Vaguely interesting (Jan 14)

(1)  Poorer (but not wealthier) Republicans appear to be moving to the left on the question of whether it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. In other words, sometimes a voting group’s opposition to a policy in the abstract is really a more specific opposition to the other party shaping and implementing that policy.

(2)  “[A] major challenge for scientists is to be open to new and important insights while simultaneously avoiding being misled by our tendency to see structure in randomness.”

(3)  “Poole and Rosenthal show that a two-dimensional dynamic spatial model is the best fitting model for Congresses [from the founding through the mid-1980s]. What has happened in the past 20 years is that the second dimension of Congressional voting has slowly evaporated.”

(4)  “[T]he overwhelming majority (92%) of white [police] officers say the U.S. has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with whites; just 29% of black officers agree.”

(5)  “[T]he evidence is clear, and consistent, regarding the Comey effect. The timing of the shift both at the state and national levels lines up very neatly with the publication of the letter ….”

(6)  “The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior.”