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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 10 months ago

JohnCRuf commented 10 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 9 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 9 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 9 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 9 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 9 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 9 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.