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JohnCRuf / alderman_machine

This is the repository for a research project investigating clientelistic politics in Chicago
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Copy Bordeau's border specification #43

Open JohnCRuf opened 11 months ago

JohnCRuf commented 11 months ago

Olivia Bordeau has a brilliant JMP that I can copy for this project, that gives me a research design basically guaranteed to work:

https://www.oliviabordeu.com/papers/fragmented_cities_obordeu.pdf

Look at borders, order them by size. Larger wards will be less likely to spend menu money on local fringes. Use a border discontinuity design to estimate the border jump from dense to non-dense wards.

JohnCRuf commented 11 months ago

Narrator: Nothing is guaranteed to work.

Copied the border design and got some really weird result: Borders are emphasized not vice versa.

JohnCRuf commented 11 months ago

Ok this was a terrible idea from the start.

image

Concept of a "core" vs "border" precinct is absolute garbage when half your wards look like above.

JohnCRuf commented 11 months ago

Chalk this up to a lesson in "blindly copying other people research designs in a rush without thinking them through is a terrible idea, john" take 1000

JohnCRuf commented 11 months ago

What I'll likely need to do is come up with a mapped mesh which will likely take explicit collaboration with Olivia to figure out what is going on here so I'm going to close this for now.

JohnCRuf commented 11 months ago

Ok I quickly came up with a fix for this:

Just geomatch to the census block level:

https://data.cityofchicago.org/Facilities-Geographic-Boundaries/Boundaries-Census-Blocks-2010/mfzt-js4n

This isn't using any support data so we don't need to restrict ourselves to the precinct level. We can go deeper.

JohnCRuf commented 11 months ago

Currently working on this, should be ready early tomorrow. Getting things to the census block level took a few hours and the big problem is computing the precinct-to-nearest ward distances. The total computation will take approximately 7 hours so I'll run it when I go to bed tonight.