The cronyism in this Tory government is so out-of-control that I honestly couldn’t keep track… so I combined my two main skills (puns and #Rstats) to create this interactive visualization.
One of the strangest patterns that emerges is the MILLIONS of pounds of government work that has been outsourced to firms linked to the “Exclusive Brethren” - a fringe Evangelical Christian sect.
First step is to create the underlying network data. We need one file of "nodes" - i.e. the people and organizations. And one file of "edges" - i.e. the connections between them.
I created these by hand, based on excellent investigate journalism:
Now we can pull these together to create a network visualization!
You'll notice that I included a column for "type" in the nodes file. This allows me to use different icons for people vs firms vs political organizations.
Ep 2 of "Suspicious Activity" (a podcast on the #FinCENFiles by @pineapplemedia and @BuzzFeedNews) recounts how George Osborne lobbied US regulators NOT to prosecute senior execs at HSBC...
... which is a brilliant illustration of "structural power" as developed by folks like @PepperCulpepper and @RaphaelJReinke, as well as @Cornelia_Woll's "collective power of inaction".
Check out the podcast and then follow-up with some further reading from #polisci! (a 🧵)
Culpepper & Reinke (2014) use the idea of "structural power" to compare and contrast the UK and US bank bailouts in 2008.
Harvard will continue employing David Kane, who has never published in a statistics journal and has a history of making basic stats errors, as Preceptor of Statistical Methods.
This isn't just failing upwards. This is affirmative action for racists.
So it turns out that the Harvard instructor who invited Charles Murray to speak in his class also blogs under a pseudonym and... it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect...
Most of his posts involve him offering an in-depth commentary about events at Williams College, where he graduated from in 1988 but doesn't seem to have any current affiliation...
Here he is mocking a "Diversity, Inclusion, Race Equity" meeting
2⃣Department hires a visiting professor to teach a class on African American political thought 🎉🥳 and... she's an AEI fellow who thinks "the declining interest and involvement in baseball is a consequence of the absence of fathers in the black community" 🤡🤡
The paper argues that recent work finding muted (or even positive!) electoral effects of austerity on incumbent support suffers from selection bias: incumbents avoid austerity when they are electorally vulnerable.