

How Democrats, Republicans compare - Eight
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/12/INH31F68GB.DTL

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cperciva
Correlation is not causation.

Sure, people who are wealthier and live in more stable societies tend to vote
Democrat; but that doesn't mean that electing Democrat representatives causes
the societies to be wealthier and more stable.

Working hard and being wealthy are also correlated, but that doesn't imply
that you can cause people to work hard by giving them lots of money.

(Lest anyone accuse me of political bias here: If I was in the US, I would be
voting Democrat, just like the author.)

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einarvollset
Your first line is a truism that your main argument doesn't support, and your
third paragraph is an appeal to "common sense" that isn't supported by data.

Ignoring those, your argument boils down to your opinion that voting has no
impact on wealth or stability. That cannot be true, at least not unless you
subscribe to a deterministic world view, surely?

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rflrob
His argument is not that voting has _no_ impact on wealth or stability, it's
that you can't deconvolve voting's impact on wealth from wealth's impact on
voting.

One could imagine a scenario where a Party X state had vastly impoverished
natural resources compared to the typical Party Y state. It's conceivable that
typical Party Y policies would have a worse outcome than typical Party X ones
_in that particular state_ , even if states that implement Party Y policies
tend to have better outcomes overall. It's furthermore conceivable that even
states that implement Party Y policies could do better if they had instead
implemented Party X ones.

The flaw in this article isn't political, it's statistical.

edit: anonymized parties in the second paragraph.

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anatari
Not that I disagree with the conclusion of the article, but I bet you can come
up with an equally impressive set of stats showing the Republican party coming
out ahead. If the article wasn't so one sided it would have been stronger.

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MaysonL
Go ahead: come up with such a set.

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rmk
The 'quiz' barely convinced me: * It's Congress that has shaped public policy
in the United States for most of the post-FDR period, not the administration
in the White House.

* Does public policy have tangible, _next-day_ consequences? For example, is the population suddenly healthier, now that the vaunted Health Insurance reform has passed?

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KaeseEs
What's the "interesting new phenomenon" that this political article elucidates
to make it not off-topic?

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nkurz
Attempting to measure the performance of a political party statistically and
without being influenced by the personalities involved is interesting and new.
The particular approach described is horrendously flawed, but it seems
possible that there is good discussion to be had in proposing a better
methodology.

Flag it if you think it's off-topic, and then something mysterious and not
well documented might or might not happen. Personally, I decided it merited
neither an upvote nor a flag.

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fondue
"Attempting to measure the performance of a political party statistically and
without being influenced by the personalities involved is interesting and
new."

I've been presented with these exact same arguments back in High School, which
was in the early 80s. You can skew the numbers to favor Republicans by just
choosing the data ranges from when the politicians actually joined office.

In over two decades of being involved in politics in some capacity I've found
that the only difference between the two major parties is how they want to
legislate control of my life.

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InclinedPlane
Sure looks like there's a strong correlation here, right?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Debt_Trend.svg>

Err, or maybe not? Even more important, the President doesn't control the
budget, congress does. What's the correlation between the budget deficit and
the party in congressional control?

We'd be a lot better off if political discussions were founded on substance
and reason rather than on silly half-backed "statistics" used to score lame
partisan points.

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masklinn
> What's the correlation between the budget deficit and the party in
> congressional control?

None. Because the factor is actually the interaction between executive and
legislative. When republicans have both seats, they have marching orders and
follow them to the letter leading to rubberstamping of whatever the other seat
wants and budget deficit increases.

When democrats control both seats, pretty much the same historically (might
have changed with the Obama administration because Obama's house shows a
distinct lack of balls and dem congresspeople haven't found their spine in the
15 years they've been looking for them).

Rep+Dem and Dem+Rep theoretically lead to the same thing, which is the
necessity for "bipartisanship" (== exchanging favors actually), limiting the
excesses of either side (Clinton admin).

Except now you have to get the current behavioral factors:

* Democrat congresspeople haven't had a spine in 15 years at least (since Reps got congress back in 1994), when faced with the GWB administration they mostly did nothing, from half cowardice and half political calculation (the GWB admin was not getting any better, letting it sink 2 more years and shifting any and all blame to the first 6 years would ensure a sweep in 2008)

* Republicans have gone completely batshit insane, they're practicing scorched-earth politics and since ~2007 they're not just pandering to the most insane side of their base, they're pandering solely to it. This voyage started with the Southern Strategy, Reagan's rhetorics gave it a sharp acceleration, GWB and 9/11 propelled into orbit and after 2007 finally got outside of sanity's gravitational well.

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gojomo
From a glance, his deficit and job growth assessments are likely sensitive to
definitions -- what's the first year that counts for an administration? was
Ford part of the Nixon administration? etc. -- and assumptions about lag
effects. (Were the 70s a hangover from the 60s boom? The 00s from the 90s? How
much of a ding should Obama, GWB, Reagan get for 09-10, 01-02, 81-82? Does
Vietnam belong to Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon?)

The reasoning about state-by-state indicators and presidential-party
preferences is very bogus; you couldn't turn 'red' states into 'blue' states
by adopting blue-state policy preferences; for one thing, the red states can't
afford them! (Some of those preferences are luxuries purchased with wealth,
rather than the original causes of wealth.)

Also consider the following: richer people lean Republican, but richer states
lean Democrat. People with high school diplomas are more Republican than those
without... but states with higher levels of high-school graduation are more
Democratic. Same with undergraduate degrees.

These counterintuitive results for the aggregates are all examples of
Simpson's Paradox:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox>

