On Jun 27, 2009, at 7:13 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> hat was tendentious about it was that they were very clearly
> trying hard to construct a case out of whatever materials they
> could find or contrive.
>
> I'm not sure it would repay the time and effort it would
> take to deconstruct this polemic in statistics' clothing.
> But maybe if the itch persists I'll write a blog post about
> it and copy here.
>
> The short, broad-brush response would that all these statistical
> arguments depend on a number of assumptions. They key one for
> the Chatham House (CH) tract is that large numbers of people in
> many different places couldn't possibly have changed their minds
> this much in the course of four years. Then there's all this
> smoke and mirrors about aggregate "conservative" and "reformist"
> votes -- which assumes that Iranians map the political space the
> same way we do, a very large assumption indeed.
The "materials" you speak disparagingly of are pretty standard raw material of political analysis. People all over the place vote by ideology, region, ethnicity, and such, and why should Iranians be any different? The kinds of changes that CH talks about are extremely unusual in the electoral realm - not shifts of a few percentage points, which is what you normally see in other countries, but shifts that are so massive that they smell funny. And why is it so implausible that Iranians might identify in blocs that we call conservative and reformist? They might use different names, but as ideological tendencies, they're pretty sensible. Are Iranians too exotic to behave like people elsewhere?
Doug