The last ten days have been mind-boggling, with the emergence of new political facts at light speed. Consider that we went from vague references, to a whistleblower complaint, to the launch of an impeachment inquiry, to the release of a “transcript” of the President’s conversation with the Ukrainian president, to the current conflict of claim and counterclaim. …
Only two U.S. presidents have ever been impeached, and in the end neither was “convicted” or removed from office. This small sample size, however, has not stopped media pundits from providing their thoughts on all things impeachment!
At heart, I’m driven by data, and this imprecision (a sample size of 2) kept my mind racing late into the night this entire week. What do we really know about impeachment from an empirical perspective? Not much.
To overcome our sample size problem in U.S., we looked through a global lens and built a database of impeachments over the past 30 years, both inside and outside of the U.S. CONT.
Clifford Young, Ipsos