Yeah, it seems like "what do you compare to what" would be a hard question there.
Whatever else one might say about the way the government in the US is set up, it probably does make analysis like this easier. With different states having different laws, adopted at different times, etc etc etc, you get the right kind of data to do all kinds of cross-comparisons. For the UK, I'm thinking coming up with some before and after numbers to compare would be trivial*, rooting out confounding variables could be a real problem.
*Trivial in this case meaning "Probably involving a great deal of grunt work counting things, but not necessarily anything all that fancy on the math side".
-Morgan.
Whatever else one might say about the way the government in the US is set up, it probably does make analysis like this easier. With different states having different laws, adopted at different times, etc etc etc, you get the right kind of data to do all kinds of cross-comparisons. For the UK, I'm thinking coming up with some before and after numbers to compare would be trivial*, rooting out confounding variables could be a real problem.
*Trivial in this case meaning "Probably involving a great deal of grunt work counting things, but not necessarily anything all that fancy on the math side".
-Morgan.