Andrew Gelman

The new pope appears to have gone back in time, as if to assist the 1975 LA police chief in a gay conversion effort. 1. From Letters of Note: 2. From Gawker: All in all, the police chief seems the more mellow of the two. People were more easygoing in the 70s, I guess. You […]

Even if a policymaker was sure of the ideal economic policy, he or she can only implement it with the help of some of the other political players. But I’m saying something different, echoing what I wrote a couple days ago. I thought of this today after seeing this recent quote from Paul Krugman (extracted […]

Miles Kimball (link from Tyler Cowen; see also Paul Krugman and Noah Smith) writes: So the fact that Barack did not push for a bigger stimulus package really is an indictment of his economic leadership. According to the reported statement by Larry Summers, it was a political judgement that a bigger stimulus was not politically […]

I was thinking more about David Brooks’s anti-data column from earlier in the week, and I realized what is really bothering me. Brooks expresses skepticism about numbers, about the limitations of raw data, about the importance of human thinking. Fine, I agree with all of this, to some extent. But then Brooks turns around uses […]

A few years ago I watched a bunch of Speed Racer cartoons with Phil in a movie theater in the early 90s. These were low-budget Japanese cartoons from the 60s that we loved as kids. From my adult perspective, the best parts were during the characters’ long drives, where you could see Japanese industrial scenes […]

For a few years I’ve been fascinated by the idea that, in American politics, the perception of polarization is larger than polarization itself. I’ve been interested this ever since reading Fiorina’s book which made the point that, if the positions of the Democratic and Republican parties are far apart, then, even if most voters are […]

One of the central goals of our blog is to improve communication between political journalists and political scientists. From one direction, we want to make journalists aware of important and relevant scholarly research. From the other direction, we want to encourage political scientists to write for general audiences. As part of our goal, we spend […]

As Andrew Thomas, Gary King, Jonathan Katz, and I discussed in our recently published article (see also discussion here), the electoral college has had little partisan bias in recent decades. By this we mean that, by our calculations (details below), the percentage of the two-party vote needed by the Republican or Democratic candidate to have […]

Given that the apportion-electoral-votes-by-congressional-votes idea is in the news again, I thought it would be a good idea to point to some recent research on the topic. Here’s what Andrew Thomas, Gary King, Jonathan Katz, and I found in a paper published a couple months ago in the journal Statistics, Politics, and Policy: We investigate […]