Politics Archive:

Two different analyses of supreme court decisions. I didn’t dig into the methodology, but the papers are available if you’re interested.

The so-called Quinn-Martin scores show the court trending significantly to the right in recent years, with even its left flank being relatively middle-of-the-road, relative to history.

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Bailey shows the court has become significantly more conservative since, for example, the 1960s, he still pegs the four more liberal justices as clearly to the left of the court, historically speaking. In addition, Bailey’s model actually suggests the court, while more conservative than in most of the last several decades, isn’t all that much more so than it was in the 1970s or when Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote in the 1990s and early 2000s.

 

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The efforts that go into tracking civilian deaths in modern conflicts are admirable. The fact that we dismiss them so blatantly is crazy. Regarding the design, the annotations are a tad slow for my taste

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I almost missed the histogram with links to details of each attack – select “victims” in the upper left.

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I suppose you could argue about what metric to use to measure the effectiveness of the drug war – but I’ve never seen one that justifies the costs (probably true for most “wars”).  Anyways, the author of the below chart does a great job detailing his sources and methodology on his website.

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An excellent annotated analysis by the NYT looking at federal, state, and corporate tax brackets.

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Hopefully these will be the last ones of the cycle – though these were nicely done by the Chicago Sun-Times’ Max Rust:

By margin of victory (technically, the same data as the “purple america” map that used blue/red hues).

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by electoral votes:

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By the talented Robert J Vanderbei

AllYears

And here’s 2012 as calculated today:

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How effective was all the new campaign spending? I’m sure the analysis will be debated until the next election.

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Preliminary estimates of total:

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Also, if you’re all worked up about the election (as I was yesterday), it calmed my nerves and restored my faith in democracy a bit to read this article from Cracked (which is having oddly insightful articles lately)

Fantastic flow chart from the NYT showing what happens depending on which way swing states go.

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Nice work by NPR – though I generally prefer non-contiguous cartograms.

The United States, with state size based on ad spending by outside groups in presidential race.

Thanks to Fez for sending in the link!

From the generally impartial Pew Center:

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Increase in federal support to states during recession:

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Where the federal grant money went as percent of state revenue:

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Another beauty from xkcd. I’m a little dubious of the methodology behind the liberal/conservative distinctions, but they’re upfront and clear about what is being displayed.

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Some fantastically clear interactive maps from the Washington Post, identifying tossups in each race (Presidential, Senate, House, Governor).

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I’m a little surprised by the increase in non-payers over the years.

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Non payers by state. I’m not sure I agree with using ordinal coloring – especially when so many states fall into the 30-40% range.

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“Eastern Europe” doesn’t really exist anymore. In fact, it never really did in the first place, according to this videographic.

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I thought the comparison with age of population was a smart addition.

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