Which legislators support democracy? We tried to quantify senators' and representatives' views.

TLDR: On the whole, Republicans are a lot less pro-democracy than Democrats -- but the extent of their illiberalism depends on your definition of democracy.
53eig.ht/3BjC3tu Using a minimalist, "bare-bones" definition of democracy -- voting in favor of election results, against insurrections, and such -- some Republicans turn out to be quite supportive of democracy.

Don't be fooled by unanimous decisions or conservative dissents: this past term shows that the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority is only just beginning to flex its muscles. With @elena___mejia:

53eig.ht/3AwW8gD Newly-released Martin-Quinn scores show that Kavanaugh was likely the median justice -- though there wasn't much daylight between him, Roberts and Barrett.

But crucially, neither Kavanaugh nor Roberts are estimated to have moved to the left compared to where they fell last year.

How the unevenness of America's democracy threatens to unravel it, by @baseballot, @elena___mejia and me:

fivethirtyeight.com/features/advan…

Or, in other words, how Republicans have harnessed political institutions to gain power without winning a majority of votes. The political institutions that make up the playing field of American politics are increasingly stacked in favor of one side: the Republican Party. The GOP has an advantage in the Electoral College, the Senate, the House of Representatives -- and in many state legislatures.

This isn't easy to say, but.. this is my last week at @FiveThirtyEight. I've really loved working here.

Having a quantitative editor to check articles' data/code/methodology is something that sets 538 apart in media and speaks to how seriously it takes rigor and thoroughness... ...and it's been a privilege to work here and have that responsibility for the past 2 years, alongside the rest of the amazing copy desk.

I'm really grateful that 538 has also let me explore other journalist-y things, like data analysis (😃), writing (😅) & interviewing (😬).

I wrote (for @derStandardat, in German) about why the Chauvin verdict doesn't dismantle the two parallel systems underlying police violence:

derstandard.at/story/20001261… First, the overpolicing of Black Americans (nytimes.com/2017/07/03/opi…, features.propublica.org/walking-while-…), and the cycle of fines and fees people end up stuck in, leading to jail time (theappeal.org/the-lab/explai…, npr.org/2014/05/19/312…)

All the data behind our article on police misconduct settlements (53eig.ht/3qCulG2) is now public on Github! Our main aim here was to make everything we received in response to our FOIAs available to others:

github.com/fivethirtyeigh… But we want to encourage responsible use of this data! It's *not* comparable across cities, which is why we're not providing it as an easy-to-use, pre-compiled data set. We want you to use it -- but we want you to read about its idiosyncrasies first!

Last summer, we set out to find out how much cities spend on settlements for police misconduct -- bills often footed by taxpayers.

We got data from 31 cities. We also found that the data is basically impossible to compare across time or city.

53eig.ht/3qCulG2 Cities don't track this money in a straightforward, comparable way. Indeed, some don't seem to track it at all.

The suburbs shifted to the Democrats, and they also got more diverse. Is the story that simple? @geoffreyvs, @elena___mejia, @ameliatd and I find that education makes the story more complicated.

53eig.ht/3qPfxUW The biggest shift towards Biden was in suburban counties that became *both* more diverse *and* more educated over the past decade -- a lot of the GA suburbs fall into this category.

Where we saw red and blue mirages -- or, as I wanted to headline it, "Election Night was a marshmallow test for the country, and we failed".

@wiederkehra, @baseballot and I look at vote counts 1.5, 12 and 72 hours after polls closed in each state:

53eig.ht/3lkZmvC In some states, generally those where absentee votes were processed before Election Day, the race looked competitive after 90 minutes, only for Election Day ballots to conclusively put Trump in the lead. (Missouri and Montana are also in this category.)

Four reasons Biden has a better shot than Clinton did in 2016 -- and 2 reasons there's still uncertainty.
A summary 🧵:

1. Biden's lead is bigger and more stable than Clinton's was.

Clinton's lead was smaller throughout, and more unstable. Biden's has never been < 6.6 points. 2. There are fewer undecideds than 2016.

A week before the 2016 election, around 14% of respondents said they were undecided or intended to vote third party -- and the vast majority of late deciders voted for Trump: 53eig.ht/2fIYJK2

This year, there are much fewer.

Vier Gründe, wieso es 2020 um Biden besser steht als 2016 um Clinton -- und zwei Gründe, wieso es trotzdem noch viel Unsicherheit gibt, heute im @derStandardat:

derstandard.at/story/20001213… 1. Bidens Vorsprung ist größer und stabiler als jener Clintons.

Clintons Vorsprung war durchgehend kleiner und schrumpfte zeitweise auf einen Prozentpunkt; Bidens lag nie unter 6.6 Punkten.

Why is turnout among young Americans so low? @ameliatd, @jazzmyth and I find that while people under 35 *are* more skeptical of the system, they're not apathetic. Instead, they're more likely to face structural barriers like not being able to get off work

53eig.ht/31Tsh22 (+ bonus charts!) How do we know young people aren't more apathetic? Well, they're not significantly more likely to say they don't vote because the system is too broken, or because they don't believe in voting. But they *are* more likely to say they wanted to vote, but couldn't.

We have evidence of racial discrepancies in police use of force. But some studies miss the extent of the problem by using data that's already biased.

fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-s…

@jazzmyth's awesome chart helps me explain this paper by @dean_c_knox, @conjugateprior and @jonmummolo: In short, as the paper explains, looking at use of force just among the set of people police have *stopped* isn't enough to let you correctly estimate racial discrepancies. If there's bias in who gets stopped in the first place, that confounds your estimate.

Everyone on even-remotely-stats-adjacent Twitter is appalled at this. I'm going to try to explain why in a thread.

1) Fitting models here is hard because the data is super noisy & changes direction every few days.

https://twitter.com/WhiteHouseCEA/status/1257680258364555264

2) If you have really noisy data, you could estimate a model to fit it closely, but that's likely to be overfitting (e.g. here, we don't *actually* think deaths are fluctuating so much). So instead, you have to make assumptions about what the data looks like absent the noise.

I *was* going to write an article about herding in Austrian polls this week... but things got weirdly busy, so here's a thread instead.

Austria's having an election this Sunday, and the polls have been incredibly stable. So stable, in fact, that there's good evidence of herding.

https://twitter.com/laurabronner/status/1177284463396556803

To check for herding, I took the 18 polls released since Aug. 1, and simulated the standard deviation you'd expect based on the polling average and sample sizes. I compared that to the actual standard deviation of the polls, which turned out to be *a lot* smaller.