The other day, a friend of mine who is an untenured professor (not in statistics or political science) was telling me about a class where many of the students seemed to be resubmitting papers that they had already written for previous classes. (The supposition was based on internal evidence of the topics of the submitted [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Uncategorized category.
Benford’s Law suggests lots of financial fraud
This post is by Phil. I love this post by Jialan Wang. Wang “downloaded quarterly accounting data for all firms in Compustat, the most widely-used dataset in corporate finance that contains data on over 20,000 firms from SEC filings” and looked at the statistical distribution of leading digits in various pieces of financial information. As [...]
Another day, another stats postdoc
This post is from Phil Price. I work in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and I am looking for a postdoc who knows substantially more than I do about time-series modeling; in practice this probably means someone whose dissertation work involved that sort of thing. The work involves developing models [...]
“Information visualization” vs. “Statistical graphics”
By now you all must be tired of my one-sided presentations of the differences between infovis and statgraphics (for example, this article with Antony Unwin). Today is something different. Courtesy of Martin Theus, editor of the Statistical Computing and Graphics Newsletter, we have two short articles offering competing perspectives: Robert Kosara writes from an Infovis [...]
Did Race Win the Election for Obama?
John Shonder points to this article by Carl Bialik discussing this article by Steve Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart discussing the 2008 election. Ansolabehere and Stewart write: Obama won because of race . . . Obama captured ten million more votes in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004, resulting in a 4.6 percentage point swing [...]
Balancing and Partisan Tides
Andrew is skeptical about “balancing” arguments in explaining why Chambliss won the Georgia Senate runoff election so easily, favoring a low-turnout explanation. Nolan looks at data and finds, as suspected, that parties not in the White House tend to win such special elections. I’m not sure why Andrew finds it difficult to believe in balancing, [...]
Low-turnout runoff elections; skepticism about the “balancing” argument
Nolan McCarty writes: Saxby Chambliss won reelection in the Georgia Senate run-off by a somewhat surprising margin 57-43% margin over Democrat Jim Martin. . . . there seems to be an emerging pattern of the newly elected president’s party losing in run-off elections. Of course, the closest parallel was in Georgia in 1992 when republican [...]
Red/blue/rich/poor: 2008 update
In our book, we discussed how the rich-state, poor-state divide was larger among the rich than the poor–or, to put it another way, how rich people in states such as Mississippi are much more Republican than poor people in Mississippi, but rich people in Connecticut do not vote so differently from poor people in Connecticut. [...]
How did the Democrats do in the 2008 congressional elections?
John Kastellec made this graph of seats and votes in 2006 and 2008. For each year, the dot is what actually happened and the line is our estimated seats-votes curve based on modeling from the previous election year. The Democrats did well in both years, but they didn’t get as many seats as we would’ve [...]
Big city Barack
This note by Nate inspired me to check the vote swings by county population. I don’t have the urban/suburban/rural status of counties in an easily grabbable form (maybe Boris has these and can send to me) and so as something quick I plotted vote swing vs. county population. Actually, I don’t have county population right [...]
Vote for charity’s sake
Here’s the article by Aaron, Noah, and myself on a topic we’ve discussed more formally before: why it makes sense, when voting, to consider the election outcome as it affects the country as a whole rather than just its effects on yourself.
Cool basketball graph
Just in case you stumbled upon this blog by accident . . . Yair made the graphs. See here for his explanation.
Good Roads Everywhere
Sometimes you hear discussion of how the red states get more from the government than they pay in taxes while the blue states get less and pay more. This is slightly misleading because the blue states are richer and rich people pay a higher rate of income tax, but it does raise the interesting question [...]
Red State, Blue State at New America Foundation on Monday
The election is coming up so this is our last DC event . . . I’ll be speaking on Red State, Blue State this Mon, 27 Oct, at the New America Foundation. The event will be from 12.15-1.45, and there will be a discussion by David Frum. Frank Micciche of the New America Foundation will [...]
Florida or Ohio? Forecasting Presidential State Outcomes Using Reverse Random Walks
Aaron Strauss provides more evidence that, compared to forecasts based on fundamentals, early polls give almost no information about election outcomes. Strauss writes the following about allocation of campaign resources: The key to a effective strategy is determining, ex ante, which states will be pivotal on Election Day. Existing Bayesian election models are inappropriate for [...]
Red Blue at NYU
I’ll be speaking Tues 14 Oct (that’s tomorrow) 10am on Red State, Blue State at NYU, at 802 Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South. Pat Egan will discuss, and then there will be time for discussion. The talk will be open to the public.
Stuff white people like (working class edition)
Matthew Yglesias asks what my coauthors and I think of this article by George Packer on white working class voters in Ohio. (This is the same issue of the New Yorker where our book is briefly noted.) I have a few thoughts on Packer’s article. First, it’s definitely a struggle for me to relate to [...]
The opiate of the elites
Whenever people are talking about social issues and voting, it’s good to remember this graph: Religious attendance predicts Republican voting much more among the rich than the poor. See chapters 6 and 7 of the book (or, for the short version, our Vox EU article) for more on religion, income, and voting, including an international [...]
“Blue parents who name with red values”
Laura Wattenberg has a fascinating discussion of the one topic you think you’ve already heard enough about . . . Sarah Palin’s kids’ names. You really have to read the whole thing, but here’s the gist: No naming event has ever filled my [Wattenberg's] inbox with as many reader queries as the unveiling of Sarah [...]
Confusion about the changing positions of political parties in the U.S.
The states won by the Democrats and Republicans in recent elections are almost the opposite of the result of the election of 1896: In their article, “Activists and partisan realignment in the United States,” published in 2003 in the American Political Science Review, Gary Miller and Norman Schofield describe this as a complete reversal of [...]
Red State, Blue State in Philadelphia
I’ll be speaking on the book this Monday (22 Sept) at 4:30pm at the University of Pennsylvania. It’ll be at the Annenberg School for Communication, Room 109. The address is 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA. This is your chance to ask questions and also to meet some interesting people: the talk is cosponsored by the [...]
Partisan Filters on Reality
Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientists blogging at The Frontal Cortex from withing ScienceBlogs, comments on new research on partisan bias in perceiving reality: Yesterday, we looked at some new research that found that when conservatives were exposed to evidence demonstrating the falsity of a partisan belief – such as a report demonstrating that Iraq didn’t have WMD, or [...]