Comments on FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Gay Rights are Popular in Many Dimensions

酒店經紀人, 菲梵酒店經紀, 酒店經紀, 禮服酒店上班, 酒店小姐兼職, 便服酒店經紀, ...

2009-10-10T08:11:52.252-04:00

酒店經紀人,
菲梵酒店經紀,
酒店經紀,
禮服酒店上班,
酒店小姐兼職,
便服酒店經紀,
酒店打工經紀,
制服酒店工作,
專業酒店經紀,
合法酒店經紀,
酒店暑假打工,
酒店寒假打工,
酒店經紀人,
菲梵酒店經紀,
酒店經紀,
禮服酒店上班,
酒店經紀人,
菲梵酒店經紀,
酒店經紀,
禮服酒店上班,
酒店小姐兼職,
便服酒店工作,
酒店打工經紀,
制服酒店經紀,
專業酒店經紀,
合法酒店經紀,
酒店暑假打工,
酒店寒假打工,
酒店經紀人,
菲梵酒店經紀,
酒店經紀,
禮服酒店上班,
酒店小姐兼職,
便服酒店工作,
酒店打工經紀,
制服酒店經紀,
酒店經紀,
菲
梵,

One more comment..."filled circles for existing la...

2009-06-22T19:57:21.496-04:00

One more comment..."filled circles for existing law" might be clearer than "filled circles for pro-gay policy."

This being politics, I think people do have a poin...

2009-06-22T19:54:51.569-04:00

This being politics, I think people do have a point that it would be nice if there were a visual cue where 50% was aside from the tick marks. Please don't enlarge the axes ranges, but perhaps slightly different shading, with the 20% around 50% one shade, the 10% to either side of that another shade, etc would visually show that most gay rights are well above 50% in support might make it clearer.

Also, tick marks for states at intervals of 25% would help, I had to count up to locate Florida as the middle state so I could think about it in terms of presidential election repercussions.

I went and made some maps based on this data, for ...

2009-06-18T14:18:10.926-04:00

I went and made some maps based on this data, for those who are interested.

@Nosimplehiway Nope, different Matt. Thanks for t...

2009-06-18T11:24:59.765-04:00

@Nosimplehiway Nope, different Matt.

Thanks for the details. I was just worried about straight up swiftboating and the like, but you laid out many more complications.

@Matt No it's not that simple, but in broad brush...

2009-06-17T11:08:55.809-04:00

@Matt No it's not that simple, but in broad brushstrokes, yeah.

Remember, these are polls in most cases of the general public, rather than likely voters. Likely voters tend (broad stereotype alert) to be older, less liberal and less transient than the general population.

Also, how a referendum is on the ballot can make a big difference. Presidential election years, odd numbered years, a particularly charismatic candidate of the state's minority party, national swings, or even just the state's largest city having a not heavily contested mayoral race can all shift the ideological composition of the electorate. It's unlikely that that shift would be more than maybe ten or twenty points, though, even in a perfect storm. So, 60-70% would be more the safe level for a vote.

More important than referenda (which I personally despise as a means of governance, but that's a whole other story) though, is what these polls say to elected officials. If a statewide candidate (Governor, AG, Controller, whatever) sees numbers like we see in LA, AZ or WV in support of outlawing housing discrimination, it may give them courage to act even in theoretically red states. I could definitely see even fairly conservative GOP candidates running for Gov in any of these states on a platform of no to marriage, but supporting ENDA.

BTW, I used to know a Matt Gilbert in Easton, PA. Any relation?

So empty circles to the right of 50 would be polit...

2009-06-16T09:58:05.346-04:00

So empty circles to the right of 50 would be politically feasible things to vote on? i know it's prolly not that simple...

It's an excellent chart, never said it wasn't. ...

2009-06-15T23:07:49.609-04:00

It's an excellent chart, never said it wasn't.

@Nosimplehiway The split becomes apparent partly because the states are ranked by their degree of support for gay marriage. It would be interesting to see how things looked if they were ranked by another series, such as job discrimination.

I was surprised that Pennsylvania is as high as it...

2009-06-15T20:47:02.108-04:00

I was surprised that Pennsylvania is as high as it is for gay rights. I really expected it to be closer to Ohio and Indiana - it leans culturally conservative on other issues. I was surprised so many people favor the anti-discrimnation and housing stuff. Why shouldn't people be able to hire and rent to who they please?

It's also that New Jersey and the desert Southwest states are almost as liberal on these issues as the weirdo liberal states of New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

Nosimplehiway said... The stock market graph you d...

2009-06-15T18:17:00.550-04:00

Nosimplehiway said...
The stock market graph you describe is a less than perfect parallel.

IMO, yes it is.

The whiners and crybabies want to see 'the full range', even if it includes a lot of white space that shows nothing. A DOW chart would also show 'the full range', including a LOT of white space that shows nothing.

I'm not saying show the daily closing average for the entire history of the DOW - I'm saying show the particular day's trading on that graph, and the whiners and crybabies would then get what they want. A graph that shows the full upside and downside the DOW has ever shown, but the data is represented in such a way that it is totally unreadable and unintelligible.

Or maybe the whiners and crybabies should just learn how to read charts and graphs.

Mike in Maryland

My Blogger ID is http://www.blogger.com/profile/02848893412251095965

I somewhat agree that showing a full 0-100 range w...

2009-06-15T17:48:19.764-04:00

I somewhat agree that showing a full 0-100 range would make it a better representation of the data for the general user, though it is a very good chart as is. Definitely a keeper.

I can read this chart fine, but then I'm used to reading charts and I get the reason for cutting off parts of it. But in this case, allowing 20% of the chart to be unshown on one end and 15% to be unshown on the other subtly shifts the visual center of the debate toward the anti-gay side of things. A full chart would show the majority of the range of data to be right of the 50% line. None of this was intentional, I believe, but any time statistics are shown graphically, there can easily be some slight distortion. With the data graphed on a full-range chart, the takeaway for this posting might easily have been: "22% of Utahns Support Second Parent Gay Adoption, While 18% of Massachusetts Residents Think It Should Be Legal For Landlords To Deny A Lease To Gay People."

Looking the chart over again, btw, I noticed something I hadn't seen before. Towards the bottom of the chart there's a split. Views on marriage, civil unions and adoption (private, family issues) shift hard to the conservative side, while views on public issues (employment, housing, hate crimes, even health benefits for same-gender partners) holds pretty steady above 50%. (With the exception of UT, which is usually an outlier, and to a much lesser degree OK and AR.) Maybe this is just because marriage is the issue in the news lately, so the pump has been primed. But I wonder if it is a more intrinsic philosophic difference... public sphere v. private sphere, or maybe "special rights" vs "discrimination just ain't right".

It certainly seems from this chart that the nation as a whole is ready for ENDA. Perhaps a good strategy for the pro-marriage side would be to put marriage on the back burner for a bit until opposition ages out of the electorate (maybe 5 years, certainly no longer than 10), and focus on ENDA or inclusion in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Once a victory is won on that, as it seems it could be, and the conservatives don't experience pillars of fire destroying homosexual riddled cities because of it, then the marriage fight may just be that much easier.

@MikeInMD The stock market graph you describe is a less than perfect parallel. The fact that you are capable of proposing a ridiculously bad graph for the stock market does not therefore mean that showing the full range of possible results might not improve this chart slightly. It's not that those who are offering a full-range chart as a constructive suggestion are whiners and cry-babies, and it's definitely not that they are incapable of reading it.

@phred Circles filled in mean that that particular policy has been put into effect. An empty circle means it has not. So, Iowa's solid purple circle means IA has a law against housing discrimination, while Pennsylvania's open purple circle means that a landlord can legally say, "Nah, I don't rent to homos." The circles only represent statewide policy, though, so in PA, housing discrimination is illegal in some cities, Philly, for example. :-)

I believe the graph should have rainbow colors. T...

2009-06-15T15:42:41.243-04:00

I believe the graph should have rainbow colors. Those colors simply aren't gay enough.

@CJ: I wondered about Benford's Law as well. App...

2009-06-15T09:36:11.790-04:00

@CJ:

I wondered about Benford's Law as well. Apparently a professor from the University of Michigan has done the analysis on the data and concluded that it complies with Benford's Law. The math is beyond me, but maybe you'd like to take a look at it. There's a link to a PDF here.

This might be obvious to anyone used to doing stat...

2009-06-15T09:33:29.011-04:00

This might be obvious to anyone used to doing statistical analysis but what do the filled-in vs. non-filled in circles mean? Does this speak to the quality/quantity of the data that dot is based on? Or does it show some sort of rounding or something?

Mr. Gelman, The chart is very readable AS IS, IMO...

2009-06-15T06:17:53.427-04:00

Mr. Gelman,

The chart is very readable AS IS, IMO.

My only quibbles would be agreeing with too many labels (10% breaks would be better), and to have a couple more vertical lines at maybe 30 or 35, and 65 or 70. Be a bit easier on the eye to guesstimate whether a state in the middle of the graph is at one percentage or another for a particular without scrolling up and down, up and down.

However, maybe to please some of the whiners and crybabies about the 0% - 100% not showing, maybe you should create a zero line on the left side, then squiggles showing the gap to 20%. On the right side, squiggles and then a line to indicate 100%.

If the whiners and crybabies can't read such a slightly revised chart, then don't even think of entertaining such complaints in the future.

And/or show a one day movement on the DOW, with the lower limit set to the lowest value of the DOW (July 8, 1932) when it stood at 41.22, with the upper limit set for the same amount over the historical high (14164.53 + 41.22 = 14205.75), and see if the whiners and crybabies could read it then, and/or have comments.

Mike in Maryland

My Blogger ID is http://www.blogger.com/profile/02848893412251095965

The chart would be so much improved if it extended...

2009-06-15T03:59:31.380-04:00

The chart would be so much improved if it extended from 0 to 100 per cent! Otherwise very interesting and useful.

It is STANDARD PRACTICE not to include any more ra...

2009-06-14T22:42:01.455-04:00

It is STANDARD PRACTICE not to include any more range on the axis than necessary to plot the data clearly.

Standard practice and good practice are not necessarily the same thing.

Alabama born and raised.

2009-06-14T22:38:44.920-04:00

Alabama born and raised.

Is it possible that there's some typo in the entry...

2009-06-14T21:23:33.122-04:00

Is it possible that there's some typo in the entry of the data for Utah? On this table, support for gay marriage is listed as 25%, but on the previous chart, support for gay marriage was below 20% at all three time points that are broken out. Assuming the values here should be some sort of (possibly weighted) average of the values from the other chart, this doesn't make sense.

My thought at first was that the second-parent adoption dot and the same-sex marriage dot were accidentally switched, but even the second-parent adoption dot has a value greater than 20% here, which means that it also couldn't be the average of the values in the other chart.

If I get the chance I will correlate this data to ...

2009-06-14T20:03:40.554-04:00

If I get the chance I will correlate this data to the the last several national elections.

I am curious how this tracks to popular vote and margins for Democrats and Republicans.

Very nice. I agree that showing cuts from 0-20 an...

2009-06-14T16:23:18.066-04:00

Very nice. I agree that showing cuts from 0-20 and 85-100% would be helpful. Only other comments on the graph itself would be to use a typeface other than Arial (which always looks very "default" and unconsidered.. except for Times or Comic Sans almost any other face would make this pop a bit more), and to perhaps ditch the border around the legend.. there are already enough black lines (all the same thickness) as it is.

What would be really great here is another sheet showing seven small maps, one for each policy. Not difficult to do at all, and I think you'd see some interesting patterns. If you want to send some data to bill@radicalcartography.net, I'd be happy to give a quick look.

I think that graphs that save range space should m...

2009-06-14T16:03:20.265-04:00

I think that graphs that save range space should make the cut explicit. E.g.

0--//--20--25-30...80--85--//--100

to draw attention to the fact that there is a natural range that's being truncated. Yes, if you read carefully and think about it you don't need this, but people don't do that reliably.

As for the Dow, seeing full-range graphs more often might well be beneficial.

The complaint about the order of items in the legend vs. the graph is a good one.

But otherwise it's well-done and interesting, I bet Tufte would be proud. What jumps out at me is the democratic deficit, the large number of states with strong support for unimplemented policies. Housing anti-discrimination has supermajority support in almost all states, but lots of empty circles. Conversely, Iowa in particular and 2nd parent adoption in several states has been pulled ahead of popular opinion.

@Nosimplehiway: Well put. Murders are not all the...

2009-06-14T15:47:44.185-04:00

@Nosimplehiway:

Well put.
Murders are not all the same. Many states have increased penalties for murder of a cop. And you can bet that assassination of the president would be treated much more seriously than the murder of a wife's lover.

This is because the policeman and the politician represent civil society. An attack on them is an attack on all of us. Similarly, hate crimes are, fundamentally, terrorism. And they should be treated as such.

wv: oustr: what Ahmedinejad may deserve but will not get.

@Scott While theoretically, I strongly sympathiz...

2009-06-14T12:52:13.143-04:00

@Scott While theoretically, I strongly sympathize with your initial urge that all crimes be treated equally, regardless of the criminal's state of mind, I must disagree with your conclusion, because a hate crime has an additional criminal goal beyond the crime itself, and therefore carries an additional offense.

A simple crime which is a non-hate crime goes something like this: Victim has a $100 watch on her wrist in a dark alley. Criminal wants watch. Criminal kills victim, takes watch. Terrible tragedy that should be punished, but it's a simple murder. It had no further social goal than sheer greed and no further social impact than perhaps raising the fear of dark alleys.

OTOH, in a hate crime, it runs more like this: Criminal decides to discourage behavior he does not like, but is not illegal, such as gay people holding hands in public, a synagogue operating, or a black family moving into a white neighborhood. The criminal attacks the "offending" person (the gay couple, the congregant leaving the synagogue or the mother of the black family) and kills them.

All are murders, and should first be prosecuted as such, yes. But hate crimes have an additional component. That component is the criminal's attempt to enforce his own personal view of social policy on his community in an extra-legal manner. So, although the community has decided that it's not illegal for two women to hold hands in public, or for a synagogue to open, or for a black family to live wherever they can afford to buy a home, the individual criminal decides that his personal judgment supersedes than that of the community.

This makes a hate crime more than just a plain old murder. A hate crime is a direct attack on our civil decision making process, an attack on the very notion of a democratic republic.

So, in addition to punishing the initial crime, hate crimes legislation punishes *that* act. Hate crimes legislation is a way for communities to re-affirm that, though the criminal has the legal and constitutional right to campaign to criminalize gay behavior, oppose the operation of a synagogue when such is proposed before a zoning board, or to re-establish segregation through accepted political, electoral and even organizational (boycotts, picketing, etc) means, he does not have the right to extra-legally overturn those decisions once they have been reached.

Scott... You said... "...you are essentially pun...

2009-06-14T12:09:38.811-04:00

Scott...

You said... "...you are essentially punishing a thought or belief." You seem to suggest that the "thought" that goes into "premeditation", which does in fact add to the penalty of any crime, should be ignored as well?

I am on your side when it comes to frowning on cluttering up the legal codes with superfluities and nonsense. However a hate crime is in a very different class from ordinary violence, because frequently these spring from hatred that is organized and occasionally very well funded.

So an inner-city drug rip-off murder and the murder of Matthew Shepard are vastly different in both scope and consequence.