Doing Research, Studying Association

Watch this clip from The Wire.  It is the best description of research, ever.

General Statistics and The Census

California and General State Politics

• Public Policy Institute of California -- California surveys and policy analysis
• California bills and laws 
• LAO -- Legislative Analyst's Office -- analysis of CA issues
• NCSL -- National Conference of State Legislatures -- analysis and data on state issues
• Open States -- bill information for all state legislatures

Elections, Parties, Campaign Finance

• Open Secrets -- Center for Responsive Politics site for federal campaign finance information
• FEC -- Federal Election Commission
• US Presidential Election Atlas -- just what the title says, great historical data
• US Elections Project -- turnout data
• California Elections Data Archive -- local elections in CA
• Join California  -- elections in CA
• California ballot measures -- archive going back to 1911

Public Opinion

• Polling Report -- aggregation of national poll data
• Gallup -- the best-known US pollster, delivering new numbers daily (for historical Gallup data, go to the Honnold Library menu, click "databases," then "Gallup Brain.")
• Field Poll -- archive of the best-known survey in California
• The 2014 exit poll

----------------------

Tocqueville, p. 513:

Americans of all ages, stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types – religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feelings by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking where in France you would find the government, or in England some great lord, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

Tocqueville, p. 517:

In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.

Flashback to September 21:

• Tocqueville on American democracy: "Under its sway it is not especially the things accomplished by the public administration that are great, but rather those things done without its help and beyond its sphere" (p. 244)
• Where people volunteer
• Where people give 

Alinsky, p. 19:

The power of the Have-Nots rests only with their numbers. It has been said that the Haves, living under the nightmare of possible threats to their possessions, are always faced with the question of "when do we sleep?" while the perennial question of the Have-Nots is "when do we eat?" The cry of the Have-Nots has never been "give us your hearts" but always "get off our backs"; they ask not for love but for breathing space.

Between the Haves and Have-Nots are the Have-a-Little. Want Mores — the middle class. Torn between upholding the status quo to protect the little they have, yet wanting change so they can get more, they become split personalities. They could be described as social, economic, and political schizoids 

Federalist 10:

Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like  discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. 

Alinsky, p. 54:

In all the reasoning found in The Federalist Papers, no point is so central and agreed upon as "Rich and poor alike are prone to act upon impulse rather than pure reason and to narrow conceptions of self-interest . . ." To question the force of self-interest that pervades all areas of political life is to refuse to see man as he is, to see him only as we would like him to be.

Alinsky, p. 52:

Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, put it this way: "What is a power, but the ability or faculty of doing a thing? What is the ability to do a thing, but the power of employing the means necessary to its execution?" Pascal, who was definitely not a cynic, observed that: "Justice without power is impotent; power without justice is tyranny." St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order, did not shrink from the recognition of power when he issued his dictum: "To do a thing well a man needs power and competence." We could call the roll of all who have played their parts in history and find the word power, not a substitute word, used in their speech and writings.

Alinsky, pp. 27-28:

To us the Declaration of Independence is a glorious document and an affirmation of human rights. To the British, on the other hand, it was a statement notorious for its deceit by omission. In the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Particulars attesting to the reasons for the Revolution cited all of the injustices which the colonists felt that England had been guilty of, but listed none of the benefits. There was no mention of the food the colonies had received from the British Empire during times of famine, medicine during times of disease, soldiers during times of war with the Indians and other foes, or the many other direct and indirect aids to the survival of the colonies. Neither was there notice of the growing number of allies and friends of the colonists in the British House of
Commons, and the hope for imminent remedial legislation to correct the inequities under which the colonies suffered.

Jefferson, Franklin, and others were honorable men, but they knew that the Declaration of Independence was a call to war. They also knew that a list of many of the constructive benefits of the British Empire to the colonists would have so diluted the urgency of the call to arms for the Revolution as to have been self-defeating. The result might well have been a document attesting to the fact that justice weighted down the scale at least 60 per cent on our side, and only 40 per cent on their side; and that because of that 20 per cent difference we were going to have a Revolution. To expect a man to leave his wife, his children, and his home, to leave his crops standing in the field and pick up a gun and join the Revolutionary Army for a 20 per cent difference in the balance of human justice was to defy common sense.