Veronique de Rugy has a response to Nate Silver's tough critique of her study on how stimulus funds were distributed. (Here's my summary from yesterday.) Her defense of the study is not very convincing, in my view, eliding several points in Silver's argument, but you can be the judge of that yourself. What interests me are these paragraphs (keep in mind that nowhere in his post does Silver suggest that de Rugy's study was rigged*):
As for the suggestion that we have deliberately biased the research design, I challenge Mr. Silver to find evidence for this anywhere in the methodology. That claim is as inflammatory as it is unsubstantiated.
This is not to say that I do not begin my research from a particular starting point. Readers who have taken interest in my work before Barack Obama became president will note that I was a consistent and highly vocal critic of his predecessor when George W. Bush's policies confounded widely understood economic truisms. Throughout his years in office, I published many articles about Bush’s profligate spending and was the first researcher to project that he was increasing spending faster than Lyndon Baines Johnson; similarly, I am known for having decried Bush’s regulatory excess.
However, my predisposition toward limited government and sound fiscal policy hardly means that I rig my data or designs. Rather, it simply means that I am particularly skeptical when anyone claims that politicians (of all parties) do not programmatically seek to advantage their allies while punishing their adversaries. That was a useful guiding assumption under George W. Bush and, under the current administration, no less so.
I'm not suggesting that de Rugy deliberately rigged her methodology. However, as Silver notes, "this could have been discerned in literally five minutes if she had bothered to look at the apparent outliers in her dataset and considered whether they had anything in common." When your starting point is the suspicion that elected officials abuse public resources for political advantage, and you find data that backs that up, you're not going to look hard at the outliers. We all have a tendency to rest easy when our hypothesis is proved true. This isn't necessarily a political phenomenon, but it feels like we're seeing it's political expression here.
-- Tim Fernholz
*I missed the brief aside noted in the comments.
