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Excerpt: 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…

Technorati Tags: extreme right, germany, NPD, political, racial hatred, right wing extremism, science

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.

Technorati Tags: academic titles, german, germany, Politics

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Excerpt: 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…

Technorati Tags: democracy, european union, Islam, multi-level analysis, Muslims, sociology, stata, turkey

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Excerpt: 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….

Technorati Tags: economic, political, science, voting

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Excerpt: 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,…

Technorati Tags: data, make, Political Science, stata

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Excerpt: 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…

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

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Excerpt: 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. Unfortunately, the interpretation of the resulting coefficients is less straightforward. A…

Technorati Tags: interaction, quantitative methods, stata, statistics

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Excerpt: 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:…

Technorati Tags: attitudes, inequality, institutions, Political Science, replication, turnout, voting, 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.

Technorati Tags: Clinton, Obama, primaries, USA, voting