andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-235 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: In the wake of the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, political commentators have been expressing a bit of frustration about polarization within the court and polarization in the nomination process. One proposal that’s been floating around is to replace lifetime appointments by fixed terms, perhaps twelve or eighteen years. This would enforce a regular schedule of replacements, instead of the current system in which eighty-something judges have an incentive to hang on as long as possible so as to time their retirements to be during the administration of a politically-compatible president. A couple weeks ago at the sister blog, John Sides discussed some recent research that was relevant to the judicial term limits proposal. Political scientists Justin Crowe and Chris Karpowitz analyzed the historical record or Supreme Court terms and found that long terms of twenty years or more have been happening since the early years of the court. Yes, there is less turnover th
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 In the wake of the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, political commentators have been expressing a bit of frustration about polarization within the court and polarization in the nomination process. [sent-1, score-1.059]
2 One proposal that’s been floating around is to replace lifetime appointments by fixed terms, perhaps twelve or eighteen years. [sent-2, score-0.35]
3 This would enforce a regular schedule of replacements, instead of the current system in which eighty-something judges have an incentive to hang on as long as possible so as to time their retirements to be during the administration of a politically-compatible president. [sent-3, score-0.564]
4 A couple weeks ago at the sister blog, John Sides discussed some recent research that was relevant to the judicial term limits proposal. [sent-4, score-0.434]
5 Political scientists Justin Crowe and Chris Karpowitz analyzed the historical record or Supreme Court terms and found that long terms of twenty years or more have been happening since the early years of the court. [sent-5, score-0.485]
6 Yes, there is less turnover than there used to be, but that is a product not so much of longer terms at the high end but of fewer judges serving very short terms. [sent-6, score-0.618]
7 Sides used this and other arguments to conclude that term limits for Supreme Court judges would not have much effect. [sent-7, score-0.778]
8 I saw John’s blog and posted a disagreement , arguing that term limits could indeed have a large effect, and that, as political scientists, we shouldn’t be so fast to dismiss proposed reforms. [sent-8, score-0.641]
9 John then replied to my arguments, again bringing in more research. [sent-9, score-0.129]
10 Finally, Crowe and Karpowitz chimed in with their thoughts: “Eighteen-year term limits may be a good idea for other reasons, but getting at the source of the recent increase in average tenure is not one of them. [sent-11, score-0.489]
11 ” I still disagree, but Crowe, Karpowitz, and Sides do make a larger point that is reasonable, which is to push the discussion toward the goals of the proposed reforms rather than to treat shorter terms as an end in themselves. [sent-12, score-0.43]
12 Beyond everything else, I’d hope that term limits would remove some of the mystique of the Supreme Court, starting with the idea that they’re called “justices” rather than simply “judges,” which is what they are. [sent-13, score-0.51]
13 Roger Taney was 80 years old when he ruled on the Dred Scott case, which is, I believe, the consensus for the worst call in Supreme Court history. [sent-16, score-0.176]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('court', 0.376), ('crowe', 0.356), ('karpowitz', 0.356), ('supreme', 0.294), ('judges', 0.267), ('limits', 0.261), ('term', 0.173), ('terms', 0.159), ('sides', 0.143), ('polarization', 0.125), ('proposed', 0.088), ('john', 0.086), ('appointments', 0.081), ('justices', 0.081), ('replacements', 0.081), ('arguments', 0.077), ('mystique', 0.076), ('turnover', 0.076), ('twelve', 0.076), ('replied', 0.076), ('elena', 0.073), ('kagan', 0.073), ('ruled', 0.073), ('eighteen', 0.073), ('wake', 0.071), ('reforms', 0.069), ('enforce', 0.069), ('roger', 0.069), ('commentators', 0.067), ('political', 0.065), ('hang', 0.064), ('lifetime', 0.063), ('nomination', 0.063), ('scientists', 0.061), ('schedule', 0.061), ('serving', 0.061), ('shorter', 0.059), ('floating', 0.057), ('confirmation', 0.057), ('frustration', 0.056), ('tenure', 0.055), ('end', 0.055), ('dismiss', 0.054), ('expressing', 0.054), ('bringing', 0.053), ('years', 0.053), ('incentive', 0.052), ('justin', 0.051), ('administration', 0.051), ('consensus', 0.05)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000001 235 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-25-Term Limits for the Supreme Court?
Introduction: In the wake of the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, political commentators have been expressing a bit of frustration about polarization within the court and polarization in the nomination process. One proposal that’s been floating around is to replace lifetime appointments by fixed terms, perhaps twelve or eighteen years. This would enforce a regular schedule of replacements, instead of the current system in which eighty-something judges have an incentive to hang on as long as possible so as to time their retirements to be during the administration of a politically-compatible president. A couple weeks ago at the sister blog, John Sides discussed some recent research that was relevant to the judicial term limits proposal. Political scientists Justin Crowe and Chris Karpowitz analyzed the historical record or Supreme Court terms and found that long terms of twenty years or more have been happening since the early years of the court. Yes, there is less turnover th
2 0.24828795 1234 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-28-The Supreme Court’s Many Median Justices
Introduction: Ben Lauderdale and Tom Clark wrote a paper in which they modeled Supreme Court judges as having different relative positions on different issues. Here’s an illustration of what their model does: Cool. And I looove the graphs. I’m pretty sure that, from the effort that the authors put into creating the many displays in the article, came a much deeper understanding of their model and its political implications.
3 0.1879192 26 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-11-Update on religious affiliations of Supreme Court justices
Introduction: When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court, and there was some discussion of having 6 Roman Catholics on the court at the same time, I posted the following historical graph: It’s time for an update: It’s still gonna take awhile for the Catholics to catch up. . . . And this one might be relevant too: It looks as if Jews and men have been overrepresented, also Episcopalians (which, as I noted earlier, are not necessarily considered Protestant in terms of religious doctrine but which I counted as such for the ethnic categorization). Religion is an interesting political variable because it’s nominally about religious belief but typically seems to be more about ethnicity.
Introduction: John Kastellec, Jeff Lax, and Justin Phillips write : Do senators respond to the preferences of their states’ median voters or only to the preferences of their co-partisans? We [Kastellec et al.] study responsiveness using roll call votes on ten recent Supreme Court nominations. We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship. We find that senators respond more powerfully to their partisan base when casting such roll call votes. Indeed, when their state median voter and party median voter disagree, senators strongly favor the latter. [emphasis added] This has significant implications for the study of legislative responsiveness, the role of public opinion in shaping the personnel of the nations highest court, and the degree to which we should expect the Supreme Court to be counter-majoritarian. Our method can be applied elsewhere to estimate opinion by state and partisan group, or by many other typologies, so as to study other important qu
5 0.11388317 36 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-16-Female Mass Murderers: Babes Behind Bars
Introduction: Around the time I was finishing up my Ph.D. thesis, I was trying to come up with a good title–something more grabby than “Topics in Image Reconstruction for Emission Tomography”–and one of the other students said: How about something iike, Female Mass Murderers: Babes Behind Bars? That sounded good to me, and I was all set to use it. I had a plan: I’d first submit the one the boring title–that’s how it would be recorded in all the official paperwork–but then at the last minute I’d substitute in the new title page before submitting to the library. (This was in the days of hard copies.) Nobody would look at the time, then later on, if anyone went into the library to find my thesis, they’d have a pleasant surprise. Anyway, as I said, I was all set to do this, but a friend warned me off. He said that at some point, someone might find it, and the rumor would spread that I’m a sexist pig. So I didn’t. I was thinking about this after hearing this report based on a reading of Sup
6 0.092961505 1569 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-08-30-30-40 Nation
8 0.083873354 1286 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-28-Agreement Groups in US Senate and Dynamic Clustering
9 0.078787953 940 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-03-It depends upon what the meaning of the word “firm” is.
10 0.078637794 162 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-25-Darn that Lindsey Graham! (or, “Mr. P Predicts the Kagan vote”)
11 0.074385382 197 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-10-The last great essayist?
12 0.071942665 1496 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-14-Sides and Vavreck on the 2012 election
14 0.068464898 1629 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-18-It happened in Connecticut
15 0.068319425 823 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-26-Including interactions or not
16 0.065739751 1793 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-08-The Supreme Court meets the fallacy of the one-sided bet
17 0.06406413 1541 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-19-Statistical discrimination again
18 0.061725922 1591 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-26-Politics as an escape hatch
19 0.059666041 1108 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-09-Blogging, polemical and otherwise
20 0.059280537 2070 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-20-The institution of tenure
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.105), (1, -0.036), (2, 0.025), (3, 0.005), (4, -0.026), (5, -0.011), (6, 0.007), (7, -0.006), (8, 0.002), (9, -0.001), (10, -0.005), (11, 0.006), (12, 0.012), (13, -0.006), (14, 0.003), (15, 0.03), (16, -0.014), (17, -0.009), (18, -0.029), (19, 0.011), (20, 0.021), (21, 0.007), (22, -0.054), (23, 0.008), (24, 0.034), (25, 0.005), (26, -0.024), (27, 0.006), (28, 0.008), (29, -0.019), (30, -0.03), (31, 0.017), (32, 0.025), (33, -0.013), (34, -0.012), (35, -0.01), (36, -0.027), (37, -0.005), (38, 0.07), (39, 0.008), (40, 0.023), (41, -0.045), (42, 0.008), (43, -0.021), (44, -0.034), (45, -0.03), (46, 0.025), (47, -0.0), (48, 0.008), (49, 0.027)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.95907855 235 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-25-Term Limits for the Supreme Court?
Introduction: In the wake of the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, political commentators have been expressing a bit of frustration about polarization within the court and polarization in the nomination process. One proposal that’s been floating around is to replace lifetime appointments by fixed terms, perhaps twelve or eighteen years. This would enforce a regular schedule of replacements, instead of the current system in which eighty-something judges have an incentive to hang on as long as possible so as to time their retirements to be during the administration of a politically-compatible president. A couple weeks ago at the sister blog, John Sides discussed some recent research that was relevant to the judicial term limits proposal. Political scientists Justin Crowe and Chris Karpowitz analyzed the historical record or Supreme Court terms and found that long terms of twenty years or more have been happening since the early years of the court. Yes, there is less turnover th
2 0.68766546 26 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-11-Update on religious affiliations of Supreme Court justices
Introduction: When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court, and there was some discussion of having 6 Roman Catholics on the court at the same time, I posted the following historical graph: It’s time for an update: It’s still gonna take awhile for the Catholics to catch up. . . . And this one might be relevant too: It looks as if Jews and men have been overrepresented, also Episcopalians (which, as I noted earlier, are not necessarily considered Protestant in terms of religious doctrine but which I counted as such for the ethnic categorization). Religion is an interesting political variable because it’s nominally about religious belief but typically seems to be more about ethnicity.
3 0.68741983 585 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-22-“How has your thinking changed over the past three years?”
Introduction: Harold Pollack writes: Over the past three years, we have experienced an amazing number of political, economic, and legislative trials. I suppose it’s human nature to respond to such events by doubling down on our own prior strongly-held beliefs. Health care reform/TARP/stimulus, whatever–that proves that I am even more right than I thought I was! That’s really too bad. We’ve been through some hard trials recently, in multiple senses. We’ve been tested by difficult times. We’ve also had the opportunity to see many of our beliefs tested through real-world experiments that should challenge our ideological, strategic, and policy views. Anyone active and attentive should be thinking differently about _something_ important after having witnessed so much history being made so quickly on so many different fronts. Have your own views changed on any basic issues of domestic policy? I’m not so much interested in your assessment of particular politicians or specific political tactics. Ra
Introduction: Steven Hayward at the American Enterprise Institute wrote an article , sure to attract the attention of people such as myself, entitled, “The irrelevance of modern political science,” in which he discusses some silly-sounding papers presented at the recent American Political Science Association and then moves to a larger critique of quantitative political science: I [Hayward] have often taken a random article from the American Political Science Review, which resembles a mathematical journal on most of its pages, and asked students if they can envision this method providing the mathematical formula that will deliver peace in the Middle East. Even the dullest students usually grasp the point without difficulty. At the sister blog, John Sides discusses and dismisses Hayward’s arguments, point on that, among other things, political science might very well be useful even if it doesn’t deliver peace in the Middle East. After all, the U.S. Army didn’t deliver peace in the Midd
5 0.66463089 113 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-28-Advocacy in the form of a “deliberative forum”
Introduction: John Sides reports on a paper by Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs about so-called deliberative forums, in particular a set of meetings called America Speaks that have been organized and conducted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, an organization formed by the former advertising executive, Secretary of Commerce, and investment banker to focus attention on the national debt. Sides, Page, and Jacobs discuss three key points: 1. Any poll or focus group is only as good as its sample, and there is no evidence that the participants in the America Speaks forums were selected in a way to be representative of the nation. Page and Jacobs write: Deliberative forums often fail to get a representative sample of Americans to participate, even when they try hard to do so. Worse, some deliberative forums make little or no serious effort to achieve representativeness. They throw open the doors to self-selected political activists with extreme opinions, or they compile a secret list
6 0.66195327 828 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-28-Thoughts on Groseclose book on media bias
10 0.6422208 1633 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-21-Kahan on Pinker on politics
11 0.64126593 805 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-16-Hey–here’s what you missed in the past 30 days!
12 0.6360265 600 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-04-“Social Psychologists Detect Liberal Bias Within”
13 0.63491595 2330 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-12-Historical Arc of Universities
14 0.63434678 1936 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-13-Economic policy does not occur in a political vacuum
15 0.63278073 1031 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-27-Richard Stallman and John McCarthy
16 0.63245136 15 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-03-Public Opinion on Health Care Reform
17 0.62887484 1417 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-15-Some decision analysis problems are pretty easy, no?
18 0.62814444 604 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-08-More on the missing conservative psychology researchers
19 0.62770474 2060 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-13-New issue of Symposium magazine
20 0.62655818 1947 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-20-We are what we are studying
topicId topicWeight
[(5, 0.051), (9, 0.018), (15, 0.02), (16, 0.05), (24, 0.126), (45, 0.015), (53, 0.011), (84, 0.263), (86, 0.024), (99, 0.234)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.95696276 667 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-19-Free $5 gift certificate!
Introduction: I bought something online and got a gift certificate for $5 to use at BustedTees.com. The gift code is TP07zh4q5dc and it expires on 30 Apr. I don’t need a T-shirt so I’ll pass this on to you. I assume it only works once. So the first person who follows up on this gets the discount. Enjoy!
2 0.94681782 323 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-06-Sociotropic Voting and the Media
Introduction: Stephen Ansolabehere, Marc Meredith, and Erik Snowberg write : The literature on economic voting notes that voters’ subjective evaluations of the overall state of the economy are correlated with vote choice, whereas personal economic experiences are not. Missing from this literature is a description of how voters acquire information about the general state of the economy, and how that information is used to form perceptions. In order to begin understanding this process, we [Ansolabehere, Meredith, and Snowberg] asked a series of questions on the 2006 ANES Pilot about respondents’ perceptions of the average price of gas and the unemployment rate in their home state. We find that questions about gas prices and unemployment show differences in the sources of information about these two economic variables. Information about unemployment rates come from media sources, and are systematically biased by partisan factors. Information about gas prices, in contrast, comes only from everyday
3 0.94256586 1181 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-23-Philosophy: Pointer to Salmon
Introduction: Larry Brownstein writes: I read your article on induction and deduction and your comments on Deborah Mayo’s approach and thought you might find the following useful in this discussion. It is Wesley Salmon’s Reality and Rationality (2005). Here he argues that Bayesian inferential procedures can replace the hypothetical-deductive method aka the Hempel-Oppenheim theory of explanation. He is concerned about the subjectivity problem, so takes a frequentist approach to the use of Bayes in this context. Hardly anyone agrees that the H-D approach accounts for scientific explanation. The problem has been to find a replacement. Salmon thought he had found it. I don’t know this book—but that’s no surprise since I know just about none of the philosophy of science literature that came after Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos. That’s why I collaborated with Cosma Shalizi. He’s the one who connected me to Deborah Mayo and who put in the recent philosophy references in our articles. Anyway, I’m pa
4 0.93262351 490 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-29-Brain Structure and the Big Five
Introduction: Many years ago, a research psychologist whose judgment I greatly respect told me that the characterization of personality by the so-called Big Five traits (extraversion, etc.) was old-fashioned. So I’m always surprised to see that the Big Five keeps cropping up. I guess not everyone agrees that it’s a bad idea. For example, Hamdan Azhar wrote to me: I was wondering if you’d seen this recent paper (De Young et al. 2010) that finds significant correlations between brain volume in selected regions and personality trait measures (from the Big Five). This is quite a ground-breaking finding and it was covered extensively in the mainstream media. I think readers of your blog would be interested in your thoughts, statistically speaking, on their methodology and findings. My reply: I’d be interested in my thoughts on this too! But I don’t know enough to say anything useful. From the abstract of the paper under discussion: Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume
same-blog 5 0.91412616 235 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-25-Term Limits for the Supreme Court?
Introduction: In the wake of the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, political commentators have been expressing a bit of frustration about polarization within the court and polarization in the nomination process. One proposal that’s been floating around is to replace lifetime appointments by fixed terms, perhaps twelve or eighteen years. This would enforce a regular schedule of replacements, instead of the current system in which eighty-something judges have an incentive to hang on as long as possible so as to time their retirements to be during the administration of a politically-compatible president. A couple weeks ago at the sister blog, John Sides discussed some recent research that was relevant to the judicial term limits proposal. Political scientists Justin Crowe and Chris Karpowitz analyzed the historical record or Supreme Court terms and found that long terms of twenty years or more have been happening since the early years of the court. Yes, there is less turnover th
7 0.87149888 1776 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-25-The harm done by tests of significance
8 0.86599195 1817 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-21-More on Bayesian model selection in high-dimensional settings
9 0.86213291 1152 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-03-Web equation
10 0.8459748 184 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-04-That half-Cauchy prior
11 0.84395921 1353 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-30-Question 20 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
12 0.84261531 1352 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-29-Question 19 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
13 0.84108412 1877 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-30-Infill asymptotics and sprawl asymptotics
14 0.8372463 2004 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-01-Post-publication peer review: How it (sometimes) really works
15 0.83277124 2053 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-06-Ideas that spread fast and slow
16 0.81472993 1165 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-13-Philosophy of Bayesian statistics: my reactions to Wasserman
17 0.81046557 42 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-19-Updated solutions to Bayesian Data Analysis homeworks
18 0.80964684 98 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-19-Further thoughts on happiness and life satisfaction research
19 0.79942679 2302 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-23-A short questionnaire regarding the subjective assessment of evidence
20 0.79501247 1732 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-22-Evaluating the impacts of welfare reform?