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It is often taken as common knowledge by scholars, pundits, and journalists that the United States now exists in a period of intense “polarization”. The United States is a country divided along political lines—be they partisan, ideological, or geographic.

Many Roads to Success! When first learning to code in R students often feel like there is exactly one way to get to a desired result. One way to load data, one way to draw a density plot, one way to run a regression—this is (emphatically) not true!

Few topics are as often abused by pundits and political scientists as ideology—particularly as it relates to partisan polarization. Political scientists are uncharacteristically eager to problematize polarization and insinuate bold action to ameliorate—or at least avoid amplifying—polarization.

At this point, it’s well established that the ANES CDF’s codebook is not to be trusted ( I’m repeating “not to be trusted to include a second link!). Recently, I stumbled across another example of incorrect coding in the cumulative data file, this time in VCF0731 - Do you ever discuss politics with your family or friends?

Ron DeSantis speaking in 2017 | photo by Gage Skidmore In a painfully predictable turn of events, COVID-19 cases have begun to skyrocket in Florida, a few short weeks after state and local government began the process of (prematurely) rolling back public health safeguards.

The American National Election Study (ANES) is one of the longest running survey datasets, stretching back to 1948—offering public opinion researchers excellent continuity over a broad base of questions. ANES data is hosted either as individual survey years, or in the “cumulative data file” (CDF), which coalesces each biennial (or quadrennial) iteration of the survey into a single dataset.