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July 30, 2012
4 notes

The Gays are Oppressing Christians Again: A Chick-fil-A Uproar Postmortem

I’m sorry for adding to the cacophony, but a thought now that it’s died down a bit. I was mostly just bewildered by the sudden brouhaha surrounding Chick-fil-A COO Dan Cathy’s remarks about gay marriage because the company had already been donating to Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate groups and “ex-gay” organizations since at least 2003. I’m not against a boycott of Chick-fil-A (I’ve refused to eat there for years), but I think energy spent organizing against a conservative fast food chain might be better directed towards campaigning for equal rights supporters in critical elections this November (like this guy, or the soon-to-be first openly gay United States Senator).

However, if the takeaway for businesses from all of this is that actively opposing equal rights for the LGBT community consistently yields PR disasters, that would say a lot about where we are as a country (note that the impact on revenues will likely be minor - Chick-fil-A is privately-owned and massive, and has greater presence in areas where being anti-gay would probably matter less). Recent events should tell us that anti-gay bigotry, even under the banner of Judeo-Christian values, is rapidly becoming an untenable position for public figures. And I welcome that.

A response to common Chick-fil-A apologist arguments after the jump.

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Tags: LGBT analysis boycott chick-fil-a commentary freedom of speech gay politics chick fil a boycott

Photo
July 24, 2012
3 notes
Where to Go Wrong with the Causes of Gun Violence,Or, Why the Above Graph is Less Useful Than it Looks In the wake of last week’s horrific shooting in Aurora, Colorado, The Atlantic made reference to an article they published in 2011 following the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others in Tuscon, Arizona. Both discussed state-level causes of gun violence. While I don’t necessarily disagree with the conclusions, the data analysis they used to get to them was careless to the point of potential tendentiousness due to a common mistake (or shortcut) in statistics: ecological fallacy. [[MORE]] In the original 2011 article, every conclusion that the author reached was guarded from criticism with predictable disclaimers: correlation does not imply causation; emphasizing that the unit of analysis is the state, not the individual; and so on. Ultimately the article was summed up with this: While the causes of individual acts of mass violence always differ, our analysis shows fatal gun violence is less likely to occur in richer states with more post-industrial knowledge economies, higher levels of college graduates, and tighter gun laws. Factors like drug use, stress levels, and mental illness are much less significant than might be assumed. The above graph captures other factors investigated and their state-level correlation to gun deaths. For example, although “[i]t is commonly assumed that mental illness or stress levels trigger gun violence,” the author points out that this does not hold at the state level. Here’s where the concept of ecological fallacy comes in. An ecological fallacy occurs when one tries to apply group-level data to conclusions about the individual members of that group. For example, let’s say hypothetically that the most politically conservative states tend to have the highest rates of poverty. One cannot accurately conclude from this that poorer people tend to be more conservative; perhaps voters in the lowest income bracket are extremely liberal but are less likely to show up to the polls, or maybe the wealthiest individuals are far more conservative and have undue influence over the electoral process in certain states. We need to keep this idea of ecological fallacy in mind when we are trying to determine the causes of gun violence because we could run into trouble by linking individual gun deaths to characteristics of the state in which those gun deaths occur. It would be problematic to conclude from these data, for instance, that mental illness has no significant correlation with gun violence - in fact, it may well be that while there is an elevated risk of gun violence among people with serious mental illnesses, the United States has such an uncommonly high rate of gun deaths that the severity of numerous other factors obscure mental illness as a strong cause here. The point is there are far more accurate and less misleading ways of investigating these factors on the individual level, and in a way that can actually establish causal relationships. This isn’t it. In the wake of tragedies like the Aurora and Tuscon shootings, we should of course always strive for reasoned discourse about how we can try to prevent future gun violence. But sensitivity and careful deliberation are of utmost importance in these kinds of policy debates: both out of respect to the victims and their families, and to avoid allowing emotions to cloud our judgement and evaluation of rhetoric and data.

Where to Go Wrong with the Causes of Gun Violence,
Or, Why the Above Graph is Less Useful Than it Looks

In the wake of last week’s horrific shooting in Aurora, Colorado, The Atlantic made reference to an article they published in 2011 following the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others in Tuscon, Arizona. Both discussed state-level causes of gun violence. While I don’t necessarily disagree with the conclusions, the data analysis they used to get to them was careless to the point of potential tendentiousness due to a common mistake (or shortcut) in statistics: ecological fallacy.

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Tags: analysis gun control gun violence methodology methods political science politics The Atlantic

Photo
July 05, 2012
253 notes
motherjones: The GOP’s war on voting, in charts. Good aggregation of statistics on generally partisan disenfranchisement efforts, and why the voter fraud argument is, as we’ve always known, specious at best. Although I try to keep well-informed about voting restrictions, I hadn’t heard how high the percentage of Asian Americans not voting due to ID and registration issues were relative to other racial groups. I can imagine many reasons for why this could be true, but be careful - the sample size of Asian Americans who are eligible to vote but did not is likely very small (consider that only about 5% of the US population, both voting citizens and not, is Asian American). Perhaps even more significantly, much higher proportions of Asian respondents cited almost every possible reason in the survey as being a factor for not voting compared with other racial groups: 43% of Asian respondents gave “illness” as a reason for not voting, 72% “out of town,” 61% “forgot,” 61% “did not receive absentee ballot,” 81% “too busy,” 78% “transportation,” 67% “didn’t like choices,” 78% “weather,” 61% “line too long,” 78% “did not receive ballot/not on time.” This seems to be a methodological issue more than anything else. It is worth noting, however, than Asian Americans as a voting bloc are largely ignored and voter mobilization and registration efforts targeting this community are relatively limited.

motherjones:

The GOP’s war on voting, in charts.

Good aggregation of statistics on generally partisan disenfranchisement efforts, and why the voter fraud argument is, as we’ve always known, specious at best.

Although I try to keep well-informed about voting restrictions, I hadn’t heard how high the percentage of Asian Americans not voting due to ID and registration issues were relative to other racial groups. I can imagine many reasons for why this could be true, but be careful - the sample size of Asian Americans who are eligible to vote but did not is likely very small (consider that only about 5% of the US population, both voting citizens and not, is Asian American). Perhaps even more significantly, much higher proportions of Asian respondents cited almost every possible reason in the survey as being a factor for not voting compared with other racial groups: 43% of Asian respondents gave “illness” as a reason for not voting, 72% “out of town,” 61% “forgot,” 61% “did not receive absentee ballot,” 81% “too busy,” 78% “transportation,” 67% “didn’t like choices,” 78% “weather,” 61% “line too long,” 78% “did not receive ballot/not on time.”

This seems to be a methodological issue more than anything else. It is worth noting, however, than Asian Americans as a voting bloc are largely ignored and voter mobilization and registration efforts targeting this community are relatively limited.

(via jrnels)

Tags: Asian Americans Asians methodology political science politics voter ID voter registration voting analysis

Photoset
June 21, 2012
2 notes

Some work I did recently for a paper entitled “Co-opted: An Analysis of the Behavior and Influence of Large Freshman Classes in the United States House of Representatives.”

It is of course difficult to draw any broad conclusions about party unity - the percentage of votes on which individual members voted with the majority of his or her party and against the majority of the opposition party - from just these four graphs, which represent the four largest freshman classes of a single party in the U.S. House in the last four decades. I do believe it raises questions about the conventional media narrative concerning the influence of large freshman classes, often viewed as idealists who will challenge the “politics-as-usual” status quo in Washington generally and in their party specifically. At least in terms of voting behavior, we do not see a great deal of deviation from the party leadership during these members’ first terms. And while this is inherently a small sample size, the difference of time and party is striking.

More analysis to come.

Tags: GOP House of Representatives democrats government house freshmen party unity political science politics republicans analysis