Finding Historical Data V: The Curious Case of Ancestry.com

In today’s post, I’m going to talk about the curious case of Ancestry.com** — in that it’s a surprising resource for academics looking for historical data.  Ancestry.com (hereafter referred to as Ancestry) has long been a resource for amateur genealogists to track down distant ancestors, but I always thought of this as place for people … Continue reading Finding Historical Data V: The Curious Case of Ancestry.com

Broadstreet Does Thanksgiving, 2021

Here at Broadstreet, we hope that all our readers are having a restful, safe, and/or productive holiday break! To celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, we’ve decided to highlight historical dishes from the archives — ones that might inspire your cooking adventures this week. More specifically, one particular flavorful source of archival data has been collected by … Continue reading Broadstreet Does Thanksgiving, 2021

Memory Lane

There’s a new paper by Gethin, Martínez-Toledano, and Piketty in the QJE that’s worth discussing, entitled “Brahmin Left versus Merchant right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948-2020.” The paper uses a comprehensive electoral dataset to study class voting in 21 democracies, between 1948 and 2020 (and it’s worth noting that this paper is a … Continue reading Memory Lane

The Persistence of Historical Persistence

Today I’m going to talk about an annual review that Tom Pepinsky and I are doing, on historical persistence! We have a draft up on SSRN (comments welcome!), but I’ll discuss some of the highlights here — Broadstreet readers might be particularly interested in the recent publication statistics for historical persistence papers. Tom and I … Continue reading The Persistence of Historical Persistence

Elementary, My Dear PAP?

One of the top journals in political science, the Journal of Politics, announced this week that all experimental research (laboratory, field, and survey experiments) will be required to be preregistered. For those unfamiliar, a “pre-analysis plan” or PAP consists of a document of how a researcher will collect and analyze data, which is submitted to … Continue reading Elementary, My Dear PAP?