andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1496 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Political scientists John Sides (one of my cobloggers at the sister spot ) and Lynn Vavreck are writing a book on the 2012 election. I’ve seen what John has posted on this so far and it looks very reasonable to me. The paradox is that “reasonable” and “scholarly” are not as exciting as “soap opera.” Nonetheless, I recommend the book to those of you who are interested in politics. My advice: if you want a gripping, edge-of-the-seat story with larger-than-life characters and fly-on-the-wall dialogue, pick up a good novel. If you want to understand the election, pick up Sides and Vavreck. (Also read Red State Blue State for some historical background!) Ultimately, I think you’ll get more enjoyment from your favorite novel plus Sides/Vavreck than you would from reading some dramatic journalistic treatment of so-called pivotal moments during the campaign. In the future (and, to some extent, even now), I hope and expect that journalistic treatments of elections will be informe
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1 Political scientists John Sides (one of my cobloggers at the sister spot ) and Lynn Vavreck are writing a book on the 2012 election. [sent-1, score-0.472]
2 I’ve seen what John has posted on this so far and it looks very reasonable to me. [sent-2, score-0.202]
3 The paradox is that “reasonable” and “scholarly” are not as exciting as “soap opera. [sent-3, score-0.207]
4 ” Nonetheless, I recommend the book to those of you who are interested in politics. [sent-4, score-0.172]
5 My advice: if you want a gripping, edge-of-the-seat story with larger-than-life characters and fly-on-the-wall dialogue, pick up a good novel. [sent-5, score-0.284]
6 If you want to understand the election, pick up Sides and Vavreck. [sent-6, score-0.167]
7 (Also read Red State Blue State for some historical background! [sent-7, score-0.095]
8 ) Ultimately, I think you’ll get more enjoyment from your favorite novel plus Sides/Vavreck than you would from reading some dramatic journalistic treatment of so-called pivotal moments during the campaign. [sent-8, score-1.113]
9 In the future (and, to some extent, even now), I hope and expect that journalistic treatments of elections will be informed by political science understanding. [sent-9, score-0.775]
10 It should be possible to go back and forth between politics, personality, and policy. [sent-10, score-0.106]
11 Personality matters—not because voters care about charisma etc. [sent-11, score-0.254]
12 , but because politics is not just about winning elections, it’s also about the one-on-one interactions needed, first to climb the greasy pole and, second, to make policy once you’re at the top. [sent-12, score-0.683]
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Introduction: Political scientists John Sides (one of my cobloggers at the sister spot ) and Lynn Vavreck are writing a book on the 2012 election. I’ve seen what John has posted on this so far and it looks very reasonable to me. The paradox is that “reasonable” and “scholarly” are not as exciting as “soap opera.” Nonetheless, I recommend the book to those of you who are interested in politics. My advice: if you want a gripping, edge-of-the-seat story with larger-than-life characters and fly-on-the-wall dialogue, pick up a good novel. If you want to understand the election, pick up Sides and Vavreck. (Also read Red State Blue State for some historical background!) Ultimately, I think you’ll get more enjoyment from your favorite novel plus Sides/Vavreck than you would from reading some dramatic journalistic treatment of so-called pivotal moments during the campaign. In the future (and, to some extent, even now), I hope and expect that journalistic treatments of elections will be informe
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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: Here are my answers to the following questions asked by Pauline Peretz: 1. Many analysts have emphasized that there was a redrawing of the electoral map in 2008. To what extent will the November midterm elections affect this red-blue map? How long will the newly blue states remain blue? 2. Do you think the predictable loss of the Democrats in November definitely disqualifies the hypothesis that Obama’s election was the beginning of a realignment in American politics, that is a period of dominance for the Democratic party due to favourable demographics? 3. Some analysts consider that voting patterns are best explained by economic factors, others by values. How do you position yourself in the debate on culture wars vs. economic wars? 4. In your book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, you renew the ongoing debate on the correlation between income and vote, showing it is much stronger in poor states. In light of this correlation, would you say that there currently is
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Introduction: Will Wilkinson adds to the discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s remarks regarding the overwhelming prevalance of liberal or left-wing attitudes among psychology professors. I pretty much agree with Wilkinson’s overview: Folks who constantly agree with one another grow insular, self-congratulatory, and not a little lazy. The very possibility of disagreement starts to seem weird or crazy. When you’re trying to do science about human beings, this attitude’s not so great. Wilkinson also reviewed the work of John Jost in this area. Jost is a psychology researcher with the expected liberal/left political leanings, but his relevance here is that he has actually done research on political attitudes and personality types. In Wilkinson’s words: Jost has done plenty of great work that helps explain not only why the best minds in science are liberal, but why most scientists-most academics, even-are liberal. Individuals with the personality trait that most strongly predicts an inclinati
Introduction: Jonathan Chait writes that the most important aspect of a presidential candidate is “political talent”: Republicans have generally understood that an agenda tilted toward the desires of the powerful requires a skilled frontman who can pitch Middle America. Favorite character types include jocks, movie stars, folksy Texans and war heroes. . . . [But the frontrunners for the 2012 Republican nomination] make Michael Dukakis look like John F. Kennedy. They are qualified enough to serve as president, but wildly unqualified to run for president. . . . [Mitch] Daniels’s drawbacks begin — but by no means end — with his lack of height, hair and charisma. . . . [Jeb Bush] suffers from an inherent branding challenge [because of his last name]. . . . [Chris] Christie . . . doesn’t cut a trim figure and who specializes in verbally abusing his constituents. . . . [Haley] Barbour is the comic embodiment of his party’s most negative stereotypes. A Barbour nomination would be the rough equivalent
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Introduction: Q. D. Leavis wrote: The answer does seem to be that the academic world, like other worlds, is run by the politicians, and sensitively scrupulous people tend to leave politics to other people, while people with genuine work to do certainly have no time as well as no taste for committee-rigging and the associated techniques. And then of course there are the forces of native stupidity reinforced by that blind hostility to criticism, reform, new ideas and superior ability which is human as well as academic nature. Not that I’ve ever read anything by Mrs. Leavis (or, as the Brits used to write, Mrs Leavis). The above quote is one of the epigraphs to a book by Richard Kostelanetz. Whom I’ve never heard of, except in a footnote in John Rodden’s classic Orwell study, The Politics of Literary Reputation. I’ll have more to say about Orwell in another post, but for now let me return to the above Leavis quote, to which I have three reactions: 1. On a personal level, I’m on Leavis’s s
Introduction: Stephen Olivier points me to this horrible, horrible news article by Jonathan Haidt, “Why working-class people vote conservative”: Across the world, blue-collar voters ally themselves with the political right . . . Why on Earth would a working-class person ever vote for a conservative candidate? This question has obsessed the American left since Ronald Reagan first captured the votes of so many union members, farmers, urban Catholics and other relatively powerless people – the so-called “Reagan Democrats”. . . . Sorry, but no no no no no. Where to start? Here’s the difference between upper-income and lower-income votes in presidential elections: Ronald Reagan did about 20 percentage points better among voters in the upper third of income, compared to voters in the lower third. The relation between income and voting since 1980 is about the same as it was in the 1940s. Oh yeah, Haidt said something about “across the world.” How bout this: It varies. In mos
Introduction: I was reading this article by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker and noticed something suspicious. Levy was writing about an event in 1979 and then continued: One year later, Ronald Reagan won the Presidency, with overwhelming support from evangelicals. The evangelical vote has been a serious consideration in every election since. From Chapter 6 of Red State, Blue State : According to the National Election Study, Reagan did quite a bit worse than Carter among evangelical Protestants than among voters as a whole–no surprise, really, given that Reagan was not particularly religious and Cater was an evangelical himself. It was 1992, not 1980, when evangelicals really started to vote Republican. What’s it all about? I wouldn’t really blame Ariel Levy for this mistake; a glance at her website reveals a lot of experience as a writer and culture reporter but not much on statistics or politics. That’s fine by me: there’s a reason I subscribe to the New Yorker and not
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