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Following up the discussions by Larry Bartels, David Brady, and myself on trends in partisanship, Chris Wlezien writes: This brought to mind my [Wlezien’s] work with Mark Kayser. Here’s the paper, which pertains to Europe and quite different trends, i.e., declining partisanship and growing (objective) economic effects on the vote. We’ve been planning to address […]

David Brady says: The Democrats at this point, all the Democrats like Obama. Republicans don’t like Obama; next to George W. Bush he’s the greatest divider since we’ve been doing public opinion. That is, subtract the percent of his party that like him, minus the percent of the other party that doesn’t like him—so if […]

Just today I received another request to review an article! Saying No isn’t all that difficult but I don’t want to be pissing off hundreds of journal editors each year. In the discussion following my recent outburst, Philip Schrodt came up with some suggestions along the lines of reducing the number of articles that researchers […]

I get about 10 requests to referee journal articles each week. At this point, even the saying No part is getting tiring. I think I’d much prefer Kriegeskorte’s system of post-publication review where whatever you write about a paper is open and available to all to read, and where you can devote your review efforts […]

Anthony Fowler and Andrew Hall send along a new paper, “Conservative Vote Probabilities: An Easier Method for the Analysis of Roll Call Data”: We propose a new roll-call scaling method based on OLS which is easier to imple- ment and understand than previous methods and also produces directly interpretable estimates. This measure, Conservative Vote Probability […]

Everybody thought that cellular automaton stuff was just B.S., but it looks like Wolfram is now making real progress. The most recent development is in the use of cellular automata for blog spam. (Details here.) P.S. As a special benefit to those of you who read this far, here’s a discussion of statistical models for […]

Thomas Ferguson wonders what is the missing-data mechanism operating at the Federal Election Commission.

Commenter Jason writes: Poor whites are very much the republican base and have been for the past 20 – 30 years, I refer you to “what’s the matter with Kansas” and any number of other books about people voting against their economic interests. If poor whites werent the GOP base who is it? College educated […]

Discussion here (see also Basbøll comment). I don’t actually know of any cases of data faking in political science and, Frank Fischer aside, our field doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with plagiarism copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings without attribution. But I know that some of you […]

David Frum points us to a recent op-ed by Brooks on happiness. Frum writes that Brooks presents a lot of statistics in a very reasonable-sounding way (in the Brooksian mode of low-key concerned conservatism) but without quite answering the questions posed in the op-ed. Here’s Brooks: Who is happier about life — liberals or conservatives? […]