Andrew Gelman

Perry Anderson writes of “a truly distinguishing feature of Indian democracy – one that sets it apart from any other society in the world”: In India alone, the poor form not just the overwhelming majority of the electorate, but vote in larger numbers than the better-off. Everywhere else, without exception, the ratio of electoral participation […]

From the Round Rock Leader: Everybody’s laughing about this poll but it looks accurate to me! According to the official figures, voter turnout in Texas in the last presidential election was 46% of the voting-age population. So 44% seems like a reasonable guess for this year. [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

Political campaigns are commonly understood as random walks, during which, at any point in time, the level of support for any party or candidate is equally likely to go up or down. Each shift in the polls is then interpreted as the result of some combination of news and campaign strategies. A completely different story […]

Unlike my co-bloggers here, here, here, I would not label Mitt Romney’s “47%” remarks as a gaffe. To my ear, a “gaffe” is some silly little remark or misstatement. In this case, it’s not that Romney said something embarrassing and mistaken, it’s that he said something very deliberately that corresponds to an unpopular position. And […]

Jeffrey Frankel, a distinguished economist, public servant, and expert on international trade, made a common but, I hope, avoidable statistical error in a recent column. Frankel wrote: Compared to “blue-staters,” those who live in red states exhibit less responsibility, on average, in their personal behavior: they are less physically fit, less careful in their sexual […]

While others argue about the political consequences of that Romney fundraising video, I wanted to briefly remark on the substance of his remarks. Romney said: [Obama] starts off with a huge number. These are the people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes […]

The Harvard-affiliated historian writes: It’s a paradox. The economy is in the doldrums. Yet the incumbent is ahead in the polls. According to a huge body of research by political scientists, this is not supposed to happen. On the other side of the Atlantic, it hardly ever does. But in America today, the law of […]

I’d like to see Paul Krugman’s evidence for this claim: What really happened in the final months of [the 2000] election? The answer — not a popular one with journalists, but very obviously true to anyone who lived through it — was that the press took sides. Reporters liked Bush and didn’t like Gore, and […]

Eduardo Porter in the New York Times talks with some experts who have written things such as that “most companies do not get any return from their lobbying expenditures” and that “campaign finance had a tiny effect.” Porter’s article is good: although he quotes some research that claims campaign spending has little effect, he also […]

I’m used to hearing the argument that, sure, cigarettes are addictive, but everyone has known forever that smoking caused cancer, and that cigarette manufacturers could hardly be blamed for supplying a consumer good that many people wanted. So I was surprised to learn the following, from historian Robert Proctor: It’s interesting to see that, at […]