U.S. Politics; Who Watches the Watchers?

[DMC]

Just now, Tywin et al. said:

I looked at the methodology

Yeah was just looking at it myself.  The item is indeed open-ended, specifically:

Quote

Would you mind naming any of them (the three branches of government)?

I still wonder what the researchers qualified as a correct answer.  @Yukle may be entirely right that "courts" or "Congress" were deemed incorrect.  Dunno what I'd do about "cabinet."  That seems, like, half-correct (as would "bureaucracy," or even "president"), which is why you do multiple choice in the first place!

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

58 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

Yeah was just looking at it myself.  The item is indeed open-ended, specifically:

I still wonder what the researchers qualified as a correct answer.  @Yukle may be entirely right that "courts" or "Congress" were deemed incorrect.  Dunno what I'd do about "cabinet."  That seems, like, half-correct (as would "bureaucracy," or even "president"), which is why you do multiple choice in the first place!

How do you balance that with people who get lucky and guess correctly? I would think the numbers on a multiple choice poll would be a lot higher simply because there’s a 25% they’d get the question right even if they had no idea what the correct answer was. I think it would be better to ask open ended questions, accept answers that are close enough, but not spot on, and then in the final report lay out how many specifically said the Executive Branch vs. the president, Legislative Branch vs. Congress/Senate and Judicial Branch vs. the Supreme Court. That way you could figure out how many Americas specifically know the branches versus those who know the gist of it.  

[Mexal]

The corruption is on another level. I imagine it'll only get worse. BBC is reporting that Ukrainian government paid Michael Cohen upwards of $600,000 to get a meeting between the Ukrainian president and Trump. A week after that meeting, the Ukrainian's stopped working with Mueller's team on their investigation into Paul Manafort.

 

[DMC]

33 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

How do you balance that with people who get lucky and guess correctly? I would think the numbers on a multiple choice poll would be a lot higher simply because there’s a 25% they’d get the question right even if they had no idea what the correct answer was. I think it would be better to ask open ended questions, accept answers that are close enough, but not spot on, and then in the final report lay out how many specifically said the Executive Branch vs. the president, Legislative Branch vs. Congress/Senate and Judicial Branch vs. the Supreme Court. That way you could figure out how many Americas specifically know the branches versus those who know the gist of it.  

Well, sure, that depends on your standards.  I'm fine with looking for the respondents that simply "get the gist of it."  You leave it open-ended and people get nervous.  Even if they're entirely aware of SCOTUS, there's a tendency for respondents to overthink it and say something like "the president, the House, and the Senate."

ETA:  @Tywin et al. - I think it'd be interesting to see how many named executive/legislative/judicial as opposed to their official titles as well.  And that data is usually there and (good) researchers will even report it.  Problem is most publishers don't care about such a distinction, they just wanna see the pie chart.

[IheartIheartTesla]

1 hour ago, dmc515 said:

Yeah was just looking at it myself.  The item is indeed open-ended, specifically:

Would you mind naming any of them (the three branches of government)?

I still wonder what the researchers qualified as a correct answer.  @Yukle may be entirely right that "courts" or "Congress" were deemed incorrect.  Dunno what I'd do about "cabinet."  That seems, like, half-correct (as would "bureaucracy," or even "president"), which is why you do multiple choice in the first place!

To be perfectly rigorous, the only three appropriate answers are:

Yes I would mind

No I would not mind

Not sure

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, dmc515 said:

This reminds me of a judicial politics seminar a few years back.  We were scrutinizing a study that found a certain (very high) percentage of respondents could not identify who the head of the Supreme Court was.  I don't recall exactly the details, but the researcher(s) had imposed a very stringent standard - as in, the answer "Chief Justice of the Supreme Court" was not correct because the official title has been "Chief Justice of the United States" since Salmon Chase in 1866.  That's ridiculous - none of us in the seminar knew that beforehand, expecting one's subjects to is clear manipulation of responses.

So, anyway, the point of that seminar and this post is yes, irresponsible or otherwise-motivated pollsters can often generate what they're looking for if they act in bad faith.  That's why academic researchers prefer survey items that at least give the respondent cues, or aren't open ended.  Best way to do that is multiple choice, i.e.:

"Who is the current Chief Justice of the United States?"

1. Anthony Kennedy
2. Paul Ryan
3. John Roberts
4. Stephen Breyer

Deal with students and others from other countries and yes, the general population of the US is as woefully ignorant of everything as our infrastructure is inferior to that of Europe and Japan.  Lately when I'm abroad in certain parts of the world looking back across the ocean the US looks like a crumbling medieval principality.

[DMC]

1 minute ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

To be perfectly rigorous, the only three appropriate answers are:

LOL, well played.

[DMC]

18 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Deal with students and others from other countries and yes, the general population of the US is as woefully ignorant of everything as our infrastructure is inferior to that of Europe and Japan.  Lately when I'm abroad in certain parts of the world looking back across the ocean the US looks like a crumbling medieval principality.

Yeah teaching at community college really disturbed me, albeit it's fair to clarify this was in Florida.  The amount of impromptu lectures I'd have to do was exhausting, and ranged from what was the cause of the Civil War to how to lease a car.  In terms of educational attainment, the US is empirically becoming more educated.*  

However, while a third of the country may have a bachelor's degrees now, that makes me really worried for the other two thirds.  Undergrad is a joke, my problem with it was literally because it was easier than the very good high school I was privileged to go to.  But, I suspect (hope?) that the correlation between having a bachelor's and knowing the three branches of govt is pretty high.  It's just the standards have been lowered - undergrad is now what used to be high school, and K-12 is something else entirely.

* That link also reports the racial disparity in obtaining a bachelor's - 56% white, 37% Asian, 23% Black, 16% Hispanic.  But, damn that affirmative action!

[Bonnot OG]

The NFL and their slave owner mentality can fuck the fuck off. 

Forcing people to stand for the anthem lol. Land of the free? HA. Fucking bunch of fascists. 

[maarsen]

3 minutes ago, Sword of Doom said:

The NFL and their slave owner mentality can fuck the fuck off. 

Forcing people to stand for the anthem lol. Land of the free? HA. Fucking bunch of fascists. 

We are having a provincial election up here in Ontario and what has made the news is a candidate for the mildly socialist NDP being raked over the coals for refusing to wear a poppy on Remembrance Day, or November 11. Personally, I have been refusing to wear one for over 40 years.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Well, sure, that depends on your standards.  I'm fine with looking for the respondents that simply "get the gist of it."  You leave it open-ended and people get nervous.  Even if they're entirely aware of SCOTUS, there's a tendency for respondents to overthink it and say something like "the president, the House, and the Senate."

ETA:  @Tywin et al. - I think it'd be interesting to see how many named executive/legislative/judicial as opposed to their official titles as well.  And that data is usually there and (good) researchers will even report it.  Problem is most publishers don't care about such a distinction, they just wanna see the pie chart.

Learned something new: you don’t get notifications if someone @’s you in an edit.

Anyways, why wouldn’t they want that side by side data? I think there would be a lot of interest in studying the depth of understanding. And you could take it several steps further by breaking it down by party, race, gender, region etc. I’m not sure what value it would add outside of academia, but it still would be interesting to look at.

[DMC]

4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Learned something new: you don’t get notifications if someone @’s you in an edit.

That's good to know.  I @ you in the edit for that purpose, alas it was futile.

6 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Anyways, why wouldn’t they want that side by side data? I think there would be a lot of interest in studying the depth of understanding. And you could take it several steps further by breaking it down by party, race, gender, region etc. I’m not sure what value it would add outside of academia, but it still would be interesting to look at.

Yeah, this is the same deal as the last time you asked me about why they don't report/get detailed data (I think in that case it was state-by-state, even district-by-district, numbers for the generic ballot).  Outside of academics, you're one of the very very few people who'd actually care about such data.

[Martell Spy]

Mueller moves to sentence Papadopoulos, signaling key step

The filing moves towards a sentencing for former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/23/mueller-russia-probe-george-papadopoulos-filing-sentencing-605153

Quote

 

A court filing Wednesday from special counsel Robert Mueller's office may be a signal that his investigation into Russian efforts to coordinate with the Trump campaign is nearing a conclusion.

The filing asked a federal judge to start the process of preparing a pre-sentencing report for former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty last year to lying to investigators in the Trump-Russia probe.

 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Did I completely overlook this a month or so ago or is this new?:

Quote

(CNN)President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, had his White House security clearance restored Wednesday, a person familiar with the matter said, after months of uncertainty stemming in part from his role in the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Kushner met with Mueller's investigators a second time in April and answered questions for seven hours, according to his attorney, Abbe Lowell. He had previously sat for an interview last November that was largely focused on former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who soon after pleaded guilty to charges of making false statements to the FBI.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/23/politics/jared-kushner-security-clearance/index.html

If this is new, it continues the pattern of finding out about stuff a month or so after it happened. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

This is a test.

ETA:

@dmc515,

I'm curious to see if I didn't get a notification because you had already quoted me in that post or if it's because the @'s don't work in editing. Guess we'll find out.

Anyways, regarding your last comment, wouldn't scholars want to push for these kinds of studies though? I know funding is tight, but it seems like a good way to advance your career while potentially finding valuable data. I feel like polling is too shallow these days, and the deeper dives might eventually pay off. 

 

[DMC]

39 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

ETA:

@dmc515,

I'm curious to see if I didn't get a notification because you had already quoted me in that post or if it's because the @'s don't work in editing. Guess we'll find out.

It notified me - so it appears it's because I already quoted you, not because of the edit.

40 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

wouldn't scholars want to push for these kinds of studies though? I know funding is tight, but it seems like a good way to advance your career while potentially finding valuable data. I feel like polling is too shallow these days, and the deeper dives might eventually pay off. 

Oh sure, and it may very well be out there.  I'd cite a dataset site, but there's so many these days I wouldn't know where to start.  The datasets you'll find in academic surveys are going to be much more thorough than a commercial firm.  And there's plenty available.  The push to publish one's dataset once what it's for gets published is very strong in the entire discipline.  And considering two of my committee members help lead that push, I'm totally on board even if I didn't wanna be.

[Bonnot OG]

5 hours ago, maarsen said:

We are having a provincial election up here in Ontario and what has made the news is a candidate for the mildly socialist NDP being raked over the coals for refusing to wear a poppy on Remembrance Day, or November 11. Personally, I have been refusing to wear one for over 40 years.

It's disgusting. I know there is an Irish soccer player over in the UK that gets a ton of shit for not wearing one because he does not support how the British military acted in Northern Ireland.


Football here is just the new cotton. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

5 hours ago, Sword of Doom said:

The NFL and their slave owner mentality can fuck the fuck off. 

Forcing people to stand for the anthem lol. Land of the free? HA. Fucking bunch of fascists. 

Yeah.  So much.  I stopped watching the NFL in 2012/13 for other but similar reasons and bow looking back I'm kind of surprised I ever gave a shit.  The weird forced 'patriotism' (fascism) shit is the most obvious part of the bs but the whole culture of what on/off field issues the sport and the coverage of it value becomes extremely disgusting extremely quickly with even the most surface exploration.  And that's just what we see after it's all been packaged nicely.   A friend was in the NFL for 11 years and some of the shit he told me pretty much ended my 'fanhood' immediately.

[Mexal]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Did I completely overlook this a month or so ago or is this new?:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/23/politics/jared-kushner-security-clearance/index.html

If this is new, it continues the pattern of finding out about stuff a month or so after it happened. 

It is new.

[Yukle]

1 hour ago, larrytheimp said:

Yeah.  So much.  I stopped watching the NFL in 2012/13 for other but similar reasons and bow looking back I'm kind of surprised I ever gave a shit.  The weird forced 'patriotism' (fascism) shit is the most obvious part of the bs but the whole culture of what on/off field issues the sport and the coverage of it value becomes extremely disgusting extremely quickly with even the most surface exploration.  And that's just what we see after it's all been packaged nicely.   A friend was in the NFL for 11 years and some of the shit he told me pretty much ended my 'fanhood' immediately.

The NFL is the perfect symbol of American fascism: white men owning billion-dollar teams that suck the livelihoods out of their communities with outrageous stadium contracts, controlling the lives of mostly black men whose brains are being destroyed by the sheer violence that their owners denies happens at all.