In the past, I did a lot of multi-level modelling with MLwiN 2.02, which I quickly learned to loath. Back in the late 1990s, MLwiN was perhaps the first ML software that had a somewhat intuitive interface, i.e. it allowed one to build a model by pointing and clicking. Moreover, it printed updated estimates on the screen while cycling merrily through the parameter space. That was sort of cool, as it could take minutes to reach convergence, and without the updating, one would never have been sure that the program had not crashed yet. Which it did quite often, even for simple models.
Worse than the bugs was the lack of proper scriptability. Pointing and clicking loses its appeal when you need to run the same model on 12 different datasets, or when you are looking at three variants of the same model and 10 recodes of the same variable. Throw in the desire semi-automatically re-compile the findings from these exercises into two nice tables for inclusion in 
again and again after finding yet another problem with a model, and you will agree that any piece of software that is not scriptable is pretty useless for scientists.
Continue reading “Running MLwiN from within Stata” »
January 21, 2012
Tags: bayes, Bristol, mlwin, multi-level modelling, pdf, software, stata
Category: Data and Methods, Political Science
Just finished my long-overdue review of David Art‘s latest book on Radical Right for West European Politics. I wonder how he survived those 140 interviews physically and mentally intact.
January 21, 2012
Tags: activists, european politics, extreme right, parties, party activists, radical right, western europe
Category: Book, My Stuff, Political Science, Review
Den Luxus getrennter Ämter – Kanzler + Präsident – leisten sich die Bundesländer nicht. Aber das bedeutet nicht, dass es die Aufgaben und die Rolle eines Staatsoberhaupts auf Länderebene nicht gibt. Der Ministerpräsident übernimmt sie – beide. Damit müsste also jeder Ministerpräsident wissen, “wie Präsident geht”, denn es ist ein ureigener Teil seines Jobs.
schreibt der Kollege Faas via Ministerpräsident = Präsident + Kanzler « Zweitstimme « ZEIT ONLINE Blogs.
Continue reading “Ministerpräsident = Präsident + Kanzler” »
January 15, 2012
Tags: germany, president
Category: Politics
I’m currently working on an analysis of the latest state election in Rhineland-Palatinate using aggregate data alone, i.e. electoral returns and structural information, which is available at the level of the state’s roughly 2300 municipalities. The state’s Green party (historically very weak) has roughly tripled their share of the vote since the last election in 2006, and I want to know were all these additional votes come from. And yes, I’m treading very careful around the very large potential ecological fallacy that lurks at the centre of my analysis, regressing Green gains on factors such as tax receipts and distance from next university town, but never claiming that the rich or the students or both turned to the Greens.
One common problem with this type of analysis is that not all municipalities are created equal. There is a surprisingly large number of flyspeck villages with only a few dozen voters on, whereas the state’s capital boasts more than 140,000 registered voters. Most places are somewhere in between. Having many small municipalities in the regression feels wrong for at least two reasons. First, small-scale changes of political preferences in tiny electorates will result in relatively large percentage changes. Second, the behaviour of a relatively large number of voters who happen to live in a small number of relatively large municipalities will be grossly underrepresented, i.e. the countryside will drive the results.
Continue reading “Robust Regression of Aggregate Data in Stata” »
January 15, 2012
Tags: aggregate data, ecological fallacy, Greens, MM, municipalities, regression, rhineland-palatinate, robreg, robust, stata, voters
Category: Data and Methods, My Stuff, Political Science
Like a premature Christmas present, my author’s copy of “The Extreme Right in Europe” arrived before the weekend. It’s a hefty volume of almost 500 pages that comes with a equally hefty price tag of just under 80 Euros. As you can see from the table of contents (the PDF also contains the introduction and a large chunk from Gilles Ivaldi’s chapter), it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but I like the idea of bringing together contributions on Eastern and Western Europe and dealing with multiple facets of the right (parties, movements, voters, ‘culture’). While I’m particularly partial to the chapters by Ivaldi and de Lange, which are on matters close to my own research interests, Heß-Meining’s piece on Right-Wing Esotericism stands out for the sheer weirdness of its subject: Hitler’s hideout in the Arctic and Al Gore the Vampire, you name it. So if you’re looking for a last-minute Christmas present for this XR-head stoner uncle of yours … just kidding of course.
As an aside, it’s remarkable that this book was published in English. The volume as well as the conference on which it is based were sponsored by French and German institutions. A few years ago, that would have meant a bilingual conference and publication. Outside Luxembourg, what is the number of scholars working in the field who could have actively participated in the conference? And how much larger would have been the number of potential readers? Individually and collectively, French and German political science might still be too big to fail for the time being, but it’s good to see that we as a discipline chose relevance. Occasionally.
To celebrate this moment of pre-Christmas clarity, here’s the author’s version of my chapter Continue reading “Just out: Backes/Moreau (Eds) The Extreme Right in Europe” »
January 12, 2012
Tags: contextual factors, elections, electoral support, electorates, esotericism, europe, extreme right, extremism, literature, parties, Political Science, Review, sociology, voting
Category: My Stuff, Political Science
Whose afraid of whom?
The liberal German weekly Zeit has commissioned a YouGov poll which demonstrates that Germans are more afraid of right-wing terrorists than of Islamist terrorists. The question read “What is, in your opinion, the biggest terrorist threat in Germany?” On offer were right-wingers (41 per cent), Islamists (36.6 per cent), left-wingers (5.6 per cent), other groups (3.8 per cent), or (my favourite) “no threat” (13 per cent). This is a pretty daft question anyway. Given the news coverage of the Neo-Nazi gang that has killed at least ten people more or less under the eyes of the authorities, and given that the authorities have so far managed to stop would-be terrorists in their tracks, the result is hardly surprising.
Continue reading “Are Germans More Afraid of Neo-Nazis Than of Islamists?” »
December 3, 2011
Tags: access panel, binomial, distribution, exact confidence intervals, extremism, germany, Islam, multinomial, neo nazi, proportions, right wingers, stata, terrorism, yougov poll
Category: Data and Methods, My Stuff, Politics
Unless you spent the last couple of days under a rock, you will have heard about the terrible series of (at least) ten neo-Nazi murders that has stunned Germany. In my view, three things are particularly remarkable about this crime.
First, the mainstream media including the public broadcasters and the left-liberal press refer to the series as ‘Dönermorde’, i.e. ‘Kebab Killings’, because most of the victims were small businessmen of Turkish origin. This is impious at any rate, and not exactly sensitive in the context of ethnically motivated violence.
Continue reading “Random thoughts on right-wing terrorism in Germany” »
November 14, 2011
Tags: extremism, federal constitutional court, germany, institutions, killings, mainstream media, murders, neo nazis, NPD, prosecution services, right wing extremism, right-wing, state
Category: My Stuff, Politics
My default for writing anything that is longer than a page is LaTeX (possibly via org-mode, if it is short and simple). In fact, the bond that ties me to the LaTeX/Emacs combo is so strong that I want to use it even for texts that are exactly one page long, i.e. conference posters.
CTAN lists a lot of packages and frameworks for posters, but I found most of them too heavy/compl
Continue reading “Quick and Fancy Conference Posters with beamer/beamerposter” »
November 6, 2011
Tags: beamer, beamerposter, conference, emacs, latex, poster, presentation
Category: Data and Methods, My Stuff
Writing for encyclopaedias is by and large a thankless task. You get no recognition at all and have to summarise all you deem relevant about your field of expertise in 500 or 1000 words without any chance of contributing something new, being original or at least witty. But sometimes, it can be fun. I realised that when I was recruited to write the article on Fringe Parties for the all new CQ Encyclopedia of Political Science (prepared with the assistance of APSA). Now that is a subject that is close to my heart. Here’s the author’s version of the manuscript (PDF).
Fringe Parties
Continue reading “Mini publication: Fringe Parties” »
November 2, 2011
Tags: fringe parties, parties
Category: My Stuff, Political Science, Uncategorized
Life as an early 21st century comparativist is good: Skim through the English literature on country X, Y, and Z, get the dataset from some institution’s website, run the models on a superfast computer, and hey presto, you’re done. More often than not, one might be tempted to skip the literature bit completely and simply analyse a dataset on any group of countries, because this dataset has the variables required to run some fancy model that one always wanted to run. The phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ springs to mind.
Therefore, analyses by people who read and speak the relevant languages and even live in the country they are writing about fill me with vicarious pride. While I was going back and forth between Angela’s Own Country and the Disgraced Republic Formerly Known as Hellas, two fine specimen have cropped up on the internet: My old chum Ben Stanley has a journal-length piece on the Polish parliamentary elections at the monkey cage, and Jacob Christensen of trailer park political scientist fame gives an equally detailed account of the situation in Denmark.
October 13, 2011
Tags: denmark, elections, poland
Category: Political Science, Politics, Uncategorized
