Udo Voigt, the leader of the NPD, has been charged with inciting racial hatred. During the 2006 World Cup, the party published a pamphlet that questioned the right of non-white players in the squad to represent Germany in the tournament. The NPD is the oldest amongst the three relevant extreme right parties in Germany. Founded in the early 1960s, the party was successful in a number of Land elections but could not overcome the 5 per cent threshold in the General election of 1969. For more than three decades, the party that once had tens of thousands of members and even set up its own student organisation barely survived as a political sect but played no role in electoral politics. If you can read German, here is a chapter on extremist parties and their voters with lots of fascinating details on Germany I wrote for a handbook on electoral behaviour.

Voigt was elected as party leader in 1996 and quickly modernised the party. His aggressive and dynamic stance persuaded the Federal government to apply for a ban of the party in the Federal Constitutional Court in 2003. The case was thrown out on procedural grounds, and for the first time in 40 years, the party managed to win seats in two state elections in 2004 and 2006.

Continue reading “Germany: Extreme right party leader charged with inciting racial hatred” »

Signify nothing has a short post on weird German regulations regarding the use of “foreign” (non-German) academic titles, with further links. The bottom line is: after 70 years or so, it’s gone.

Last year, the “Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie” published an article on the level of support for the European Union’s core principles (democracy, gender equality, religious freedom, rule of law) in Turkey. In essence, the author claimed that the level of support for these principles in Turkey is low because a) the level of economic development is low while b) the number of Muslims is very high. Thanks to the very efficient PR office at the university of Cologne, these findings made their way into the mainstream media in Germany (including the English service of the Deutsche Welle) and Turkey and eventually even into the more shady parts of the blogosphere (that are normally the object rather than the consumer of sociological studies).

I felt, however, that the analysis suffered from a whole host of serious methodological and theoretical shortcomings, and that the claims of the original paper are untenable. Therefore, I wrote a comment on “Paßt die Türkei zur EU und die EU zu Europa” (in German, also as PDF). The Kölner Zeitschrift has recently accepted my article, and it will appear in the next issue. Replication data and stata scripts for my paper are available, too.

Continue reading “Democratic values and attitudes in Turkey” »

The basic assumptions of the theory of economic voting are very simple:

• voters care about unemployment, inflation, and growth
• voters blame the government for adverse economic conditions
• voters use the ballot to punish the government.

Unfortunately, the impact of this effect is not constant over time and across countries, which is slightly embarrassing. In their recent book, van der Brug et al. do not claim that they have solved this puzzle, but they maintain that they have taken the discussion one step further. According to them, previous research has looked at the wrong variable, i.e. (dichotomous or multinomial) vote intentions. This is hardly surprising. For the last decade or so, these authors and their associates have campaigned for an alternative measure, namely the subjective probability to vote for each single party. However, their measure (which has been implemented in the European Election Studies) is not uncontroversial. First, analysts must account for the clustering of these ratings (while we might look at 4,000 or 6,000 ratings, we still have only 1,000 truly independent cases, i.e. persons). Second, if a respondent does not rate a party, is that a missing value or a zero probability? Third, comparisons across political systems (especially comparisons of two-/multiparty systems) are at least as dodgy as comparisons of the traditional variable. And finally, while counting votes/vote intentions obviously discards valuable information about the individual calculus that leads to this decision, subjective probabilities are closer to party sympathies than to real thing. Nonetheless, an interesting read.

Continue reading “A fresh look at economic voting” »

By relying on scripts (do-files), Stata encourages you to work in a structured, efficient and reproducible way. This text-based approach is familiar and attractive to anyone who has ever used a unix shell and the standard utilities. Actually, unix-flavoured utilities can make your stata experience even better. One non-obvious candidate is make, which is usually used for programming projects that require some sort of compilation.

Consider the following scenario. You have two ascii files of raw data, micro.raw and macro.raw. You want to read in both files, correct some errors, convert them to stata’s .dta format, merge them, apply some recodes, do a lot of preliminary analyses, and finally produce a postscript file and a table for inclusion in LaTeX. Of course, you could write one large do-File that does the job. But then, changing a tiny detail of the final graph would require you to repeat the whole procedure, which is time-consuming (especially when you work with very large datasets). Moreover, you often want to perform some interactive checks at an intermediate stage. So breaking down the large job in a number of smaller jobs that are much easier to maintain and produce a set of intermediate files seems like a good idea.

Continue reading “How Stata and a Makefile can make your day” »

If you are interested in subnational politics, France is an interesting case for many reasons. On the one hand, the country is highly centralised and divided into 96 (European) Departements (administrative units) with equal legal rights (though Corsica is a bit of an exception to this). In fact, Departements were created after the revolution in an attempt to replace the provinces of the Ancien Regime with something rational and neat. On the other hand, the Departements are vastly different in terms of their size, population, economic, political and social structure, which gives you a lot of variance that can be modelled. Electoral data is often made available at the level of the Departement (see e.g. the useful book by Caramani for historical results and the CDSP and government websites for recent elections) or can be aggregated to that level since electoral districts are nested in Departements. The French National Insitute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) has a wealth of data from the 1999 census and other sources, and even more is available from Eurostat. One thing that is incredibly annoying, however, is that many sources like Caramani, INSEE and the Wikipedia use the traditional French system. This system (which is part of the ISO standard ISO 3166-1) assigns numbers from 1 to 95 that once reflected the alphabetical order of the Departments’ names, though this initial order was a bit scrambled by territorial changes. The most obvious result of these are the odd 2A/2B codes for Corsica (after 1975, see this article on the French Official Geographic Code for the details). Rather unsurprisingly, Eurostat (and a few others) prefer the European NUTS-3 codes, which have a hierarchical structure that consists of a country (FR), region, and subregion (=Departement) code. If you want to merge Departmental data from various sources you obviously have to map one system to the other, which is cumbersome and prone to error. That’s why I wrote a little script in Perl that reads a table of Departmental Codes and creates a do-File for Stata, which does the actual mapping. From within Stata, you can simply type net from http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/stata to get the whole package. It should be fairly easy to adopt this to your own needs – enjoy!

Technorati Tags: france, subnational, departements, stata, perl, geocodes

Continue reading “Resolved: French Departements, INSEE, ISO and NUTS-3 codes” »

Many hypothesis in the social sciences involve interaction: The effect of some variable x (say xenophobia) on some variable y (say support for the extreme right) is conditional on a third variable z (say ethnicity). Modelling interactive hypotheses looks straightforward on the surface: simply generate a third variable by multiplying x and z and plug all three in your regression. In Stata, this process can be automated by means of the built-in command xi or by desmat, which is available from SSC.

Click on the citations to get bibliographic data.

Continue reading “Review: Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis” »

Last year, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations published an article which essentially argued that higher levels of welfare state spending create attitudes which are conducive to higher turnout. I was not convinced and so I wrote a comment/replication in which I demonstrate that there is no robust evidence for a universal, politically relevant relationship between
inequality/welfare state spending, and turnout (HTML). The journal has recently accepted the article for publication later in 2008, but for the time being, the manuscript is available here (PDF). I have also set up an archive with replication data for this paper.

Technorati Tags: turnout, voting, political science, inequality, welfare state, institutions, attitudes, inequality

Continue reading “Turnout, Institutions, Inequality, and the Welfare State” »

While I’m not an expert on US politics, I was recently “interviewed” online (in writing) on the US primaries (in German)

In the future, everyone will be famous for, er, 15 lines.