More issues
Why Were the Polls so Accurate?
The Quant. Interwebs have overflowed with joy since the election. Poll aggregation works. And so indeed does polling, though you won’t hear as much about it on the news, which is likely biased towards celebrity intellects rather than the hardworking many. But why were the polls so accurate?
One
Raising Money for Causes
Four teenagers, on the cusp of adulthood and eminently well-to-do, were out on the pavement raising money for children struck with cancer. They had been out raising money for a couple of hours, and from a glance at their tin pot, I estimated that they had raised about $30 or
Randomly Redistricting More Efficiently
In a forthcoming article, Chen and Rodden estimate the effect of ‘Unintentional gerrymandering’ on the number of seats that go to a particular party. To do so, they pick a precinct at random, and then add (randomly chosen) adjacent precincts to it till the district is of a certain size
A Potential Source of Bias in Estimating the Impact of Televised Campaign Ads
Or When Treatment is Strategic, No-Intent-to-Treat Intent-to-Treat Effects can be biased
One popular strategy for estimating the impact of televised campaign ads is by exploiting ‘accidental spillover’ (see Huber and Arceneaux 2007). The identification strategy builds on the following facts: Ads on local television can only be targeted at the
Sample This
What do single shot evaluations of MT (replace it with anything else) samples (vis-a-vis census figures) tell us? I am afraid very little. Inference rests upon knowledge of the data (here – respondent) generating process. Without a model of the data generating process, all such research reverts to modest tautology – sample
Moving Away From the Main Opposing Party
Two things are often stated about American politics: political elites are increasingly polarized, and the issue positions of the masses haven't budged much. Assuming such to be the case, one expects the average distance between where partisans place themselves and where they place the ‘in-party’ (or the ‘out-party’
Representativeness Heuristic, Base Rates, and Bayes
From the Introduction of their edited volume:
Tversky and Kahneman used the following experiment for testing the ‘representativeness heuristic’ –
Subjects are shown a brief personality description of several individuals, sampled at random from 100 professionals – engineers and lawyers.
Subjects are asked to assess whether the description is of an engineer
State of the Union
Over the past forty years, the proportion of respondents reporting at least one union member in the household has declined precipitously (Source: American National Election Studies).
union.time_union.time_.pdf5 KBdownload-circle
Interviewer Assessed Political Information
In the National Election Studies (NES), interviewers have been asked to rate respondents’ level of political information: “Respondent’s general level of information about politics and public affairs seemed — Very high, Fairly high, Average, Fairly low, Very low.” John Zaller, among others, has argued that these ratings measure political knowledge