The New York Times just released a dataset with every order from state and local governments for surplus military items (the result of a Freedom of Information Act request).
We’ve loaded the dataset into Statwing to make it easy to explore.
Category Archives: Politics
Republicans have been losing moderates (and liberals) for 20 years
Yesterday Gallup published poll results showing an all-time low of Americans Identifying as Republicans. We statistically analyzed data from the General Social Survey to identify which groups were leaving the Republican party. The answer? Moderates, liberals, the wealthy, the young, and the well-educated, but not women., Republicans have been defecting to “Independent” for 20 years… Continue Reading
The Most Interesting Survey in the World: the General Social Survey (1972 – 2012) | Part 1
The General Social Survey is the most frequently cited social science dataset (except for the U.S. Census). More than 14,000 academic papers, books, and dissertations are based on this biennial, 90-minute survey, conducted since 1972. Until now, exploring this dataset required painstaking downloads, codebooks, and installed software. Now anyone can play around with it online… Continue Reading
Political Polling is Broken (And How Mushiness Can Fix It)
Advertisement: Statwing is an easy-to-use tool for analyzing survey results and other business data. Click through the visualization below to see the analysis in Statwing (and play around with the rest of the dataset). Daniel Yankelovich, the “founding father of public opinion research”, was bothered that political polling did not take into account the conviction with… Continue Reading
The Ecological Fallacy
Advertisement: Statwing makes an easy-to-use data analysis tool. Click through any of the images below to see that analysis in Statwing (and play around with related data). U.S. states with proportionally more immigrants have proportionally more households with income above $100k.[1] Ergo, immigrants are more likely than non-immigrants to have household incomes above $100k. Hopefully… Continue Reading
Democrats are Neurotic, Republicans are Close-minded, & Other Statistical Overstatements
We here at Statwing are curious folk, so we thought it’d be fun to analyze the relationship between politics and personality. Using CrowdFlower, we asked 2,000 Americans about their U.S. presidential election voting plans, as well as what psychologists call the Big 5 personality traits—Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, and Extraversion. Then we took the results and pasted them into… Continue Reading