Math and Probability

Quick Post

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So it's been a little while since I've posted here (very busy times these are).  Anyway, I wanted to link to this post by Phil Arena over at his blog.  Phil discusses how his views on various topics related to IR have changed over the past few years.  I agree with a lot of what he has to say on these issues–I think a lot of what IR scholars focus on, to the extent that we're interested in the domestic forces generating foreign policy outcomes, tend to place too much stock in the qualities we typically assume to characterize democracies and autocracies.  I also agree that economic forces play a huge role in shaping the incentives of political actors–particularly the elites that Arena mentions. 

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CRACK

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I found this link via Andrew Gelman's blog the other day: CRACK Mapmaking software for Mac I haven't had much of a chance to play with it, but it looks like it could be useful.  I've had a few instances in class this semester where I've wanted to make some maps of the US to … Read more

Losses Less than Expected?

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As the 2010 election draws near, many political pundits have predicted that the Democrats will face significant losses in House elections (for a nice summary of election forecasts see here and here). Some have even suggested that the losses will be enough for Democrats to lose majority control over the House. Commentators on CNN have even began discussing how Republicans and Democrats will share power in Washington after the election.  

Although it seems highly likely that Democrats will face losses in both chambers in the midterm election (as this is usually the case in midterm elections for members of the President's party), the extent of the losses may be slightly less than expected. A new study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press suggests that polls that do not call cell phones may be misrepresenting how well Republicans will do in this year's upcoming election. While most national polls do call cell phones, the state and local polls generally do not. Given the study's results, predictions that use state and local polls in predicting this year's election results may be overestimating how well the Republicans will do.

More after the jump…

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More More or Less

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This episode of the radio show 'More or Less', available in podcast, has a nice discussion of Arrow's impossibility theorem. It's a consistently good show for anyone interested in quantitative social science, especially how to teach it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moreorless/ Ben FarrerBen is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at Knox College. He … Read more

Faculty Salary, Compensation, and the Cost of Living.

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Voir Dire posted a working paper yesterday that is worthy of reposting given its broad implications. The paper "University Rankings by Cost of Living Adjusted Faculty Compensation" by Terrance Jalbert, Mercedes Jalbert, and Karla Hayashi in the International Journal of Management and Marketing Research can be found at SSRN. The abstract can be viewed at either Voir Dire or SSRN, so I will save the space and not repost it here, but a bit more information can be found after the jump.  It is perhaps sufficient to say that the aggregated and averaged data can be tremendously interesting to any of us that influenced by the academic job market.

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Bayesian Approaches to Political Science

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I ordered Carlin and Louis 2009 “Bayesian Methods for Data Analysis” yesterday and have been left with some questions by the first chapter that I want to raise here, because it reinforces my belief that there’s an unfortunate lacuna in this and many similar books. Specifically, is there a specific Bayesian approach to political science beyond what we think of as the Bayesian approach to statistical inference? I believe that our discipline conducts empirical testing primarily for the basis of making a convincing attempt at falsifying ourselves. If a tool is confusing to the median political scientist, can it ever be convincing? And for Bayesian statistics in particular, is an effort to fit the best model really an effort to falsify the theory?


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Projectors and Pollsters

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The methodologists and closeted Americanists among us (everyone is during the election season, it seems–don’t worry, we won’t tell) may be interested to know that WashingtonPost.com is hosting a live chat tomorrow at noon with Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight.com and Charles Franklin of Pollster.com.  If you are unfamiliar with these websites then first, you should … Read more