Re: Statistical analysis of the DPL 2005 election
* Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> [2005-05-06 09:53]:
> Uh, the point of analyses like these is to get an idea of trends without
> being overly influenced by what your preconceived notions are -- and
> claims of the form "foo was irrelevant" seem particularly inappropriate
> in a statistical context if they aren't directly supported. In any
> event, the conclusions should arise from the statistics, not be added on
> as a post-hoc explanation -- you could as well say "Some have suggested
> AT's platform was irrelevant, and the influence of AT's candidature was
> solely due to the alignment of Mars and Jupiter relative to the moon".
> Maybe that seems reasonable, maybe it doesn't -- but there's nothing in
> the statistics to differentiate that explanation from the ones presented.
Well, the whole "Discussion" section was already subjective and
speculative even before I added Steve's interpretation. I think I have
made it clear from the beginning. That said, your comment above is not
wrong. If you wish, I can add a paragraph with your comments. Just send
me privately what you wish to be added to the paper.
> Personally, while I would've expected more or less the reaction Steve
> suggests; that doesn't seem to what actually happened: by all the
> measures I could easily do, and while some people certainly voted
> strongly for or against me, I couldn't find any significant difference
> as to how folks voted for me compared to how they voted for Branden;
> except (obviously) that he got a few more votes in his favour.
One obvious conclusion from the Factor Analysis is that the election was
polarized around the AT option, meaning that voters tended to rank AT
either above or below all the others (this is factor #2). OTOH, Branden
and Andreas received similar ranks and they were opposed to Matthew
(factor #3). Notice that the FA does not allow to understand why one of
the options won. Instead, it only allows to understand the main patterns
of opposition among the voters' choices.
> (It might be interesting to see if the factors still apply when the
> ballots are normalised; with "1--" going to "1[2.5][2.5]" instead of
> "144")
This is indeed a good idea. Unfortunately, I do not have time to try it
but anyone interested is free to change the distributed Perl script that
preprocess the tally data and see what happens.
--
Rafael
Reply to: