Study Claiming Link Between Stimulus Funding and Partisanship is Manifestly Flawed

Why I love FiveThirtyEight, Study Claiming Link Between Stimulus Funding and Partisanship is Manifestly Flawed.

"A study purporting to find a connection between stimulus spending and the partisanship of a district suffers from an obvious flaw. But in so doing, it provides an example of why it's important to retain some common sense -- and some sense of context -- when conducting a statistical analysis."

"That de Rugy has testified before Congress on the basis of her evidence, and never paused to consider why the top five congressional districts on her list overlap with Sacramento, Albany, Austin, Tallahassee and Harrisburg, is mind-boggling. The presence of a state capital is the overwhelmingly dominant factor it predicting the dispensation of stimulus funds. This could have been discerned in literally five minutes if she had bothered to look at the apparent outliers in her dataset and considered whether they had anything in common -- a practice that should be among the first things that any researcher does when evaluating any dataset."

"But my bet is that this is all a bunch of noise resulting from an incomplete -- and possibly deliberately biased -- research design. If de Rugy follows my recommendations -- excludes state capitals, accounts for a broader array of demographic variables, and evaluates unemployment rates at the district level -- and still finds a statistically significant positive relationship between the distribution of stimulus funds and whether the district elected a Democrat to Congress, I will buy her and three of her colleagues lunch anywhere in Washington or New York City. And if such a study is published in a credible, peer-reviewed journal, I will buy them dinner as well."