggregating economic data to different geo…
Barp
Estimating the Ideology of Political YouTube Videos
We present a method for estimating the ideology of political YouTube videos. The subfield of estimating ideology as a latent variable has often focused on traditional actors such as legislators, while more recent work has used social media data to estimate the ideology of ordinary users, political elites, and media sources. We build on this work to estimate the ideology of a political YouTube video. First, we start with a matrix of political Redd…
Synthetic Replacements for Human Survey Data? The Perils of Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) offer new research possibilities for social scientists, but their potential as “synthetic data” is still largely unknown. In this paper, we investigate how accurately the popular LLM ChatGPT can recover public opinion, prompting the LLM to adopt different “personas” and then provide feeling thermometer scores for 11 sociopolitical groups. The average scores generated by ChatGPT correspond closely to the averages in ou…
Yellin’ at Yellen
Labeling social media posts
The increasing multimodality (e.g., images, videos, links) of social media data presents opportunities and challenges. But text-as-data methods continue to dominate as modes of classification, as multimodal social media data are costly to collect and label. Researchers who face a budget constraint may need to make informed decisions regarding whether to collect and label only the textual content of social media data or their full multimodal conte…
Economic evaluations and partisan faultfinding
This paper introduces a simple approach for assessing which survey questions are more likely to elicit political identity-influenced responses. We use daily data from Gallup to test which survey self-reports exhibit more or less susceptibility to politicization, finding the highest likelihood of politicization for societal-level questions. Conversely, we show that self-reported assessments of personal finances are less sensitive to partisan motiv…
Antiglobalization sentiment
Individuals with heightened labor market insecurity express more protectionist, xenophobic, and isolationist sentiment. We construct a novel measure of labor market insecurity that combines an individual's industry‐based exposure to import competition with an occupation‐based measure of job immobility. Immobility captures the similarity of an individual's job to others in the economy, weighted by their prevalence. The holder of a job that is diss…
The Vibes Are Off
Twitter has been a prominent forum for academics communicating online, both among themselves and with policy makers and the broader public. Elon Musk’s takeover of the company brought sweeping changes to many aspects of the platform, including public access to its data; Twitter’s approach to censorship and mis/disinformation; and tweaks to the affordances of the platform. This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk’s …
Ex Ante Immigration Policy
Scholarly work on the politics of immigration in the U.S. has focused primarily on the influence of local demographics. Less understood are the ways in which local governments respond to demographic changes beyond the city limits. We hypothesize that local governments anticipate future influxes of immigrants from neighboring localities and adjust policies ex ante in order to constrain their movement before it can occur. We predict variation in an…
Evaluating Echo Chambers, Rabbit Holes, and Radicalization Pathways on YouTube
To what extent does the YouTube recommendation algorithm push users into echo chambers, rabbit holes, or radicalization pathways? Using a novel method to estimate the ideology of YouTube videos and an original audit design, we demonstrate that YouTube users are in mild ideological echo chambers, but this is primarily driven by user behavior. We also demonstrate that the recommendation algorithm prioritizes content that is similar to what the user…
Political science (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Social media (5 works)