Andrew Gelman

So this happened earlier in the week: I had no idea this sort of thing even existed: I’m reminded of our discussion of Charles Murray’s recent book on social divisions among Americans. Murray talked about differences between upper and lower class, but I thought he was really talking more about differences between liberals and conservatives […]

Under the heading, Technology Start-Ups Take Root in Berlin, Mark Scott writes: More than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German capital has gone from a cold war relic to one of the fastest-growing start-up communities. Engineers and designers have flooded into Berlin in recent years, attracted by the underground music […]

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 […]

Jeremy Fox points us to a paper by David Broockman and Christopher Skovron, who look at legislators’s perceptions of their constituents and compare to estimates of the the actual issue attitudes of people living in their districts. Broockman and Christopher Skovron find, There is a striking conservative bias in politicians’ perceptions, particularly among conservatives: conservative […]

Markus Prior writes: On factual survey questions about economic conditions, opponents of the president often report significantly worse economic performance than supporters of the president. Scholars have so far interpreted this finding to mean that partisan respondents cannot even agree on matters of fact. We test an alternative interpretation: Partisans give the partisan congenial answer […]

Alex Engler writes: I just finished an article for the Georgetown Public Policy Review that you might be interested in. I took a thorough look at the influence of the Hispanic vote in congressional races in 2012, and how the party balance in the House changes under different levels of Hispanic party support. I used […]

Doug Hartmann writes (link from Jay Livingston): Justice Antonin Scalia’s comment in the Supreme Court hearings on the U.S. law defining marriage that “there’s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not.” Hartman argues that Scalia is […]

This post is mostly not about economics or even politics but rather about the central role of comparisons in statistics and statistical graphics. It started when someone pointed me to this article in which Megan McArdle points out the misleadingness of a graph that seems to show a bimodal income distribution but only by combining […]