Adam Berinsky is presentjng this paper at the New York Area Political Psychology Meeting today. I don’t have much to say about the content of the paper, except that a key issue would seem to me to be framing: are civil liberties a luxury (as our math professors would say in college when proving a theorem, “culture”) that we can’t afford in wartime, or are civil liberties a form of security that is needed more than ever during a war? I would think that many of the controversies about civil liberties–in policy discussions and in public opinion–depend on this framing.

In any case, I have some comments about the graphs in the paper. First, I like how the paper follows in the Page and Shapiro tradition of presenting results graphically rather than as tables. For the Berinsky paper, I’d recommend more consistency in the presentation, basically displaying the information, wherever possible, as line plots with time on the x-axis. This parallelism will make the paper easier to read, I think–partly because the graphs can be made physically small and thus fit into the text better, also because a compact display allows more information to be displayed and be made visible in one place (so that the reader–and the researcher–can see more comparisons and learn more).

In detail:

The x-axes should be cleaner. I’d recommend, either putting a tick mark at Jan 1 for each year, or else showing year boundaries on the x-axis and putting the year labels between tick marks (so that, for example, “2003” is placed between the 1 Jan 2003 and 1 Jan 2004 tick marks. It’s confusing to read raphs such as Fig 1 with tick marks at “Jul-2001”, “May-2003”, “Mar-2003”, etc.

Fig 5.2 is hard to read. I’d recommend actually replacing Fig 5.2 by 3 small figures, one for each of the poll questions you’re analyzing. Figs would be on common scales, and for each fig, you can show the time series for Reps, Dems, and Independents. I’d also like to see these go back before 1995. Perhaps can get similar questions from NES?

Figs 5.3 and 5.4 should be combined as time series. Also, I’d like to see these questions ordered in increasing (or decreasing) support for the “no on civil liberties” response.

Fig 5.5 should have some data on it. Actually, I think it should be rewritten as a time series, with year on the x-axis and 2 lines for the 2 levels of war support (0 and 1). Also, I’d make this richer in info by considering subsets of the population. A famous example is education: highly-educated people supported the war more.

Fig 5.6 (“Threat and intolerance”) could use a more descriptive title. What are the questions here? It’s good for figures to be self-contained. Also, the lines should be labled directly (not with a legend) and the x-axis should just have labels every 10 years. Again, maybe more could be learned by looking at subsets of the population or at other questions.

Fig 5.7: a little confusing. Maybe breaking up into 2 or 3 or 4 little plots (arranged on a grid) would help. Also, I’d label the x-axis as discussed in the Fig 5.1 comment.

Figs 5.8 and 5.9 should be combined and presented as time series.