andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-159 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A couple years ago, upon the selection of Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee, I made some graphs of the popularity of governors of different-sized states: As I wrote at the time : It seems to be easier to maintain high approval in a small state. What’s going on? Some theories: in a large state, there will be more ambitious politicians on the other side, eager to knock off the incumbent governor; small states often have part-time legislatures and thus the governor is involved in less political conflict; small states (notably Alaska) tend to get more funds per capita from the federal government, and it’s easier to be popular when you can disburse more funds; large states tend to be more heterogeneous and so it’s harder to keep all the voters happy. I was curious how things have been going more recently, and Hanfei made an updated graph using data from this archive . Here’s the story: There’s lots of variation–clearly there are many other factors than state popu
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1 A couple years ago, upon the selection of Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee, I made some graphs of the popularity of governors of different-sized states: As I wrote at the time : It seems to be easier to maintain high approval in a small state. [sent-1, score-1.255]
2 I was curious how things have been going more recently, and Hanfei made an updated graph using data from this archive . [sent-4, score-0.171]
3 Here’s the story: There’s lots of variation–clearly there are many other factors than state population that predict governors’ popularity–but we continue to see more the more popular governors in smaller states. [sent-5, score-1.082]
4 The problem also calls out for some regression analysis to compare for factors other than state size. [sent-6, score-0.442]
5 We haven’t done a lot here, but we did regress governors’ approval on two variables: - log (state population), - percent change in average personal income in the state in the past year. [sent-7, score-0.575]
6 68 According to these results, governors of large states are still less popular than governors of small states, on average, even after controlling for recent economic performance. [sent-24, score-1.984]
7 (We also tried a regression including the interaction of these two predictors, but I won’t bother showing it: the coefficient of the interaction was small and the other coefficients were essentially unchanged. [sent-25, score-0.586]
8 ) It’s possible that we didn’t use the best economic variables, but, for now, I’d say that the evidence is pretty clear that it’s tougher being a governor of a large state. [sent-26, score-0.564]
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Introduction: A couple years ago, upon the selection of Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee, I made some graphs of the popularity of governors of different-sized states: As I wrote at the time : It seems to be easier to maintain high approval in a small state. What’s going on? Some theories: in a large state, there will be more ambitious politicians on the other side, eager to knock off the incumbent governor; small states often have part-time legislatures and thus the governor is involved in less political conflict; small states (notably Alaska) tend to get more funds per capita from the federal government, and it’s easier to be popular when you can disburse more funds; large states tend to be more heterogeneous and so it’s harder to keep all the voters happy. I was curious how things have been going more recently, and Hanfei made an updated graph using data from this archive . Here’s the story: There’s lots of variation–clearly there are many other factors than state popu
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Introduction: A couple years ago, upon the selection of Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee, I made some graphs of the popularity of governors of different-sized states: As I wrote at the time : It seems to be easier to maintain high approval in a small state. What’s going on? Some theories: in a large state, there will be more ambitious politicians on the other side, eager to knock off the incumbent governor; small states often have part-time legislatures and thus the governor is involved in less political conflict; small states (notably Alaska) tend to get more funds per capita from the federal government, and it’s easier to be popular when you can disburse more funds; large states tend to be more heterogeneous and so it’s harder to keep all the voters happy. I was curious how things have been going more recently, and Hanfei made an updated graph using data from this archive . Here’s the story: There’s lots of variation–clearly there are many other factors than state popu
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