Tuesday, March 18, 2014

FiveThirtyEight on AZ State Politics

FiveThirtyEight had an interesting article, The Wild, Conservative West. It seems that while Arizona is conservative, it's state legislature is way more conservative than it's people (and virtually any other state legislature in the country). The explanation is that clean election laws level the playing field between mainstream and extreme candidates. Also that long term representatives mellow out over time but Arizona has a term limit of 8 years meaning that representatives don't reach the mellow phase of their careers.

The annoying thing is that even though it's a FiveThirtyEight article there are no graphs and no real data. There are links like in this sentence:

Indeed, a study by Harvard University’s Andrew Hall and a separate study by the University of Denver’s Seth Masket and the University of Illinois’s Michael Miller both show that clean election laws lead to more extreme candidates.

but one is to a 43 page paper and another is to a page announcing a paper from two years ago but the link to the actual paper on that page is dead. I thought they were supposed to summarize the data for me with interesting graphs.

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