The “evidence” that the US Presidential Election will have been stolen

With his fortunes flagging in the polls, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has increasingly spoken of the 2016 election as being ‘rigged’. Dan Cassino looks at how ‘evidence’ of voter fraud might begin to circulate on and after Election Day; evidence which will be fueled by misunderstandings over exit polls, precinct sizes, and how election results are recorded

Why are there more and more guns in America? Blame Fox News

Dan Cassion 80x108Why do Americans buy guns? For many, it’s because they are worried that new gun control measures may stop them from buying guns in the future. Dan Cassino examines the role of the news media – specifically Fox and network news, in driving Americans’ fears about gun control. He finds that while mass shootings do lead to an increase in gun sales – as measured by the number of background checks – coverage of gun control measures by Fox leads to far more. He writes that in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012, for example, coverage of gun control by Fox News led to an additional 1.9 million background checks

How men's misplaced sense of masculinity in the face of Covid-19 may be killing them

The evidence and messaging are clear – one of the most important ways that people can protect themselves and others from the spread of Covid-19 is to frequently wash their hands. And yet, according to survey data, men are still washing their hands less often than women. Using survey data, Dan Cassino finds that men who feel that they have the same chance of dying from Covid-19 as women are less likely to wash their hands, potentially because they are doubling down on their masculine identities in the face of a threat that they can’t control

What happened?: how gender may have influenced support for Trump among African-American and Latinx voters in 2020

Following the 2020 election, there has been some evidence that Donald Trump performed better than polls had predicted among African-American and Latinx voters. Dan Cassino argues that gender identity – not race – may be a better indication of support for Trump. He writes that recent polls have shown that men who identify more closely traditionally masculine gender identity were more likely to vote for Donald Trump. That African-American men were more likely to assert this type of traditional gender identity may go some way towards explaining how they voted

Generic ballot measures, party candidate recruitment and the coming 2018 wave

Using data on generic ballot results back to 1954, Dan Cassino argues that generic ballot measures are most useful in identifying the quality of candidates recruited by a party, not necessarily the outcome of the race. With Republicans expected to slightly underperform their standing on the generic ballot measure this year, the 2018 midterms could look like a wave election for the Democrats

A study of the distributions underlying business survey responses in New Zealand

This study examines the distributions underlying business survey responses in New Zealand. These distributions are used in procedures which derive quantitative statistics from qualitative survey data. They are also used in an econometric procedure recently developed by the French economist Marc Ivaldi which uses survey data to test structural economic models. These procedures often assume that the distributions are normal. The purpose of this study is to examine the empirical validity of this assumption. The polychoric correlation coefficient procedure is used to test the goodness of fit of a standardised bivariate normal distribution on data from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research's Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion

President Trump’s approval ratings are being driven down by his ‘tweetstorms’

Presidential approval ratings are seen as critical to leveraging Congress, and are therefore important to any President who wishes to achieve legislative reform. Traditionally, Presidents have experienced a ‘honeymoon’ of initially high approval ratings – President Trump has bucked this trend with unprecedentedly low approval ratings for a new President. In new analysis, Dan Cassino finds that each of Trump’s ‘tweetstorms’ is costing him nearly one approval point each, indicating that his poor approval ratings are rather self-inflicted

Gender is costing Hillary Clinton big among men

There has been little discussion of the impact of Hillary Clinton’s gender on her electoral prospects, but are American men really ready for a female President? Looking at the results of a new experiment, Dan Cassino finds that the threat to male identity embodied by Clinton is costing her as much as 24 points among men, and bringing her down by 8 points overall