andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-406 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Dan Hopkins sends along this article : [Hopkins] uses regression discontinuity design to estimate the turnout and election impacts of Spanish-language assistance provided under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. Analyses of two different data sets – the Latino National Survey and California 1998 primary election returns – show that Spanish-language assistance increased turnout for citizens who speak little English. The California results also demonstrate that election procedures an influence outcomes, as support for ending bilingual education dropped markedly in heavily Spanish-speaking neighborhoods with Spanish-language assistance. The California analyses find hints of backlash among non-Hispanic white precincts, but not with the same size or certainty. Small changes in election procedures can influence who votes as well as what wins. Beyond the direct relevance of these results, I find this paper interesting as an example of research that is fundamentally quantitative. Th
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Dan Hopkins sends along this article : [Hopkins] uses regression discontinuity design to estimate the turnout and election impacts of Spanish-language assistance provided under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. [sent-1, score-1.175]
2 Analyses of two different data sets – the Latino National Survey and California 1998 primary election returns – show that Spanish-language assistance increased turnout for citizens who speak little English. [sent-2, score-1.602]
3 The California results also demonstrate that election procedures an influence outcomes, as support for ending bilingual education dropped markedly in heavily Spanish-speaking neighborhoods with Spanish-language assistance. [sent-3, score-1.224]
4 The California analyses find hints of backlash among non-Hispanic white precincts, but not with the same size or certainty. [sent-4, score-0.471]
5 Small changes in election procedures can influence who votes as well as what wins. [sent-5, score-0.57]
6 Beyond the direct relevance of these results, I find this paper interesting as an example of research that is fundamentally quantitative. [sent-6, score-0.263]
7 The qualitative finding–”Spanish-language assistance increased turnout for citizens who speak little English”–reaches deep into dog-bites-man territory. [sent-7, score-1.311]
8 What makes the paper work is that the results are quantitative (for example, comparing direct effect to backlash). [sent-8, score-0.282]
9 I love love love that Hopkins makes his points with graphs that display data and fitted models. [sent-11, score-0.677]
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same-blog 1 1.0 406 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-10-Translating into Votes: The Electoral Impact of Spanish-Language Ballots
Introduction: Dan Hopkins sends along this article : [Hopkins] uses regression discontinuity design to estimate the turnout and election impacts of Spanish-language assistance provided under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. Analyses of two different data sets – the Latino National Survey and California 1998 primary election returns – show that Spanish-language assistance increased turnout for citizens who speak little English. The California results also demonstrate that election procedures an influence outcomes, as support for ending bilingual education dropped markedly in heavily Spanish-speaking neighborhoods with Spanish-language assistance. The California analyses find hints of backlash among non-Hispanic white precincts, but not with the same size or certainty. Small changes in election procedures can influence who votes as well as what wins. Beyond the direct relevance of these results, I find this paper interesting as an example of research that is fundamentally quantitative. Th
2 0.13144134 389 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-01-Why it can be rational to vote
Introduction: I think I can best do my civic duty by running this one every Election Day, just like Art Buchwald on Thanksgiving. . . . With a national election coming up, and with the publicity at its maximum, now is a good time to ask, is it rational for you to vote? And, by extension, wass it worth your while to pay attention to whatever the candidates and party leaders have been saying for the year or so? With a chance of casting a decisive vote that is comparable to the chance of winning the lottery, what is the gain from being a good citizen and casting your vote? The short answer is, quite a lot. First the bad news. With 100 million voters, your chance that your vote will be decisive–even if the national election is predicted to be reasonably close–is, at best, 1 in a million in a battleground district and much less in a noncompetitive district such as where I live. (The calculation is based on the chance that your district’s vote will be exactly tied, along with the chance that your di
3 0.13144134 1565 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-06-Why it can be rational to vote
Introduction: I think I can best do my civic duty by running this one every Election Day, just like Art Buchwald on Thanksgiving. . . . With a national election coming up, and with the publicity at its maximum, now is a good time to ask, is it rational for you to vote? And, by extension, wass it worth your while to pay attention to whatever the candidates and party leaders have been saying for the year or so? With a chance of casting a decisive vote that is comparable to the chance of winning the lottery, what is the gain from being a good citizen and casting your vote? The short answer is, quite a lot. First the bad news. With 100 million voters, your chance that your vote will be decisive–even if the national election is predicted to be reasonably close–is, at best, 1 in a million in a battleground district and much less in a noncompetitive district such as where I live. (The calculation is based on the chance that your district’s vote will be exactly tied, along with the chance that you
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Introduction: We all have opinions about the federal budget and how it should be spent. Infrequently, those opinions are informed by some knowledge about where the money actually goes. It turns out that most people don’t have a clue. What about you? Here, take this poll/quiz and then compare your answers to (1) what other people said, in a CNN poll that asked about these same items and (2) compare your answers to the real answers. Quiz is below the fold. The questions below are from a CNN poll. ======== Think about all the money that the federal government spent last year. I’m going to name a few federal programs and for each one, I’d like you to estimate what percentage of the federal government’s budget last year was spent on each of those programs. Medicare — the federal health program for the elderly Medicaid — the federal health program for the poor Social Security Military spending by the Department of Defense Aid to foreign countries for international development
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Introduction: At the sister blog, Henry writes about poll averaging and election forecasts. Henry writes that “These models need to crunch lots of polls, at the state and national level, if they’re going to provide good predictions.” Actually, you can get reasonable predictions from national-level forecasting models plus previous state-level election results, then when the election comes closer you can use national and state polls as needed. See my paper with Kari Lock, Bayesian combination of state polls and election forecasts . (That said, the method in that paper is fairly complicated, much more so than simply taking weighted averages of state polls, if such abundant data happen to be available. And I’m sure our approach would need to be altered if it were used for real-time forecasts.) Having a steady supply of polls of varying quality from various sources allows poll aggregators to produce news every day (in the sense of pushing their estimates around) but it doesn’t help much with a
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Introduction: Dan Hopkins sends along this article : [Hopkins] uses regression discontinuity design to estimate the turnout and election impacts of Spanish-language assistance provided under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. Analyses of two different data sets – the Latino National Survey and California 1998 primary election returns – show that Spanish-language assistance increased turnout for citizens who speak little English. The California results also demonstrate that election procedures an influence outcomes, as support for ending bilingual education dropped markedly in heavily Spanish-speaking neighborhoods with Spanish-language assistance. The California analyses find hints of backlash among non-Hispanic white precincts, but not with the same size or certainty. Small changes in election procedures can influence who votes as well as what wins. Beyond the direct relevance of these results, I find this paper interesting as an example of research that is fundamentally quantitative. Th
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Introduction: Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis wrote this useful news article on the promise and limitations of “big data.” And let me add this related point: Big data are typically not random samples, hence the need for “big model” to map from sample to population. Here’s an example (with Wei Wang, David Rothschild, and Sharad Goel): Election forecasts have traditionally been based on representative polls, in which randomly sampled individuals are asked for whom they intend to vote. While representative polling has historically proven to be quite effective, it comes at considerable financial and time costs. Moreover, as response rates have declined over the past several decades, the statistical ben- efits of representative sampling have diminished. In this paper, we show that with proper statistical adjustment, non-representative polls can be used to generate accurate election forecasts, and often faster and at less expense than traditional survey methods. We demon- strate this approach
Introduction: I dodged a bullet the other day, blogorifically speaking. This is a (moderately) long story but there’s a payoff at the end for those of you who are interested in forecasting or understanding voting and public opinion at the state level. Act 1 It started when Jeff Lax made this comment on his recent blog entry: Nebraska Is All That Counts for a Party-Bucking Nelson Dem Senator On Blowback From His Opposition To Kagan: ‘Are They From Nebraska? Then I Don’t Care’ Fine, but 62% of Nebraskans with an opinion favor confirmation… 91% of Democrats, 39% of Republicans, and 61% of Independents. So I guess he only cares about Republican Nebraskans… I conferred with Jeff and then wrote the following entry for fivethirtyeight.com. There was a backlog of posts at 538 at the time, so I set it on delay to appear the following morning. Here’s my post (which I ended up deleting before it ever appeared): Party-Bucking Nelson May Be Nebraska-Bucking as Well Under the head
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Introduction: Fabio Rojas points me to this excellently-titled working paper by Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen, and himself: Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this ques- tion using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided by the Federal Election Commission. Our results show that the percentage of Republican-candidate name mentions correlates with the Republican vote margin in the subsequent election. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district’s racial and gender composi- tion. With over 500 million active users in 2012, Twitter now represents a new frontier for the study of human behavior. This research provides a framework for incorporating this emerging medium into the computational social science toolkit. One charming thing
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Introduction: Dan Hopkins sends along this article : [Hopkins] uses regression discontinuity design to estimate the turnout and election impacts of Spanish-language assistance provided under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. Analyses of two different data sets – the Latino National Survey and California 1998 primary election returns – show that Spanish-language assistance increased turnout for citizens who speak little English. The California results also demonstrate that election procedures an influence outcomes, as support for ending bilingual education dropped markedly in heavily Spanish-speaking neighborhoods with Spanish-language assistance. The California analyses find hints of backlash among non-Hispanic white precincts, but not with the same size or certainty. Small changes in election procedures can influence who votes as well as what wins. Beyond the direct relevance of these results, I find this paper interesting as an example of research that is fundamentally quantitative. Th
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Introduction: Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson write : Financial crises are staggeringly costly. Only major wars rival them in the burdens they place on public finances. Taxpayers typically transfer enormous resources to banks, their stockholders, and creditors, while public debt explodes and the economy runs below full employment for years. This paper compares how relatively large, developed countries have handled bailouts over time. It analyzes why some have done better than others at containing costs and protecting taxpayers. The paper argues that political variables – the nature of competition within party systems and voting turnout – help explain why some countries do more than others to limit the moral hazards of bailouts. I know next to nothing about this topic, so I’ll just recommend you click through and read the article yourself. Here’s a bit more: Many recent papers have analyzed financial crises using large data bases filled with cases from all over the world. Our [Ferguson
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Introduction: The second best thing about this story (from Tom Scocca) is that Anderson spells “Tweets” with a capital T. But the best thing is that Scocca is numerate—he compares numbers on the logarithmic scale: Reminding Lake that he only had 169 Twitter followers was the saddest gambit of all. Jon Lee Anderson has 17,866 followers. And Kim Kardashian has, as I write this, 17,489,892 followers. That is: Jon Lee Anderson is 1/1,000 as important on Twitter, by his own standard, as Kim Kardashian. He is 10 times closer to Mitch Lake than he is to Kim Kardashian. How often do we see a popular journalist who understands orders of magnitude? Good job, Tom Scocca! P.S. Based on his “little twerp” comment, I also wonder if Anderson suffers from tall person syndrome—that’s the problem that some people of above-average height have, that they think they’re more important than other people because they literally look down on them. Don’t get me wrong—I have lots of tall friends who are complete
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Introduction: Matthew Yglesias and Megan McArdle argue about the economics of landlord/tenant laws in D.C., a topic I know nothing about. But it did remind me of a few stories . . . 1. In grad school, I shared half of a two-family house with three other students. At some point, our landlord (who lived in the other half of the house) decided he wanted to sell the place, so he had a real estate agent coming by occasionally to show the house to people. She was just a flat-out liar (which I guess fits my impression based on screenings of Glengarry Glen Ross). I could never decide, when I was around and she was lying to a prospective buyer, whether to call her on it. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. 2. A year after I graduated, the landlord actually did sell the place but then, when my friends moved out, he refused to pay back their security deposit. There was some debate about getting the place repainted, I don’t remember the details. So they sued the landlord in Mass. housing court
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