andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-1027 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: A student journalist called me with some questions about when the U.S. would have a female president. At one point she asked if there were any surveys of whether people would vote for a woman. I suggested she try Google. I was by my computer anyway so typed “what percentage of americans would vote for a woman president” (without the quotation marks), and the very first hit was this from Gallup, from 2007: The Feb. 9-11, 2007, poll asked Americans whether they would vote for “a generally well-qualified” presidential candidate nominated by their party with each of the following characteristics: Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, an atheist, a woman, black, Hispanic, homosexual, 72 years of age, and someone married for the third time. Between now and the 2008 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates — their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happene
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1 A student journalist called me with some questions about when the U. [sent-1, score-0.102]
2 At one point she asked if there were any surveys of whether people would vote for a woman. [sent-4, score-0.615]
3 I was by my computer anyway so typed “what percentage of americans would vote for a woman president” (without the quotation marks), and the very first hit was this from Gallup, from 2007: The Feb. [sent-6, score-1.006]
4 Between now and the 2008 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates — their education, age, religion, race, and so on. [sent-8, score-0.163]
5 If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be …, would you vote for that person? [sent-9, score-1.152]
6 Barack Obama, currently running second in the Democratic nomination trial heats, is black. [sent-11, score-0.122]
7 Americans express little hesitation about putting a person with either of those backgrounds in the White House — 95% would vote for a Catholic candidate for president and 94% would vote for a black candidate. [sent-12, score-1.708]
8 As cognitive psychologists have learned in their research, people tend to set their general attitudes aside when confronted with particular cases. [sent-17, score-0.074]
9 For example, 42% of respondents said they would not vote for a generally well-qualified 72-year-old. [sent-18, score-0.642]
10 Given that McCain did about as well as might be expected given his party and economic conditions, it’s hard to believe that he was starting off the election 42 points in the hole. [sent-19, score-0.122]
11 Similarly, I don’t take seriously the idea that 24% of Americans would not vote for a Mormon or that 53% would not vote for an atheist. [sent-20, score-1.1]
12 If you want to pay me to write this blog, I’ll make a graph for you. [sent-25, score-0.06]
13 If you’re a journalist, it can be great to interview an expert. [sent-30, score-0.097]
14 But you’ll get a lot more out of the interview if you google yourself up to speed first. [sent-31, score-0.151]
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Introduction: A student journalist called me with some questions about when the U.S. would have a female president. At one point she asked if there were any surveys of whether people would vote for a woman. I suggested she try Google. I was by my computer anyway so typed “what percentage of americans would vote for a woman president” (without the quotation marks), and the very first hit was this from Gallup, from 2007: The Feb. 9-11, 2007, poll asked Americans whether they would vote for “a generally well-qualified” presidential candidate nominated by their party with each of the following characteristics: Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, an atheist, a woman, black, Hispanic, homosexual, 72 years of age, and someone married for the third time. Between now and the 2008 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates — their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happene
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Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
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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
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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
Introduction: The other day we had a fun little discussion in the comments section of the sister blog about the appropriateness of stating forecast probabilities to the nearest tenth of a percentage point. It started when Josh Tucker posted this graph from Nate Silver : My first reaction was: this looks pretty but it’s hyper-precise. I’m a big fan of Nate’s work, but all those little wiggles on the graph can’t really mean anything. And what could it possibly mean to compute this probability to that level of precision? In the comments, people came at me from two directions. From one side, Jeffrey Friedman expressed a hard core attitude that it’s meaningless to give a probability forecast of a unique event: What could it possibly mean, period, given that this election will never be repeated? . . . I know there’s a vast literature on this, but I’m still curious, as a non-statistician, what it could mean for there to be a meaningful 65% probability (as opposed to a non-quantifiab
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Introduction: Jan Vecer writes about a new voting system that is now being considered in the Czech Republic which faces a political crisis where some elected officials became corrupted: I came across a new suggestion about a voting system. The proposal is that in each electoral district the voter chooses 2 candidates (plus vote), but also chooses one candidate with a minus vote. Two top candidates with the highest vote count (= number of plus votes – number of minus votes) are elected to a parliament. There are 81 districts in total, the parliament would have 162 members if the proposal goes through. The intention of the negative vote is to eliminate controversial candidates. Are there any clear advantages over the classical “select one candidate” system? Or disadvantages? Any thoughts on this? I am not an expert on this topic but maybe some of you are.
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Introduction: Shankar Vedantam writes : Americans distrust the GOP. So why are they voting for it? . . . Gallup tells us that 71 percent of all Americans blame Republican policies for the bad economy, while only 48 percent blame the Obama administration. . . . while disapproval of congressional Democrats stands at 61 percent, disapproval of congressional Republicans stands at 67 percent. [But] Republicans are heavily tipped to wrest control of one or both houses of Congress from the Democrats in the upcoming midterms. Hey! I know the answer to that one. As I wrote in early September: Those 10% or so of voters who plan to vote Republican–even while thinking that the Democrats will do a better job–are not necessarily being so unreasonable. The Democrats control the presidency and both houses of Congress, and so it’s a completely reasonable stance to prefer them to the Republicans yet still think they’ve gone too far and need a check on their power. But Vendatam thinks this expla
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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
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Introduction: According to this op-ed by Louise Mozingo, the fashion for suburban corporate parks is seventy years old: In 1942 the AT&T; Bell Telephone Laboratories moved from its offices in Lower Manhattan to a new, custom-designed facility on 213 acres outside Summit, N.J. The location provided space for laboratories and quiet for acoustical research, and new features: parking lots that allowed scientists and engineers to drive from their nearby suburban homes, a spacious cafeteria and lounge and, most surprisingly, views from every window of a carefully tended pastoral landscape designed by the Olmsted brothers, sons of the designer of Central Park. Corporate management never saw the city center in the same way again. Bell Labs initiated a tide of migration of white-collar workers, especially as state and federal governments conveniently extended highways into the rural edge. Just to throw some Richard Florida in the mix: Back in 1990, I turned down a job offer from Bell Labs, larg
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