• can't attend the #PVV (#wilders party) pre-election rally tomorrow night because I can't get "security clearance". bother. possibly the firs #

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• can't attend the #PVV (#wilders party) pre-election rally tomorrow night because I can't get "security clearance". bother. possibly the firs #

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• sna #

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I’m teaching a lecture course on Political Sociology at the moment, and because everyone is so excited about social capital and social network analysis these days, I decided to run a little online experiment with and on my students. The audience is large (at the beginning of this term, about 220 students had registered for this lecture series) and quite diverse, with some students still in their first year, others in their second, third or fourth and even a bunch of veterans who have spent most of their adult lives in university education.

Who knows whom in a large group of learners?

Fortunately, I had a list of full names plus email addresses for everyone who had signalled interest in the lecture before the beginning of term, so I created a short questionnaire in limesurvey and asked them a very simple question: whom do you know in this group? Given the significant overcoverage of my list – in reality, there are probably not more than 120 students who regularly turn up for the lecture – the response rate was somewhere in the high 70s. If you want to collect network data with limesurvey, the “array with flexible labels” question type is your friend, but keying in 220 names plus unique ids would have been a major pain. Thankfully, one can program the question with a single placeholder name, then export it as a CSV file. Next, simply load the file into Emacs and  insert the complete list, then re-import it in limesurvey.

Getting  a data matrix from Stata into Pajek is not necessarily a fun exercise, so I decided to give the networkx module for Python a go, which is simply superb. Networkx has data types for representing social networks, so you can read in a rectangular data matrix (again as CSV),  construct the network in Python and export the whole lot to Pajek with a few lines of code:


#Some boring stuff omitted
#create network
Lecture=nx.DiGraph()
#Initialise
for i in range(1,221):
Lecture.add_node(i, stdg="0")
for line in netreader:
sender = int(line[-1])
#Sender-ID at the very end
edges=line[6:216]
#Degree-scheme
Lecture.node[sender]['stdg']=line[-8]
#Edges
for index in range(len(edges)):
if edges[index] == '2':
Lecture.add_edge(sender,int(filter(str.isdigit,repr(knoten[index]))),weight=2)
elif edges[index] == '3':
Lecture.add_edge(sender,int(filter(str.isdigit,repr(knoten[index]))),weight=3)
nx.write_pajek(Lecture,'file.net')


As it turns out, a lecture hall rebellion seems not very likely. About one third of all relationships are not reciprocated, and about a quarter of my students do not know a single other person in the room (at least not by name), so levels of social capital are pretty low.  There is, however, a small group of 10 mostly older students who are form a tightly-knit core, and who know many of the suckers in the periphery. I need to keep an eye on these guys.

260 reciprocated ties within the same group

Finally, the second graph also shows that those relatively few students who are enrolled in our new BA programs (red, dark blue) are pretty much isolated within the larger group, which is still dominated by students enrolled in the old five year programs (MA yellow, State Examination green) that are phased out. Divide et impera.

Technorati Tags: limesurvey, networkx, pajek, political sociology, python, sna, social capital, social network analysis, social networks, stata, survey data

• BBC: "there could be a legal challenge" because of the inconsistencies re the queues. Is the UK to Europe what Florida is to the US? #ge2010 #
• "A %0 per cent swing would leave them all in the same place". Well done, BBC #ge2010 #

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• BBC: "there could be a legal challenge" because of the inconsistencies re the queues. Is the UK to Europe what Florida is to the US? #ge2010 #
• "A %0 per cent swing would leave them all in the same place". Well done, BBC #ge2010 #

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Being a political scientist is not considered an exciting occupation by people who have a life, and  as party conversation topics go, electoral systems are pretty lousy. But with LibDem support somewhere in the high 20s (if the polls are to be believed), normal people start to wonder why 26% of the vote should give them 12% of the seats, while 28% of the vote for Labour would amount to just under 40% of the seats (you can fiddle with the numbers at the wonderful BBC’s election pages).

So it is perhaps unsurprising that the hitherto pretty arcane idea of tactical voting (voting against your favourite party to support them) is now making headlines in the tabloids: Enter the Mirror’s guide to tactical voting for Labour and LibDem supporters. The information looks valid and may well be part of Labours last-ditch strategy to save what might be saved.

Technorati Tags: 2010, general election, guide, libdems, mirror, tactical voting, uk

• Did they just turn down Gordon's microphone? #leadersdebate #

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• Did they just turn down Gordon's microphone? #leadersdebate #

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The other day, a (rather clever) student told me that she has no real need for all these stats classes, because she will be a journalist. I told her that the world would be a better place if all journalists underwent compulsory numeracy classes. Here is the proof from my favourite newspaper. How long does it take you to spot the glitch?

Young people in the East Midlands were the most down-to-earth of those surveyed, expecting an annual salary of £33,468 by the time they reached their mid-thirties. However, even this figure is still around £4,000 higher than the average.

Two-thirds of respondents also thought they would own a house by the time they were 25. In reality, only 14% of homeowners are aged 25 or under.

With the rising cost of higher education hitting students hard, recent figures suggest young people will be left with more than £20,000 of debt by the end of their courses. But the poll shows today’s school children do not realise how out of pocket they will actually be: the average expected figure was just half the reality.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/mar/30/teenagers-expect-earnings-51000

Technorati Tags: fun, guardian, income, numeracy, property, stats, survey, teenagers

This is a true gem of interdisciplinary research: A recent article in the British Medical Journal demonstrates that the crisis may have toppled major banks and halved the value of your assets, but did not stop these silly little buggers from happily swallowing coins at a constant rate.

Technorati Tags: fun, obscure social science, science

Sixteen months ago, we started the Political Science Peer-Review Survey. This week, the input form was shut down. That is about three quarters of a year later than expected, but then again, I underestimated the fallout of my move back to Germany. Moreover, until a few weeks ago there was still a tiny trickle of replies coming in. So far, we have found few major problems with the data. The RA has spotted two instances where the respondent somehow managed to save the data at various stages of the interview, thereby inflating the number of respondents. Moreover, it’s amazing how many political scientists read ‘percent’ and give absolute numbers

Right now, the RA is enjoying is well-deserved holiday. He’ll be back in four weeks time, and we hope to have a data set ready for distribution by June.

Technorati Tags: peer-review, survey

Over the last two decades I have accumulated thousands of references that have travelled with me all the way from bibtex-mode through Endnote, Citavi and some more obscure packages until we finally came full circle and ended up in bibtex-mode again. To my mild surprise, my use of (some) keywords has been fairly consistent so that it was relatively easy (using make, bibtool and bibtex2html) to create a 380+ entries strong online bibliography on the Extreme Right in Western Europe. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: bibliography, bibtex, extreme right, make, online, western europe

• Phd seminar @ #cologne #

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Source: Long/Freese, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata

I use emacs/for all my textprocessing needs, and for the last four or five years, I have created all my slides with Till Tantaus excellent “beamer” class. At the moment, I’m teaching a 2nd year stats course (imagine doing this with PowerPoint – the horror! the horror!), so I sometimes use graphs from the assigned text like this one from Long&Freese that illustrates the latent variable/threshold interpretation of the binary logit model. The message should be fairly clear: depends on andfollows a standard logistic distribution around its conditional mean.

Click to download the animated PDF. Requires javascript, so view in Acrobat reader.

But the fact that the bell-curve lies flat in the plane confused my students no end. So I wasted half a day on creating a nice 3d-plot for them. After trying several options, I settled on pgfplots.sty, which builds on tikz/pgf, the comprehensive, portable graphics package designed by Tantau (here’s a gallery with most amazing examples of what you can do with this little gem). Plotting data and functions with pgfplots in 2d or 3d is a snap, so that was not too hard. Eventually.

Finally, in a desperate attempt to drive the message home, I enlisted the help of animate.sty, yet another amazing package that creates a javascript-based inline animation from my source (requires Acrobat reader). So the bell-curves pop out of the plane, in slow motion. Did it help the students to see the light? I have no idea. Here is the source.

Technorati Tags: 3d, animation, beamer, latex, logistic, pdf, pgf, pgfplots, plot, standard, stats, teaching, tikz

I’m teaching an introductory SNA class this year. Following a time-honoured tradition, I conducted a small network survey at the beginning of the class using Limesurvey. Getting the data from Limesurvey to Stata via CSV was easy enough. Here is the data set. But how does one get the data from Stata to Pajek for analysis? Actually, it’s quite easy.

First, we need to change the layout of the data. In the data set, there is one record for each of the 13 respondent. Each record has 13 variables, one for each (potential) arc connecting the respondent to other students in the class. This is equivalent to Stata’s “wide” form. Stata’s reshape command will happily re-arrange the data to the “long” form, with one record for each arc. This is what Pajek requires.

Second, we need to save the data as an ASCII file that can be read into Pajek. This is most easily done using Roger Newson’s listtex, which can be tweaked to write the main chunks of a Pajek file. Here is the code, which should be readily adapted to your own problems.

If you are interested, you can get the whole package from within Stata: net from http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/stata/

Technorati Tags: ascii, listtex, pajek, reshape, sna, stata

Statistics and Data links roundup for November 23rd through December 29th:

• The Data and Story Library – DASL (pronounced “dazzle”) is an online library of datafiles and stories that illustrate the use of basic statistics methods. We hope to provide data from a wide variety of topics so that statistics teachers can find real-world examples that will be interesting to their students. Use DASL’s powerful search engine to locate the story or datafile of interest.
• Drawing graphs using tikz/pgf & gnuplot | politicaldata.org -

Technorati Tags: data, datasets, education, imputation, methods, quantitative, R, sna, statistics, stats, teaching, tutorial

Without doubt, late December is exactly the right time for reflection and (re-)assessment. Looking back on the last months, I had too many conference dinners, not nearly enough conference beers/chats, and definitively too many conference papers to read. Amongst these, the prize for the most original political science graph (along with the price for the most pointless use of too-cute images) goes to the unnamed creator of the pastiche on the right, which I have not made up and which probably just goes to show that concepts of the good are relative. Or something along these lines. As an aside, I am sure that somewhere in the world there is a culture for which The Fluffy Bunny is evil incarnate.

Competing Concepts of the Good

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• On my way to #Bielefeld http://tinyurl.com/yofrgj Probably the last extreme right talk for this month #

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• Right-winger are causing climate change: on my way to yet another right-wing extremism conference at #Manchester #

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Statistics and Data links roundup for November 14th through November 23rd:

• SNAP: Network datasets -
• Network data -
• CASOS Tools: Network Analysis Data | CASOS – Network Analysis Data Casos & INSA
• NodeXL Teaching – CASCI – datasets incl. senate
• Statistics and Data links roundup -

It’s surprisingly difficult to find suitable datasets for a sna workshop that are relevant for political scientists.

Technorati Tags: data, education, imputation, methods, quantitative, R, sna, statistics, teaching, tutorial

Here is a short presentation on the electorates of the Western European Extreme Right I gave last Thursday at the Collège Doctoral Européen de Strasbourg.

And here is the

Summary

• Clear socio-demographic profile: young, male, working/lower middle class
• Clear attitudinal profile:
  • Not necessarily fully paid-up extremists
  • But dissatisfied with politics and suspicious of immigrants and elites
• Little support for disintegration thesis
• Personality traits and additional factor?
• Findings in line with theories of values, preferences, group conflict
• Contextual factors often make a difference

But …

• Very strong country effects remain after controlling for context
• Serious limits on the number and quality contextual control variables
• More/better information on parties needed
• Comparative media studies sorely lacking

Technorati Tags: electorates, extreme right, presentation, right wing extremism, sociology, strasbourg, western europe

• on my way back after a goof conference. #
• right-wing extremism conference @strasbourg #

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• Kai Arzheimer: Vorlesung Statistik II -
• Welcome | Teaching with Data (QSSDL) – TeachingWithData.org (TwD) is a repository of tools and educational materials designed to improve quantitative literacy skills in social science courses. Built especially for faculty teaching post-secondary courses in such areas as demography, economics, geography, political science, social psychology, and sociology, the materials include stand-alone learning activities, tools, and pedagogy services.The goal is to make it easier for faculty to bring real social science data into courses across the curriculum ranging from introductory classes to senior seminars.
• Social Science Statistics Blog: The changing nature of R resources -
• Gary King – What to do About Missing Values in Time Series Cross-Section Data – James Honaker and Gary King, “What to do About Missing Values in Time Series Cross-Section Data,” American Journal of Political Science, (April, 2010), forthcoming, copy at http://gking.harvard.edu/files/abs/pr-abs.shtml. (Paper: PDF)

Technorati Tags: data, education, imputation, methods, quantitative, R, statistics, teaching

Replication data for our recent article on knowledge networks in Political Science are available from my dataverse

Technorati Tags: bibliometrics, knowledge networks, PVS, sna

Harald’s and my article on citation and collaboration networks in German and British Political Science has finally appeared in print and online, which is obviously great. Here is the abstract:

Citations and co-publications are one important indicator of scientific communication and collaboration. By studying patterns of citation and co-publication in four major European Political Science journals (BJPS, PS, PVS and ÖZP), we demonstrate that compared to the conduits of communication in the natural sciences, these networks are rather sparse. British Political Science, however, is clearly less fragmented than its German speaking counterpart.

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• back from ECPR land. #

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Just back from the ECPR conference at Potsdam, which was great fun for various reasons. Here is my conference presentation on the dynamics of radical right support and mainstream party political change in France (PDF).

Technorati Tags: dynamics, ecpr, extreme right, france, issues, potsdam, radical right, salience

Believe or not: in Germany, it is illegal to publish results from exit polls before the polling stations close (at 6pm – we’re German) on polling day. Last Sunday, state elections were held in three Länder, and someone leaked alleged results on twitter while the stations were still open. The political class was outraged and suggested just about anything from banning exit polls to suing twitter, which inspired me to rant against these draconic and silly proposals over at Andrea’s and Thorsten’s Wahlen nach Zahlen blog (in German).

Technorati Tags: ban, election day, exit polls, germany, twitter

West European Politics has finally published our paper on ‘Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties‘.  Hooray! And here is the link to the authors’ version.

Technorati Tags: extreme right, radical right, religion, religiosity, voting, western europe

Should one weight their survey data? Is it worth the effort? The short answer must be ‘maybe’ or ‘it depends’. A slightly longer and much more useful answer was given by Leslie Kish in his enormously helpful paper ‘Weighting: Why, when and how’. Today (well, actually I submitted the final manuscript 2.5 years ago – that’s scientific progress for you!), I have added my own two cent with a short chapter that looks at the effects and non-effects of common weighting procedures (in German). The bottom line is that if you employ the usual weighting variables (age, gender, education and maybe class or region) as controls in your regression, weighting will make next to no difference but might mess with your standard errors.

Technorati Tags: data, Leslie Kish, regression, Social Sciences, standard errors, survey, survey data, weighting

In my pet model, the salience of issues such as immigration or national identiy in the manifestos of established parties

Random shock to salience - support cannot be bothered to react

makes a vote for the extreme right/radical right much more likely. There is, however, a potential problem with this argument: if radical right support is stable in the medium term, and if other parties react to past successes for the radical right by modifying their manifestos, this relationship might be spurious. In my paper for the ECPR conference at Potsdam, I use a time-series model  to address this problem: I estimate a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) of radical right support and issue salience in France (while controlling for immigration and unemployment). As it turns out, salience is independent of previous radical right success. This finding provides some support for my original argument, though the analysis  preliminary and restricted to France (at the moment).

Technorati Tags: conference, ecpr, electoral support, europe, issue salience, manifestos, time series model, vote

Image via Wikipedia

The European Consortium for Political Science (ECPR), for all purposes and intents the European Political Science Association, has a tiny problem: at their last meeting, they faced “a shortage of candidates” for the Executive Committee. To their credit, they faced it head on and set up a blog to discuss  “Constitutional and Electoral in (of?) the ECPR”. So far, there is just the inaugural post but I’m sure there is more to come.

Technorati Tags: blog, ecpr, EU, european, european political science, political science association

Image via Wikipedia

These days, a bonanza of political information is freely available on the internet.  Sometimes this information comes in the guise of excel sheets, comma separated data or other formats which are more or less readily machine readable. But more often than not, information is presented as tables designed to be read by humans. This is where the gentle art of screen scraping, web scraping or spidering comes in. In the past, I have used kludgy Perl scripts to get electoral results at the district level off sites maintained by the French ministry of the interior or by universities (very interesting if you do not really speak/read French). A slightly more elegant approach might be to use R’s builtin Perl-like capabilities for doing the job, as demonstrated by Simon Jackman. Finally, Python is gaining ground in the political science community,  which has some very decent libraries for screen/web scraping – see this elaborate post on Drew Conway’s Zero Intelligence Agents blog. But, let’s face it: I am lazy. I want to spend time analysing the data, not scraping them. And so I was very pleased when I came across outwit, a massive plugin for the firefox browser (Linux, Mac and Windows versions available) that acts as a point-and-click scraper.

French Départements (from Wikipedia)

Say you need a dataset with the names and Insee numbers for all the French Départements. The (hopefully trustworthy) Wikipedia page has a neat table, complete with information on the Prefecture and many tiny coats of arms which are of absolutely no use at all. We could either key in the relevant data (doable, but a nuisance), or we could try to copy and paste the table into a word processor, hoping that we do not lose accents and other funny characters, and that WinWord or whatever we use converts the HTML table into something that we can edit to extract the information we really need.

Or you we could use outwit. One push of the button loads the page

Scraping a table with outwit

into a sub-window, a second push (data->tables) extracts the HTML tables on the page. Now, we can either mark the lines we are interested in by hand (often the quickest option) or use a filter to selfect them. One final click, and they are exported as a CSV file that can be read into R, OpenOffice, or Stata for post processing and analysis.

While I’m all in favour of scriptable and open-source tools like Perl, Python and R, outwit has a lot to go for it if all you need is a quick hack. Outwit also has functions to mass-download files (say PDFs) from a page and give the unique names. If the job is complex, there is even more functionality under the hood, and you can use the point-and-click interface to program you own scraper, though I would tend use a real programming language for these cases. At any rate, outwit is a useful and free tool for the lazy data analyst.

Technorati Tags: departements, france, outwit, perl, python, R, scraping, screen, web scraper

My ‘Lakatos Reloaded’ rejoinder has just been published by the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (vol. 11 (2009): 526-528. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2009.00372.x).

Technorati Tags: british journal of politics and international relations, lakatos, rejoinder, time-series cross-sectional data, tscs, turnout

Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews have published a preliminary analysis of the recent election in Iran. The paper (though it is based on official stats) suggests that the election was indeed rigged to a considerable degree. Here is the complete analysis of the Iranian Presidential Election 2009.

p.s. Just discovered that Ahmadinejad has his own blog. The world must surely be coming to an end. Then again, it has not been updated since 2007.

Technorati Tags: Ahmadinejad, analysis, chatham house, election, iran, iranian presidential election, st andrews

The publication of thousands of claims by members of parliament that have the most interesting parts are blacked out has triggered a new wave of outrage over members expenses. Now, even the Guardian has to recognise that the Telegraph was instrumental in uncovering the scale of the mess we’re in. And so, in a bid to keep pace, they have released an innovative crowdsourcing tool that mirrors the principle behind NASA’s “Clickworkers” project (and Amazon’s http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/ you can wade through 457,153 pages of claims and help the good people of the Guardian to identify the juiciest bits.

The task is daunting. My MP (Bob Russell) alone has put in a mere 800 pages of  claims and receipts.  But you can win a duck island.

Technorati Tags: Bob Russell, guardian, mechanical turk, members of parliament, receipts, sleaze

Next week, the European Parliament will celebrate its 7th direct election. However, this will be the culmination of 27 national campaigns. Here is a post on the lack of truly European content in the European I wrote for Andrea Römmele’s and Thorsten Faas’ “Wahlen nach Zahlen” blog (in German).

Technorati Tags: 2009, blog, campaign, election, election posters, EU, europe, european, european election, european parliament, national campaigns, parliament, posters

With the upcoming EP elections, I felt obliged to check out the profiler sites my colleagues have put on the internet. I started with Germany’s wahl-o-mat that has been around for a number of years. After evaluating 30 statements, the program decided that I should vote for the German Liberals, which was not such a big surprise. The Bavarian Christian Democrats and the New Left Party were the biggest distance away from my ideal point, not least because my preferences seem to be more pro-European than these parties.

Why I should vote for the LibDems (maybe)

Given that I’m going to vote in the UK, I next tried the EU Profiler, which is an international project that aims at providing the relevant information on party positions for all 27 member states. After evaluating a new set of another 30 items, I was presented with a fancy two-dimensional graph that shows that I should vote for the UK LibDems, although they look more like my least-bad option since the policy space around my ideal point is not exactly crowded. This is because I am luke-warm (but warm) when it comes to European Integration plus a bit of a lefty when it comes to the “socioeconomic” dimension. This dimension, however, looks a bit dodgy, because according to the map, the Tories would be ever so slightly to the left of Labour. Well, maybe they are. At least no one suggest that I should vote UKIP or BNP (who sent me a flyer the other week, suggesting that all those immigrants should leave the UK).

In a bold move I switched from British to German parties and was a little surprised to learn that I should vote New Left, which is reasonably close to my ideal point while the Liberals are rather far away. So it would seem that I suffer from a national-political personality split.

Should I vote for the Left party?!?

Still not content with the results, I returned to the wahl-o-mat and discovered that they too have teamed-up with researchers from other countries, meaning that we have apparently two competing pan-European profiler projects. So I answered a final UK-specific questionnaire and was reassured that I should indeed vote for the LibDems, though apparently for different reasons.

While their accuracy of the results might be debatable, these tools provide a lot of information and are great fun.

Technorati Tags: dimensional graph, election, elections, EP, EU, europe, european integration, european union, fun, german liberals, parliament, political personality, profiler, tories, UKIP, wahl o mat

I kid you not: yesterday the Daily Mail, not normally a promoter of civic education, published a Venn diagram outlining the overlap between the three main parties’ proposals for dealing with the parliamentary expenses mess. As diagrams go, this was not exactly brilliant. A lot of colour and space were wasted to illustrate the fact that while each party has its own preferences, they could possibly agree on a set of four or five measures. And no, because the font size was large and time was short, they did not pay any attention to proposals supported by say the Conservatives and the Liberals which are opposed by labour.

Nonetheless, they seemed to get the basics right. Most amazingly, the whole thing was correctly labeled as a Venn diagram. Just like that, no quotation marks, no references to quirky scientists. Is the Mail where all those students with a training in formal analysis end up? Good graduates go everywhere, bad graduates … ?

Technorati Tags: analysis, daily mail, fun, parliamentary expenses, venn diagram

Here is the (almost) finalised program for the our section on the Radical Right in Perspective, organised under the auspices of the ECPR’s 5th General Conference (Potsdam, September 10-12), boasting about 50 papers.

• Post-Soviet Russian Nationalism: Ideology, Context, Comparison
  • The ‘New Political Novel’ by Right-Wing Writers in Post-Soviet Russia
  • Ethnic Conflict and Radical Right in Estonia: An Explosive Mixture?
  • How far is Moscow Weimar? Similarities and Dissimilarities between Inter-War Germany and Post-Soviet Russia
  • From Communist Totalitarianism to Right-wing Radicalism: The Dynamics of the Crimean Peripheral Politics and Its Impact on the Ukrainian State
  • Moderating/Mediating the Extreme: The Accommodation of Xenophobic Nationalist Views on Vladimir Pozner’s Vremena Programme
  • Right-wing extremism among immigrant adolescents from the FSU in Israel and Germany
• The causes for the success and failure of the radical right in Central and Eastern Europe
  • Are there opportunity structures for the Radical Right? A comparative analysis of the Visegrad Group countries.
  • Explaining the failure of radical right parties in Estonia
  • Manoeuvring for the Right: Atypical Features of a Bulgarian Radical Right-Wing Party
  • The Diffusion of Radical Right Ideology in Central-Eastern Europe: Cultural Resonance and Issue Ownership Strategies as Factors Behind Electoral Support Takeover
  • The Radical Right in Bulgaria
  • From Alienation of the Working Class to the Rise of the Far Right? Party Strategy and Cleavage Evolution in Post-Communist Societies
• On the Borderline Between Protest and Violence: Political Movements of the New Radical Right
  • Radical Right and the Use of Political Violence: Idealist Hearths in Turkey in the 1970s.
  • Extreme Right and Populism: a Frame Analysis of Extreme Right Wing Discourses in Italy and Germany
  • “Armed spontaneism”: an independent revolutionary way in the Italian extreme right-wing groups
  • Movement Against Illegal Immigration: analysis of the central node in the Russian extreme-right movement network
  • Mobilizing Activism: A comparative analysis of the contemporary Right-Wing Extremists and Islamists in Germany
  • Why There has been Little Violence among East European Radicals? Transformations of Tolerance in Post-peasant Eastern Europe
• Consequences of the surge of anti-immigration parties
  • Anti-immigrant party support and newspaper coverage: a cross-national and over-time perspective
  • A Populist Zeitgeist? Populist Discourse among Mainstream Political Parties in Western Europe
  • The Surge of the Swiss Peoples Party: Implications at Switzerland’s Subnational Level
  • Immigration policy and the populist radical right in office: The policy impact of the FPÖ/BZÖ, 2000-06
  • Rhetoric or reality? Platforms and actions of anti-immigration parties
• The Radical Right in Western Europe
  • A Matter of Timing? The Salience of Immigration and the Dynamics of Radical Right Electoral Success
  • Old Cleavages and New Actors in the Formation of a New Cultural Divide: Why a Right-Wing Populist Party Emerged in France but not in Germany
  • The Programmatic Positions of Established Parties and their Influence on Extreme Right Parties Vote Share
  • The Influence of the Programs of Far Right Parties on the Electoral System
  • Radical Right, Populism and the Fear of Democracy
  • Explaining anti-immigrant party support in Western Europe: individual grievances, elite failure or social context?
  • Comparing radical right party ideology and the voters’ profile and attitudes: a study on the Danish People’s Party, the Northern League and the Austrian Freedom Party
• Inside the Radical Right: An Internalist Perspective
  • The Public Image of Leaders of Right-Wing Populist Parties: the Role of the Mass Media
  • ‘This rally is a must’ – Which factors lead neo-Nazis to take part in demonstration marches?
  • Right-wing extremist groups and Internet: Construction of Identity, Source of Mobilization and Organization
  • “Enemy from inside” the party and … inside us? What the researcher does to the local teams of the radical right in France: return to a possible controversial relationship
  • Pan-German student fraternities and the Austrian Freedom Party: A reciprocal relationship
• Party-based Euroscepticism in Western and Eastern Europe
  • europeanization of euroscepticism? the significance of european parliament groups and factions for the typology and ideological classification of party-based euroscepticism
  • euroscepticism of turkish political parties
  • hellenes-barbarians and european civilization: a conceptual approach to the ideologies of the greek far right.
  • hungary – between euroenthusiasm and euroscepticsm
  • radical right euroscepticism and the theory of strategic choice
• neighbourhood effects revisited: the visualisation of immigrants and radical right-wing vote
  • Presence of Migrants and Radical Right Support across Different Levels of National Institutionalisation
  • Exploring the Contextual Determinants of the anti-immigrant vote: The Case of the LPF
  • Explaining the extreme right resurgence in English local elections 2002-8: a spatial model of aggregate data
  • Ethnic Identity of Second Generation Immigrants across German Regions
  • Radical right’s neighbourhoods: considering meso level explanations for its success through a case-study at the local level
  • Is Local Diversity Harmful for Social Capital? A Multilevel Research on Flemish Data
  • Immigration, diversity and civic culture in Spain
• The radical right and the debate over immigration policy
  • After Fortuyn: new radical right-wing populist parties in the Netherlands
  • Plataforma per Catalunya: emergence, features and quest for legitimacy of a new radical right party in the Spanish autonomous region of Catalonia
  • The impact of anti-immigration parties: a comparison between the Flemish VB and the Walloon FN
  • The (de)politicization of immigrant integration and policy outcome in Belgium.

The program is still somewhat in flux, and any omissions are accidental.

Technorati Tags: attitudes, conference, eastern europe, ecpr, extreme right, extremism, far right, populism, populist right, radical right, research, right-wing, western europe

I have left Britain’s Best Politics Department (™) for my alma mater, which (oddly enough) wants me back.

Technorati Tags: essex mainz politics

My article on Contextual Factors (unemployment, immigration, other parties) and the Extreme Right vote in Western Europe between 1980 and 2002 was yesterday published in the American Journal of Political Science (online). Obviously, I’m absolutely chuffed. The DOI (doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00369.x) does not work yet, but the link to Wiley Interscience does. Here is the full bibliographic information.

Multilevel replication data and scripts for Stata and MLWin are available via my dataverse.

Technorati Tags: 1980, 2002, Agenda Setting, american, contextual factors, Eurobarometer, extreme right, immigration, journal, MLA, multi-level analysis, Political Science, populist right, radical right, unemployment, voting, welfare state, western europe

As a light-hearted follow-up to my post on the growth of the database state in the UK, here is a link to boing-boings

Well done, junior!

“remix the British Transport Police’s paranoid turn-in your neighbour posters” campaign. Most of the pictures sent in are really good, and many of them look almost-real, which is slightly disturbing.

Technorati Tags: boing-boing, british transport police, database state, fun, london, paranoia, terrorism, uk

Arguably, no western democracy has more surveillance cameras per citizen than the UK. I would also like to think that few European countries are collecting data on their citizens on such an Orwellian scale. In a recent report, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has assessed 46 major government databases. Somewhat predictably, the result is devastating. Only six databases are “effective, proportionate and necessary”, 29 “have significant problems, and may be unlawful” whereas the remaining 11 are “almost certainly illegal under human rights or data protection law”.

Examples of the latter include the National DNA Database, which holds information on 2 million innocent people including 39,000 children, and (my pet hate) ONSET, a system which brings together information on children from various sources to predict which children will offend in the future. Another nightmare is the Jacqui Smith‘s dream project of a system that registers every phone call made, every email sent, and every visit to any web page.

While the traffic light system used by the trust conflates two distinct dimensions (efficiency and data protection standards/human rights), it is certainly useful to get an overview of a very complex situation, and to identify the biggest problems.

The publication of the report created quite a splash in the media. The Guardian highlights the case of a 13-year old with a criminal record for taking part in a playground fight, and a single mother who does not dare to discuss her mental problems with her GP for fear of loosing her children to the social services, though I could not find any sources for these examples. The BBC throws in an interview with Ross Anderson, Cambridge IT professor, and one of the authors of the report. And here are even more articles on the Rowntree report , most of them basically summarising the executive summary.

Technorati Tags: cambridge, criminal record, database, government, government databases, human rights, jacqui smith, joseph rowntree reform trust, national dna database, nightmare, Orwell, privacy, single mother, social services, surveillance, uk

MLwiN is one of the granddaddies of multi-level modelling software (the other being HLM).  Essentially, it is a 1990s-ish looking and sometimes quirky GUI wrapped around  an old DOS program (MLn). The one feature that set MLwiN apart in the late 1990s is point-and-click interface that allows you to build the equations for a multi-level in a stepwise fashion. The underlying command language is still slightly confusing and less than well documented, and some of the modern features (such as modelling categorical dependent variables) are implemented as external macros, which does not need to concern you unless something goes horribly wrong, which happens occassionally.

That said, MLwiN is reasonably fast, does now incorporate modern MCMC estimators, has an interface with WINBUGS and can be convinced to do most things you would possibly want to do with it.  I bought version 1.10 ca. 1998, received free upgrades to 2.02 and good support well until 2004/2005 or so.  These days, Stata, R and MPlus can all estimate multi-level models, but working with MLwiN may still be worthwhile for you (by the way, you can download the free stata2mlwin addon from UCLA academic technology to export your variables from Stata to MLwiN).

Rather amazingly, MLwiN is now freely available for anyone working in UK universities: just enter your details including your ac.uk-email, and few days later, they will send you a download link.

Technorati Tags: british, download, mlwin, multi-level analysis, multi-level modelling, software, uk, uk universities, winbugs

Colleagues Andrea Römmele and Thorsten Faas have set up a new blog that will cover the many German elections of 2009 (seats in the federal parliament, several state parliaments, local councils as well as the presidency are all up for grabs) and asked me to contribute. How could I resist them? “Wahlen nach Zahlen” (voting by numbers) is not yet public, but since it is already indexed by Google et al., why not spill the beans? There are already four posts (in German), and the list of (potential) contributors looks pretty good. And here is my inaugural post on right-wing extremism amongst German youngsters.

Technorati Tags: 2009, blog, campaign, elections, extreme right, extremism, federal diet, germany, presidency, right-wing, state elections, voting

Some answers given by students in written exams are so brilliant that you couldn’t make it up:

• “The peace settlement created a problem regarding Germany and Austria. What was this problem and what were its consequences?”: Germany and Austria were not content with this and were still at war with each other.
• “Why did communism spread in Central and Eastern Europe after World War Two?”: Communism spread because after world war II, Stalin came into power and was spreading communism into the other countries as he was connected to people in high places.
• ‘Putin’ is a post-communist form of government. In the long run, he’ll probably turn out to be right.
• Threats to communism in the 1950s and 1960s include the 1980 Solidarity challenge.
• ‘The aim of the 1919 peace settlement was the establishment of independent, democratic nation states. Why was this not achievable in CEE…?’ ‘They could not achieve it because of lack of transportation and route links.’

Technorati Tags: austria, cee, fun, germany, poland, stalinism

Image via Wikipedia

Radio 4 never fails to amaze me. This morning, just three minutes before the 9 o’clock news, they interviewed David Spigelhalter. Spiegelhalter is obviously the man who gave us BUGS. But he  is also Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, and a man who can (within the 90 seconds they allocated him) explain to a lay public why a spade in knife-crime (last summer, four people were killed in the space of just one day) is not totally unlikely and does not necessarily indicate an increase in the murder rate, illustrating the idea of clustered risks in passing. He even convinced the anchor that stats is actually fun, even if you look at 170 murders per year in a population of just 7 million Londoners. I was duly impressed (you can listen here to the interview with Spiegelhalter). In fact, I was so impressed that I googled him once I reached the office and came across his website understandinguncertainty.org, which has full coverage of the London murder mystery (that is solved by modelling a Poisson distribution of the incidents).

Technorati Tags: bugs, David Spiegelhalter, fun, london, murder rate, murders, poisson distribution, probability, radio 4, risk, statistics, uk, university of cambridge

Twelve months ago, I started a blog at wordpress.com.  Half a year ago, I started re-publising its content here. Last week I decided that this was getting too tedious, installed my own copy of wordpress and transferred my stuff here. Onwards and upwards!

Technorati Tags: blog, transfer

A friend send me this link to Huber’s Sandwich Emporium yesterday.

Sandwich Estimator?

Huber’s sandwiches is within walking distance of the University of Vienna, and we spent a dreamy 10 minutes imagining  how slightly anxious researchers that suffer from correlated disturbances shuffle into that shop and ask for the massive 18 centimetre sandwich estimator. If you think this is remotely funny, your life must be pretty sad.

Technorati Tags: estimator, fun, huber-white, robust, sandwich, standard errors

Over the last 7 years or so, much of my work has focused on the question of why support for the Extreme Right is so unstable over time and so uneven across countries. In a recent paper on Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002, I estimate a model that aims at providing a more comprehensive and satisfactory answer to this research problem by employing a broader database and a more adequate modelling strategy, i.e. multi-level modelling. The main finding is that while immigration and unemployment rates are important, their interaction with other political factors is much more complex than suggested by previous research. Moreover, persistent country effects prevail even if a whole host of individual and contextual variables is controlled for. Replication data for this article is available from my dataverse.

The final version of the paper will appear in the April issue of the American Journal of Political Science, which is obviously great.

Technorati-Tags: Extreme Right, Radical Right, Populist Right, Western Europe, Unemployment, Immigration, Agenda Setting, Welfare State, Voting, Eurobarometer, Multi-level Analysis, MLA, 1980, 2002

Technorati Tags: 1980, 2002, Agenda Setting, Eurobarometer, extreme right, immigration, MLA, multi-level analysis, populist right, radical right, unemployment, voting, welfare state, western europe

Image via Wikipedia

A few months ago, I published an article on inequality, institutions and turnout in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations that criticised an earlier piece in the same journal. The journal has granted the original author the right to a reply, which seems only fair. I was, however, slightly surprised that I would have the right to respond to that reply. Where does it stop? Anyway, a very short article with the fancy title ‘Lakatos reloaded‘ has been submitted and accepted and will appear in one of the next issues of the BJPIR.

Technorati-Tags: bjpir, turnout, lakatos, british journal of politics and international relations, institutions, welfare, state, tscs, case study

Technorati Tags: bjpir, british journal of politics and international relations, case study, institutions, lakatos, state, tscs, turnout, welfare

With about 100 new respondents, yet another brilliant week for the Political Science Peer-Review Survey draws to a close. While the snowball is still rolling, and while we cannot know for certain because the survey is anonymous after all, we might soon reach a point of saturation: I have received a number of very friendly replies from people who tell me that they have already heard about the survey once (or twice) from someone else. The Netherlands in particular seem to be a hotspot of peer-review survey related activities. You could guess that much from the distribution of our respondents. While the US dominate the field (as they should), Switzerland and the Netherlands come an amazing 5th and 6th, accurately reflecting the standing of these countries as Social Science strongholds.

Technorati-Tags: political science, peer review, survey, netherlands, respondents, journals, publications

Technorati Tags: journals, netherlands, peer-review, Political Science, publications, respondents, survey

The Guardian had a wonderful short article last week. Apparently, Italy invented a 300,000 strong army in the 1950s as part of the great game that was the Cold War. And apparently they assumed that the first thing the Soviet spies would watch out for were neither tanks nor barrackes, but an active bureaucracy (something both the Russians and the Italians were familiar with), so they created tonnes and tonnes of fake files relating to this fantasy army. Today, these files clog the real army’s warehouses: since the imagined 3rd corps was disbanded in the 1970s, it cannot declassify its files. And while they are not declassified, they cannot be destroyed. Se non e vero, e molto ben trovato.

Technorati-Tags: italy, army, cold war, fantasia, borges

Technorati Tags: army, borges, cold war, fantasia, italy

On Monday, the Political Science Peer-Review Survey had 506 respondents. Between Tuesday and Friday, we sent out 1,100 new invitations. Five days and many contacts with helpful colleagues later the number stands at 626. Feel free to join them.

Technorati Tags: journals, peer-review, Political Science, survey, update

The title says it all: yesterday, respondents 500-506 took the Political Science Peer-Review Survey, which is obviously great. A neat detail is that so far, more than 60 current or previous editors of political science journals have taken part in the survey. Tomorrow, we will resume or email campaign (aimed at those who have published in SSCI journals over the last eight years or so) to get even more people on board.
Technorati-Tags: political science, peer review, journals, survey, publications, research, ssci, social science citation index

Technorati Tags: journals, peer-review, Political Science, publications, research, social science citation index, ssci, survey

Does religion make you a better or worse human being? More specifically, does Christian religiosity reduce or increase the likelihood of a radical/extreme right vote in a West European context? This is the question Liz and I are trying to address in our latest paper on “Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties“.

There are a number of reasons why good Christians could be more likely to vote for the Right than agnostics: American research starting in the 1940s has linked high levels of church attendance and a closed belief systems to support for rightism. More over, contemporary Radical Right parties try to frame the issue of immigration in terms of a struggle between Christian/Western values and Islam.

On the other hand, many of the most radical parties (e.g. the Austrian FPÖ) have anti-clerical roots. Moreover, the Churches give support and shelter to refugees/immigrants in many countries, and some pro-immigrant movements are inspired by Christian values. Finally, religious voters are often firmly tied to Christian-Democratic parties and will therefore not be available for the Radical Right.

We develop a theoretical model that incorporates these mechanisms and use Structural Equation Modelling to test this model in eight countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Norway. As it turns out, religious people do not differ from their more agnostic compatriots in terms of their attitudes towards immigrants. They are, however, less likely to vote for the radical right because they often identify with Christian Democratic/Conservative parties. The final version of the paper will appear in West European Politics.

Technorati-Tags: extreme right, radical right, western europe, religion, religiosity, islam, structural equation modelling, attitudes, immigration, immigrants

Technorati Tags: attitudes, extreme right, immigrants, immigration, Islam, radical right, religion, religiosity, structural equation modelling, western europe

On Monday, we started a new initiative to boost response to the Political Science Peer Review Survey. Thanks to some very industrious research students, we were able to identify about 21,000 individual authors who have published in Social Science Citation Index-covered Political Science Journals between 2000 and 2008. For about 8,000 of these, the SSCI lists their email addresses (that’s the EM field in the SSCI records), and so we started contacting them and asked them to participate in the survey. Obviously, some addresses are not longer valid because people have moved on to different places or have left academia altogether. Nonetheless, I was slightly surprised by the rather poor quality of the address data supplied by Thomson. In some cases, letters were missing whereas in other cases similar looking letters (e.g. ‘v’ and ‘y’) had been confused. This looks like either a weak OCR routine or an non-native and underpaid data typing slave has been used. Overall, we have contacted 962 people so far. About 200 of our messages have bounced, and we have 61 new responses to the survey (assuming that without the mailout, no one would have responded during these four days), which brings us to a new total of 238 responses

Technorati Tags: journals, peer-review, Political Science, publication, survey

December 18 was the the day (or rather the night, as results were communicated at midnight) for UK academics: after years of preparation and second-guessing and months of waiting, the results of the 6th Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were published. Every five years or so, the UK higher education funding councils examine the research output of the various “units of assessment” (i.e. departments) and publish a league table that is crucial for the allocation of “quality weighted research funding” (i.e. money) as well as for the reputation of a place. At the moment, the system is chiefly based on an evaluation of up to four publications per active researcher, which has lead to the creation of transfer market for scientists that ressembles professional football.

In every RAE since 1986, my institution has earned top grades. This time around, the marks are a bit more disaggregated, i.e. a percentage of 4*, 3* etc. work was published. But no matter which way you count and weight the results, we end up in the first place (tied with Sheffield but clearly ahead of Oxford and the LSE). Obviously, we are freaking happy.

Technorati-Tags: essex, politics, government, rae, research assessment exercise, 2008

Technorati Tags: 2008, essex, government, Political Science, Politics, rae, research assessment exercise

Finally, the call for papers for the ECPR’s 5th conference (at Potsdam, September 10-12 2009) is out. Our section on the Radical Right will consist of the following nine panels:

• The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe
• The Internationalisation of the Radical Right
• Will Fascism return?
• On the Borderline Between Protest and Violence: Political Movements of the New Radical Right
• Consequences of the surge of anti-immigration parties
• The Radical Right in Western Europe
• Inside the Radical Right: An Internalist Perspective
• Party-based Euroscepticism in Western and Eastern Europe
• Neighbourhood Effects Revisited: the Visualisation of Immigrants and Radical Right-Wing Voting

Each panel can have up to five paper givers, so the section offers us a chance to bring together cutting edge research on the Populist/Extreme/Radical Right from various subfields (parties, voters, rational choice, normative theory – you name it). Please submit your abstract via the the electronic submission system to the appropriate panel(s).

Technorati-Tags: ecpr, potsdam, radical right, extreme right, populist right, western europe, eastern europe, cee, central europe, right, conference, parties, voters

Technorati Tags: cee, central europe, conference, eastern europe, ecpr, extreme right, parties, populist right, potsdam, radical right, right, voters, western europe

While we are in the mood of surveying the peer-review process in political science, here is a quick link to the Political Science Journal Monitor. The site itself is blogspot blog converted into a makeshift forum, and activity is low. Nonetheless, this is an interesting an potentially relevant resource for many of us.

Technorati-Tags: political science, political_science, political-science, peer-review, survey, journals, publications

Technorati Tags: journals, peer-review, Political Science, political_science, publications, survey

Almost exactly three years ago, a major political science journal asked me to review a manuscript. I recommended to reject the paper on the grounds that a) its scope was extremely limited and b) that it largely ignored the huge body of existing political science literature on its topic. The editors followed my suggestion (presumably, the other reviewers did not like the piece either). A couple of days ago, an obscure national journal sent me the very same (though slightly updated and upgraded) manuscript review. Is this sad or funny? How often did they authors have to downgrade their ambitions for finding a decent outlet in the process? And how common is this?

Thanks to the all new, all shiny political science peer-review survey, there is at least an answer to the last question: about 30 per cent of our respondents say that they would submit a rejected manuscript to a less prestigious journal. But what really strikes me is the proportion of reviewers who have reviewed (and rejected?) the same manuscript for at least two different journals: 29 per cent. This squares nicely with my personal experience (sometimes I seem to hit the same wall twice or more) and points to the fact that political science is a small world. Too small perhaps.

The survey is still open, so if your are an active political scientist, please, please participate and share your experience with us! We will publish preliminary results of the peer review survey online and will eventually put the data into the public domain.

Technorati-Tags: political, science, political_science, survey, peer-review, peer_review, journals, publication

[digg=http://digg.com/general_sciences/Another_War_Story_from_the_Blind_Review_Process_Political]

Technorati Tags: journals, peer-review, peer_review, political, political_science, publication, science, survey

If you edit, review or author manuscripts for political science journals, the peer-review process is at the centre of your professional life. Unfortunately, for most of us the process is largely a black box. While everyone has heard (or lived through) tales from the trenches, there is very little hard evidence on how the process actually works. This is why a number of colleagues and I started the peer-review survey project that aims at collecting information on the experience of authors, reviewers and editors of political science journals.

If you are an active political scientist, this survey is for you: we need your expertise, and your input is greatly appreciated. Filling in the form is fun and will typically take less than ten minutes of your time. It is also a great way to release some steam
Ready? Then proceed to the Political Science Peer-Review Survey.

We also put some (very) preliminary results of the political science peer-review survey online and will release further findings and eventually the data set in the future.

If you think this is worthwhile (and who wouldn’t?), please spread the word. To make this easier, we have created short URL for the survey (http://tinyurl.com/peer-review-survey) and the results (http://tinyurl.com/peer-review-results) that you can forward to your colleagues. Thanks again for your support. It is greatly appreciated.

Technorati-Tags: political science, science, journals, peer-review, peer, review, political, science, survey, results, quality, articles, manuscripts

Technorati Tags: articles, journals, manuscripts, peer, peer-review, peer_review, political, Political Science, quality, results, Review, science, survey

The US might face unprecedented levels of turnout in tomorrow’s election, but historically, the non-voters are the biggest camp in American politics. One intriguing explanation for this well-known fact is that low turnout could be a consequence of the very high (by any standard) levels of income inequality: because voters lack experience with universalistic institutions, they are less likely to adopt norms and values that foster participation in elections. This is the gist of an article that appeared recently (by social science standards) in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. While the thesis is interesting enough, I did not find the evidence (design, operationalisation, statistical model) particularly convincing and consequentially embarked on a major replication exercise. As it turned out, there are indeed major problems with the original analysis, including a rather problematic application of the ever popular time-series cross-sectional approach (aka Beck&Katz). Last week, my own article on the (non-)relationship between inequality and turnout has finally appeared in the BJPIR. If you don’t have access to the journal, you can still download the preprint version (“Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something True?”) from my homepage. And if you in turn find this rather unconvincing, you can download the replication data for the various inequality/turnout models and do your own analysis. Enjoy.
Technorati-Tags: turnout, elections, inequality, tscs, beck and katz, time-series cross-sectional data, replication, data, usa, oecd, social, norms, download, bjpir, bootstrapping

Technorati Tags: beck and katz, bjpir, bootstrapping, data, download, elections, inequality, norms, oecd, replication, social, time-series cross-sectional data, tscs, turnout, USA

Jörg Haider 1950-2008

“Colourful” did not even begin to describe him. If Bill Clinton was America’s first rock&roll president, Jörg Haider, who died in a car crash early on Saturday morning, was Austria’s first pop politician. Apt for a future right-winger, Haider was born into a national-socialist family. A gifted public speaker, he was active in right-wing circles and in Austria’s national-liberal party FPÖ from an early age on. In 1986, he rose to international prominence when he won (with the support of the party’s nationalist wing) a leadership contest against the FPÖ’s liberal figurehead Norbert Steger. Within months, Haider transformed the slightly dusty FPÖ into one of the most modern, controversial, populist and electorally successful parties of the European Extreme Right.
Under his leadership, the party went from strength to strength. In 1999, the FPÖ won over 20 per cent of the popular vote and entered a coalition with the Christian Democrats, thereby bringing Haider one step closer to his life-long ambition: to become chancellor (prime minister) of Austria. However, his involvement with the Austrian government triggered international backlash and the European Union’s ill-advised “sanctions” against Austria. Subsequentially, the party lost much of its support.
Haider retreated to subnational politics (he was “Landeshauptmann” (minister president) of the state of Carinthia from 1989-91 and then again from 1999 on). In 2005, he and a group of supporters left the FPÖ and formed a new party, the BZÖ. Considered a one-man show by many, Haider and the party garnered almost 11 per cent of the national vote in the general election two weeks ago, and Haider seemed destined to return to the forefront of Austrian politics.
Like many politicians, Haider was many things to many persons. His remarks on the “reasonable” economic and social policies of the Nazis predictably led to an international outcry. He was famous for political gaffes and insults but was described as courteous and friendly once the cameras were switched off. He also played an instrumental role in a referendum campaign against a nuclear power plant in 2002. Of course, he claimed the plant was insecure by definition because it was Czech, allowing Haider to play the national card and to exploit animosities that go back to the days of the Hapsburg Empire. Oddly enough, he also supported Turkey’s bid for membership in the European Union.
Haider carefully controlled his public image. Papers haven been written (and published) on his attractiveness for both male and female voter. Back in the 1980s, Austria’s other international pop star Falco quipped that people liked Haider because he was sexy and right-wing. At 58, Haider still projected the image of a youthful sportsman, which might explain that Austrians are so shocked by his sudden death. Politicians from all political parties are now praising his more positive qualities. Carinthia, where he was genuinely popular with large parts of the population, is rife with conspiracy theory.
Oddly enough, the death of its most prodigious leader might make Austria’s Extreme Right even stronger: without him, the BZÖ is an orphan that might soon be brought back into the FPÖ fold.
Technorati-Tags: haider, jörg haider, österreich, austria, fpö, bzö, right wing extremism, extreme right, radical right, rechtsextremismus

[digg http://digg.com/politics/Austrian_Extreme_Right_Leader_Jorg_Haider_dies_in_car_crash]

Technorati Tags: austria, bzö, extreme right, fpö, haider, jörg haider, österreich, radical right, rechtsextremismus, right wing extremism

Courtesy of Google’s book search, a large parts of my new book on the Extreme Right in Western Europe (in German) is now available online. I don’t know how they calculate which and how many pages one may view but I was able to read several consecutive pages of it. Plus you have the search function which comes in handy if you know exactly what you are looking for e.g. because you want to verify a quote. And if Google fails you, you can always try amazon which has its own online version of “Die Wähler der Extremen Rechten 1980-2002″. Nice.
Technorati-Tags: extreme right, extreme, right, political science, western europe, voting, extreme rechte, rechtsextremismus, wahlverhalten, westeuropa

Technorati Tags: extreme, extreme rechte, extreme right, Political Science, rechtsextremismus, right, voting, wahlverhalten, western europe, westeuropa

In a recent article in the European Journal of Political Research, Kestilä and Söderlund claim (amongst other things) that in the French regional elections of 2004, turnout and district magnitude have significant negative effects on the extreme right vote whereas the effects of the number of party lists and unemployment are positive and significant. Most interestingly, immigration (which is usually a very good predictor for the radical right vote) had no effect on the success of the Front National. More generally, they argue that a subnational approach can control for a wider range of factors and provide more reliable results than cross-national analyses (now the most common approach to this phenomenon). My colleague Liz Carter and I disagreed and engaged in a massive replication/re-analysis endeavour. The outcome is a critique of the KS model of subnational political opportunity structures in regional elections. In this paper, we dispute Kestilä’s and Söderlund’s claims on theoretical, conceptual and methodological grounds and demonstrate that their findings are spurious. Today, the European Journal has accepted the article for publication (probably in 2009)

Technorati-Tags: extreme right, radical right, populist right, far right, france, opportunity structures, unemployment, immigration, district magnitude, regional elections, front national, 2004, voting

Technorati Tags: 2004, departements, district magnitude, extreme right, far right, france, front national, immigration, opportunity structures, populist right, radical right, regional elections, subnational, unemployment, voting

Today, the BBC has a rather amusing piece by Larry Sabato (Virginia) on the “The US election nightmare scenario“: an equal split of the “toss-up” state leads to deadlock in the Electoral College. Enter the unit rule, a constitutional provision which stipulates that the House will select the President in a vote where each state delegation has a single vote. Sounds bizarre? Certainly. Unlikely? Not entirely. And yes, apparently Pelosi could become the next President of the US. Read it yourself.
Technorati-Tags: US, elections, constitution, unit rule, electoral college, Barack Obama,John McCain,Nancy Pelosi, fun

[digg http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/How_Nancy_Pelosi_could_become_president_Political_Science]

Technorati Tags: barack obama, constitution, elections, electoral college, fun, john mccain, nancy pelosi, unit rule, US

[Slightly off topic] Having your own domain is obviously attractive, but when I moved to the UK two years ago, I left my main site with all my presentations, pre-prints and other goodies in a subdirectory of my old institution’s website where it had resided since about 1999. They have a decent server with loads of space that is regularly backupped, and they don’t charge me a penny. But more importantly, over the years I have accumulated a whopping 160 MB worth of files (about 6000 of them), and people (and Google) know where to find my stuff. In the past, I have moved single pages of special interest groups from one domain to another with  javascript redirects but had no clue who this would translate to a huge and fairly overgrown structure of PDFs, powerpoints etc. And so I simply left everything as it was (i.e. working).

However, during the summer break I had a little spare time and decided that it was time to move my stuff to a domain of my own. This is what I did:

• I registered my own domain kai-arzheimer.com and rented 250 MB of webspace from a small but very keen provider for less than 18 Euros per year. Crucially, they give me ssh access to the server and a handy set of tools (bash, textutils, emacs, perl, python and even gcc)
• I carefully read the advice on moving to a new domain that Google gives on its webmaster blog. I registered both the old and the new site with them and installed their tool for generating sitemaps.
• I copied everything to the new site without making any changes.
• I brushed up my knowledge on generating 301 redirects. A “301″ means that what ever content was available at a given URL has moved permanently to another URL. Most browsers take you to this new address in the blink of an eye without you ever realising that the URL has changed. And Google will eventually update its index and will interpret any links pointing to the old URL as pointing to the new one. At least this is what they promise.
• I found out that I was extremely lucky because my old institution runs Apache with the Mod-Rewrite module enabled and gives ordinary users access to this machine via .htaccess files. This is obviously Techno-Babble but the upshoot is this: I put a file named .htaccess in the top-level directory of my old site (www.politik.uni-mainz.de/kai.arzheimer/) and changed its content to
  Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/$1 [R=301,L]

  This instructs the server at Mainz to do a  search&replace operation on URLs that refer to my old site and rewrite them into redirects to my new site. This works for PDFs, powerpoints, single pages, pictures, anything. That also means that external links to duly forgotten working papers on other people’s sites which have (just like the working papers) not been updated since 1999 still work. The object does not even have to exist: if you ask for http://www.politik.uni-mainz.de/kai.arzheimer/meaning-of-life.html you will be served a 404-page from my new site. How neat is that?

• Finally, I found a perl-oneliner that would correct the absolute references to the old site that might or might not be buried deep in the HTML code of ancient pages: perl -pi.bak -e 's!www.politik.uni-mainz.de/kai.arzheimer!www.kai-arzheimer.com!ig' *.htm* There is probably a more clever way to do this, but I applied the same changes in the lower-level directories by changing the last few characters to */*.htm*, */*/*.htm* and so on. Rather amazingly, the same trick worked for PDF files: by applying the patch to *.pdf and so on, I could change URLs in files that had been generated by Office 97.

On the next day, results from the new site began very slowly to replace the pages from the old site. For a couple of days, pages from the new site would disappear and re-appear, but this doesn’t really matter because thanks to the redirect, people find you either way. Three weeks on, the transition seems to be mostly complete. So far, it has been a surprisingly painless experience.

[digg http://digg.com/linux_unix/How_to_move_to_a_new_domain_without_losing_your_backlinks]

Technorati Tags: 301, backlinks, domain, google, Political Science, redirect, science, site, technology

Why Stalin would have loved PowerPoint

Like many other people, I just hate PowerPoint. But I had no idea that this pet hate could be the result of a serious
(well) analysis of PP’s ideological flaws. Now I know. Though the original article by scientific idol and graphics guru Edward Tufte (“power corrupts, powerpoint corrupts absolutely“) has been on the internet for five years, I only acame across the graphical analysis while browsing -er- a PowerPoint presentation. Though it’s a good one on research designs.

Technorati-Tags: fun, powerpoint, presentation, political science, stalinism, ideology

Technorati Tags: fun, ideology, Political Science, powerpoint, presentation, stalinism

Everyone just seems to know that the voters of the Extreme Right hate foreigners in general and immigrants in particular, but robust comparative evidence for the alleged xenophobia – Radical Right vote link is scarce. Moreover, many of the published analyses are based on somewhat outdated (i.e. 1990s) data, and alternative accounts of the extreme right vote (the “unpolitical” protest hypothesis and the hypothesis that the Far Right in Western Europe attracts people with “neo-liberal” economic preferences, championed by Betz and Kitschelt in the 1990s) do exist. Just a few days ago, a journal has accepted a paper by me in which I test these three competing hypotheses using (relatively) recent data from the European Social Survey and a little Structural Equation Modelling. As it turns out, protest and neo-liberalism have no statistically significant impact on the Extreme Right vote whatsoever. Anti-immigrant sentiment, however, plays a crucial role for the Extreme Right in all countries but Italy. Its effects are moderated by party identification and general ideological preferences. Moreover, the effect of immigrant sentiment is moderate by general ideological preferences and party identification. I conclude that comparative electoral research should focus on the circumstances under which immigration is politicised. Wasn’t it blindingly obvious?

Technorati-Tags: extreme right, radical right, populist right, far right, sem, structural equation modelling, western europe, italy, immigration, comparative politics, european social survey, voting, voters

Technorati Tags: comparative politics, european social survey, extreme right, far right, immigration, italy, populist right, radical right, sem, structural equation modelling, voters, voting, western europe

Weird, sad but apparently true: at Nottingham University, a PhD student who works on islamic terrorism and an administrator were arrested (though released without charges) because they were in possession of an al-Qaeda manual downloaded from the internet. The twist: the manual was part of an MA dissertation and had been re-submitted as part of a PhD application. Now this is clandestine. THE has the full story, and boing boing has lots of comments on it. All of the sudden, the whole point of urging students to provide proper references and go back to the sources seems rather moot.

Technorati-Tags: nottingham, university, terrorism, radicalism, islam, al-qaeda, plagiarism, uk, political, science, political science

Technorati Tags: al-qaeda, Islam, nottingham, plagiarism, political, Political Science, radicalism, science, terrorism, uk, university

Worldwide mutual citations in Political Science

Last Saturday, we presented our ongoing work on collaboration and citation networks in Political Science at the
4th UK Network conference held at the University of Greenwich. For this conference, we created a presentation on Knowledge Networks in European Political Science that summarises most of our findings on political science in Britain and Germany and provides some additional international context. The picture on the right shows a subnetwork of about 320 scientists who mutually cite each others’ work. Watch out for the dense IR/methods cluster and the lack of (mutual) connections between the dispersed political sociology and formal methods camps.

Technorati-Tags: sna, pajek, networks, analysis, political science, citation, bibliometrics, pdf, presentation

Technorati Tags: analysis, bibliometrics, citation, networks, pajek, pdf, Political Science, presentation, sna

Ever tried to get something done around other social scientists?

Good stuff: On orgtheory.net Kieran reports on a major breakthrough in the exciting and ever so slightly apocryphal sub-subfield of socio-physics. Beware of the Biggs-Hangeron.

Technorati-Tags: fun, obscure, social science, political science

Technorati Tags: fun, obscure, social science

As a subdiscipline, the study of electoral behavior (or “psephology”) begins with a handful of monographs that were published in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It’s amazing to see how concepts and ideas that were developed in Downs’ “Economic Theory of Democracy” or in the “American Voter” by Campbell et al. some 50 years ago inform our work to the present day. However, the study of electoral behaviour (or electoral behavior – the publisher keep changing the title just to confuse me) did obviously not end with these holy books. From the 1960s on, the discipline was increasingly defined by a number of ground breaking articles that were published in professional journals.

This collection gave us the opportunity to bring together 66 articles which – in our humble view – define the discipline, represent important new departures, or bring together the knowledge we have on a given subject. As a friend of mine wisely remarked, at $ 950 the collection might be slightly underpriced. Then again, if you teach a course on electoral behaviour or political sociology, or if just want to get an overview of electoral studies, getting much if not most of the important stuff in one four-volume-1640-pages book is really a bargain. Maybe you should invite your librarian for a coffee. Make it a large one.

What the Library of Electoral Behaviour gives you is a full introduction to the study of electoral behaviour plus:

Socio-Political Models

1. Lipset, S. M. and S. Rokkan (eds.) (1967) [‘Introduction’] in Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, New York: The Free Press..

2. Erikson, Robert, John H. Goldthorpe and Lucienne Portocarero (1979), ‘Intergenerational Class Mobility in Three Western European Societies. England, France and Sweden’, British Journal of Sociology 30: 415-441

3. Alford, Robert R. (1962): A Suggested Index of the Association of Social Class and Voting, in: Public Opinion Quarterly 26, S. 417–425

4. Lijphart, Arend: Religious vs. Linguistic vs. Class Voting: The “Crucial Experiment” of Comparing Belgium, Canada, South Africa, and Switzerland, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 73, No. 2. (Jun., 1979), pp. 442-458.

5. Class Mobility and Political Preferences: Individual and Contextual Effects Nan Dirk De Graaf; Paul Nieuwbeerta; Anthony Heath The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 100, No. 4. (Jan., 1995), pp. 997-1027.

6. The Developmental Theory of the Gender Gap: Women’s and Men’s Voting Behavior in Global Perspective Ronald Inglehart; Pippa Norris ‎. (Oct., 2000), pp. 441-463.

7. Alan Zuckerman (1975) ‘Political Cleavage: a conceptual and theoretical analysis’, British Journal of Political Science, 5: 231-248.

8. Key, V. O. “A Theory of Critical Elections.” The Journal of Politics 17, no. 1 (1955): 3-18

9. Belknap, G., and A. Campbell. “Political Party Identification and Attitudes toward Foreign Policy.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1951): 601-23.

10. Converse, P. (1966) ‘The concept of a normal vote’ in A. Campbell et al (eds.) Elections and the Political Order, New York, John Wiley.

11. Jennings, M.K. and R. Niemi (1968) ‘The transmission of political values from parent to child’, American Political Science Review, 62: 169-84.

12. Converse, Philip E. (1964), ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’, in: David E. Apter (ed). Ideology and Discontent, pp. 206-261, New York: Free Press

13. Jackson, J. (1983). “The systematic beliefs of the mass public: estimating policy preferences with survey data” in Journal of Politics, vol. 45: 840-58.

14. Markus, Gregory B., and Philip E. Converse. “A Dynamic Simultaneous Equation Model of Electoral Choice.” The American Political Science Review 73, no. 4 (1979): 1055-70.

15. Fiorina, Morris P. “An Outline for a Model of Party Choice.” American Journal of Political Science 21, no. 3 (1977): 601-25.

16. Bartels, Larry M. “Partisanship and Voting Behavior, 1952-1996.” American Journal of Political Science 44 (2000): 35-50.

Cognition and the Voter Calculus

1. Hotelling, Harold (1929), ‘Stability in Competition’, The Economic Journal 39(153): 41-57.

2. Riker, William H., and Peter C. Ordeshook. “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.” American Political Science Review 62 (1968): 25-42.

3. Ferejohn, J. and M. Fiorina (1974) ‘The paradox of not voting’, American Political Science Review, 68: 525-536.

4. Niemi, R. (1976) ‘Costs of voting and nonvoting’, Public Choice, 27: 115-119.

5. Grofman, Bernard. “Is Turnout the Paradox That Ate Rational Choice Theory?” In Information, Participation, and Choice. An Economic Theory of Democracy in Perspective, edited by Bernard Grofman, 93-103. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1993.

6. Stokes, Donald E. “Spatial Models of Party Competition.” The American Political Science Review 57 (1963): 368-77.

7. Grofman, Bernard. “The Neglected Role of the Status Quo in Models of Issue Voting.” The Journal of Politics 47, no. 1 (1985): 230-37.

8. Heath, A., G. Evans and J. Martin (1994) “The measurement of core beliefs and values: the development of balanced socialist / laissez faire and libertarian / authoritarian scales”, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 24: 115-32

9. Rabinowitz, George, and Stuart Elaine MacDonald. “A Directional Theory of Issue Voting.” American Political Science Review 83 (1989): 93-121.

10. Iversen, T. (1994) ‘Political leadership and representation in Western democracies: a test of three models of voting’, American Journal of Political Science, 38: 45-74.

11. Abramowitz, Alan I. “The Impact of a Presidential Debate on Voter Rationality.” American Journal of Political Science 22, no. 3 (1978): 680-90.

12. Petrocik, John R. “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study.” American Journal of Political Science 40 (1996): 825-50.

13. Budge, Ian (1994), ‘A New Spatial Theory of Party Competition: Uncertainty, Ideology and Policy Equilibria Viewed Comparatively and Temporally’, British Journal of Political Science 24: 443-467

14. Sears, David O., Richard R. Lau, Tom R. Tyler und Harris M. Jr. Allen (1980): Interest vs. Symbolic Politics in Policy Attitudes and Presidential Voting, in: American Political Science Review 74, S. 670–684.

15. Quattrone, G. and A. Tversky (1988) ‘Contrasting rational and psychological analyses of political choice’, American Political Science Review, 82: 719-736.

16. Aldrich, John H., John L. Sullivan, and Eugene Borgida. “Foreign Affairs and Issue Voting: Do Presidential Candidates “Waltz before a Blind Audience?”" The American Political Science Review 83, no. 1 (1989): 123-41.

17. Marcus, G. and M. MacKuen (1993) ‘Anxiety, enthusiasm, and the vote: the motivational underpinnings of learning and involvement during presidential campaigns’, American Political Science Review, 87: 672-685.

Forecasting and Electoral Context

1. Reif, Karlheinz, and Hermann Schmitt. “Nine National Second-Order Elections: A Systematic Framework for the Analysis of European Elections Results.” European Journal of Political Research 8 (1980): 3-44.

2. Jackman, R. and R. Miller (1995) ‘Voter turnout in the industrial democracies during the 1980s’, Comparative Political Studies, 27: 467-492.

3. Leighley, J. and J. Nagler (1992) ‘Individual and systemic influences on turnout: who votes?’, Journal of Politics, 54: 718-740.

4. van der Eijk, C., M. Franklin and M. Marsh (1996). “What voters teach us about Europe-wide elections: what Europe-wide elections teach us about voters” in Electoral Studies, vol. 15 no.2: 149-66.

5. Mueller, J. (1970) ‘Presidential popularity from Truman to Johnson’, American Political Science Review, 64: 18-34.

6. Kramer, G. (1971) ‘Short-term fluctuations in US voting behaviour, 1896-1964’, American Political Science Review, 65: 131-143.

7. Nannestad, Peter, and Martin Paldam. “The Vp-Function – a Survey of the Literature on Vote and Popularity Functions after 25 Years.” Public Choice 79, no. 3-4 (1994): 213-45.

8. Lewis-Beck, M. (1997) ‘Who’s the chef? Economic voting under a dual executive’, European Journal of Political Research, 31: 315-325.

9. Conover, P. and S. Feldman (1986) ‘Emotional reactions to the economy: I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore’, American Journal of Political Science, 30: 50-78.

10. Powell, G. B. and G. Whitten (1993) ‘A cross-national analysis of economic voting: taking account of the political context’, American Journal of Political Science, 37: 391-414.

11. Sanders, D. (2000) ‘The real economy and the perceived economy in popularity functions: how much do voters need to know? A study of British data, 1974–97’, Electoral Studies, 19: 275-294.

12. Evans, G. and R. Andersen (2006) ‘The political conditioning of economic perceptions,’ Journal of Politics, 68: 194-207..

13. Gelman, Andrew and King, Gary: Why are American Presidential Election Campaigns Polls so Variable when Votes are so predictable, in: APSR 1993 409-451

14. Krosnick, J. and D. Kinder (1990) ‘Altering the foundations of support for the President through priming’, American Political Science Review, 84: 497-512.

15. Ansolabehere, S., S. Iyengar, A. Simon and N. Valentino (1994) ‘Does attack advertising demobilize the electorate’, American Political Science Review, 88: 829-838.

16. Bartels, L. (1993) ‘Messages received: the political impact of media exposure’, American Political Science Review, 87: 267-285.

17. MacKuen, Michael, and Courtney Brown. “Political Context and Attitude Change.” The American Political Science Review 81, no. 2 (1987): 471-90.

Debates and Methodology

1. Kliemt, Hartmut. “The Veil of Insignificance.” Europäische Zeitschrift für Politische Ökonomie / European Journal of Political Economy 2 (1986): 333-44.

2. Fishbein, Martin, and Icek Ajzen. “Attitudes and Voting Behaviour: An Application of the Theory of Reasoned Action.” In Progress in Applied Social Psychology, edited by Geoffrey M. and Davis Stephenson, James H., 253-313. Chichester: John Wiley \& Sons, 1981

3. Key, V. O. . “Secular realignment and the party system”, The Journal of Politics, 21: 198-210.

4. Inglehart, Ronald (1971): The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies, in:American Political Science Review 65, S. 991–1017

5. Dalton, Russell J. “Cognitive Mobilization and Partisan Dealignment in Advanced Industrial Democracies.” Journal of Politics 46 (1984): 264-84.

6. Converse, Philip E., and Gregory B. Markus. “Plus Ça Change… The New Cps Election Study Panel.” American Political Science Review 73 (1979): 32-49.

7. Carmines, Edward G., and James A. Stimson. “Issue Evolution, Population Replacement, and Normal Partisan Change.” American Political Science Review 75 (1981): 107-18.

8. Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M., and Renée M. Smith. “The Dynamics of Aggregate Partisanship.” American Journal of Political Science 90 (1996): 567-80.

9. Abramowitz, Alan I., and Kyle L. Saunders. “Ideological Realignment in the US Electorate.” The Journal of Politics 60, no. 3 (1998): 634-52.

10. van der Eijk, C., and B. Niemöller (1979). “Recall accuracy and its determinants” in Acta Politica, vol. 14 no. 3: 289-342.

11. van der Eijk, C. (2002) ‘Design issue in electoral research: taking care of (core) business’, Electoral Studies, 21: 189-206.

12. Pattie, C. and R. Johnston (1995) ‘“It’s not like that round here”: region, economic evaluations and voting at the 1992 British general election’, European Journal of Political Research, 28: 1-32.

13. Gerber, Alan S., and Donald P. Green. “The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment.” American Political Science Review 94, no. 3 (2000): 653-63.

14. Robinson, William S. (1950), ‘Ecological Correlation and the Behavior of Individuals’, American Sociological Review 15: 351-357.

15. Falter, Jürgen W., and Reinhard Zintl. “The Economic Crisis of the 1930s and the Nazi Vote.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19 (1988): 55-85. [or King et al.?]

16. Bassili, John N. 1993. Response Latency Versus Certainty as Indexes of the Strength of Voting Intentions in a Cati Survey. The Public Opinion Quarterly 57:54-61.

17. Alvarez, Michael R., and Jonathan Nagler. 2000. A New Approach for Modelling Strategic Voting in Multiparty Elections. British Journal of Political Science 30:57-75

Technorati-Tags: voting, elections, library, political science, sociology, theory, electoral studies, electoral behaviour, election, US, scholarship

Technorati Tags: election, elections, electoral behaviour, electoral studies, library, Political Science, scholarship, sociology, theory, US, voting

Our project on social (citation and collaboration) networks in British and German political science involves networks with hundreds and thousands of nodes (scientists and articles). At the moment, our data come from the Social Science Citation Index (part of the ISI web of knowledge), and we use a bundle of rather eclectic (erratic?) scripts written in Perl to convert the ISI records into something that programs like Pajek or Stata can read. Some canned solutions (Wos2pajek, network workbench, bibexcel) are available for free, but I was not aware of them when I started this project, did not manage to install them properly, or was not happy with the results. Perl is the Swiss Army Chainsaw (TM) for data pre-processing, incredibly powerful (my scripts are typically less than 50 lines, and I am not an efficient programmer), and every time I want to do something in a slightly different way (i.e. I spot a bug), all I have to do is to change a few lines in the scripts.
After trying a lot of other programs available on the internet, we have chosen Pajek for doing the analyses and producing those intriguing graphs of cliques and inner circles in Political Science. Pajek is closed source but free for non-commercial use and runs on Windows or (via wine) Linux. It is very fast, can (unlike many other programs) easily handle very large networks, produces decent graphs and does many standard analyses. Its user interface may be slightly less than straightforward but I got used to it rather quickly, and it even has basic scripting capacities.

The Missing Manual

The only thing that is missing is a proper manual, but even this is not really a problem since Pajek’s creators have written a very accessible introduction to social network analysis that doubles up as documentation for the program (order from amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de. However, Pajek has been under constant development since the 1990s (!) and has acquired a lot of new features since the book was published. Some of them are documented in an appendix, others are simply listed in the very short document that is the official manual for Pajek. You will want to go through the many presentations which are available via the Pajek wiki.

Of course, there is much more software available, often at no cost. If you do program Java or Python (I don’t), there are several libraries available that look very promising. Amongst the stand-alone programs, visone stands out because it can easily produce very attractive-looking graphs of small networks. Even more software has been developed in the context of other sciences that have an interest in networks (chemistry, biology, engineering etc.)
Here is a rather messy collection of links to sna software. Generally, you will want something that is more systematic and informative. Ines Mergel has recently launched a bid for creating a comprehensive software list on wikipedia. The resulting page on social network analysis software is obviously work in progress but provides very valuable guidance.

Technorati-Tags: sna, software, political science, network, analysis, perl, citation, bibliometrics, networks, social, social networks

Technorati Tags: analysis, bibliometrics, citation, network, networks, perl, Political Science, R, science, sna, social, social networks, software, stata

Via Simon Jackman’s blog: Chris Jordan found an intriguing way to visualise some very large, mostly scary national statistics, such as the as the number of plastic cups used on flights in the US every six hours (one million), or the number of cell phones retired every day (426,000). Amazing and aesthetically pleasing in a most disturbing way.Technorati-Tags: statistics, art, politics, USA

Technorati Tags: art, Politics, statistics, USA

More preliminary findings on Social Networks in Political Science: from our analysis of collaboration patterns in the British Journal of Political Science (BJPS) and Political Studies (PS), we conclude that co-publication is much more widespread and intense than in Germany (not a huge surprise). Yet, at least on the basis of these two journals, collaboration networks in British political science look rather fragile when compared to the sciences. Obviously, further research is needed.

Technorati-Tags: social networks, research, political science, methods, publication, citation, analysis

Technorati Tags: analysis, citation, methods, networks, Political Science, publication, research, social networks

Like most social scientists I am a little bit obsessed with social networks. I’m also interested in the sociology of knowledge, which is a little more original. So some time ago, a colleague and I embarked on a project called “Networks in Political Science”, which rather unsurprisingly tries to apply network analysis to publications in Political Science. Our basic idea is that everyone seems to take subfields, theoretical schools and even citation circles for granted, but unlike in some other disciplines, little empirical work has been done so far. More specifically, we want to identify

• highly cited articles that form the core of subfields
• individual influential scholars
• sub-networks of scholars that cite each other and/or collaborate frequently, thereby forming an “invisible college” and
• individuals that are able to bridge sub-discplinary divides by publishing in a whole host of subfields.

Ideally, we would build a huge database of articles, chapters, and monographs. However, this requires lots of research assistants, and so for the time being, we use the Social Science Citation Index, which covers at least the core journals. We are soon due to deliver a paper at a conference, so I started writing it up. I’ve already put some preliminary findings on co-publication in Politische Vierteljahresschrift (PVS), arguably the most important German political science journal, on the web. The summary is very short and perhaps not very surprising: it doesn’t happen on a large scale.

Technorati-Tags: social networks, research, political science, methods, publication, citation, analysis

Technorati Tags: analysis, citation, methods, networks, Political Science, publication, research, social networks

Over the last 25 years, the study of the extreme / radical / populist right
has blossomed as a sub-discipline of both party and electoral research.
As well as becoming the focus of significant case-specific and
comparative work in stable democracies, the end of communism and the
integration of the New Democracies in Central and Eastern Europe into
the European Union has further spurred interest in these parties and
their voters. Equally, additional subdisciplinary literatures including
political communication, political economy, public opinion and
political theory now constitute a core part of the corpus of work on
these organizations.

In a bid to bring together state-of-the-art research from these approaches, Liz Carter and I will organise a section titled “Perspectives on the Radical Right” during the ECPR’s 5th General Conference at the University of Potsdam in Germany in September 2009. The section will consist of eight panels, each with slots for 4-5 papers. A few days ago, a formal call for Panels within this section on the Extreme / Radical / Populist Right was issued. Panel chairs do not have to be members of ECPR institutions, so anyone interested in organising a panel can submit a proposal through the website. The deadline for panel proposals is September 1, 2008. A call for papers will be issued in November 2008.

Technorati-Tags: extreme right, populist right, radical right, extreme, radical, populist, rightextreme right, populist right, radical right, extreme, radical, populist, right

Technorati Tags: extreme, extreme right, populist, populist right, radical, radical right, right

It’s almost unbelievable: after some six months of communication problems with the publishers, my recent book on the extreme right vote in Western Europe since the 1980s is finally out and ready for you to order and read (qualification: if you read German). If you don’t read German, you might still be interested in a brief English summary of my findings on the Extreme Right vote, including various presentations and other goodies.

Technorati Tags: europe, extreme, extreme right, populist, radical, right, vote, voters, voting, western

This is hilarious: Tony Zirkle (the chap behind the lectern) is obviously a man who knows how to sink his own campaign before it has even taken off. As part of his bid for a house seat in Indiana, he recently addressed a meeting of American Neo Nazis who were commemorating Hitler’s birthday (have you spotted the neat hand-made “happy birthday” garland in the foreground?). Respectful Insolence has the full story, complete with links to Zirkle’s homepage on which he blames the great porn dragon for the publicity fallout (I kid you not).

In a strange way, the whole scene looks a bit like the set of a slightly less than funny movie. If you grew up in the 1980s, you will get the impression that you have actually seen this film: remember the “I hate Illinois Nazis” moment from the original Blues Brothers movie?

[digg=http://digg.com/politics/Indiana_congressional_hopeful_woos_American_Neo_Nazis]

Update: Zirkle was defeated soundly in the primary.

Technorati Tags: american, campaign, campaigning, congress, election, extreme right, illinois, nazis, USA, zirkle

In a recent post, I have commented on a (now scrapped) law from the 1930s that made it technically illegal for “foreign” PhDs to use their titles in Germany. A superficially similar case concerns the German citizenship law that was first enacted in 1913 (the Empire happily existed without a concept of federal citizenship for more than four decades) and remained in force with minor amendments until 2000. At the core of this law was the idea that one cannot become German. Rather, one is German by virtue of the bloodline, i.e. by having German forefathers (the original sexist bias of the law was ameliorated in the 1970s). This is the infamous ius sanguinis. However, while the PhD regulations were half-forgotten and rarely enforced (though they provided an income for dubious lawyers), the continuity of the citizenship law after the war was clearly the result of political intent and was even enshrined in article 116 of the constitution.

While the ius sanguinis is archaic, the West German elites had two good reasons for not modernising the law. First, given that Bonn did not accept East Germany’s claim to sovereignty, meddling with the concept of citizenship was obviously dodgy. Second, West Germany considered itself a safe haven for millions of ethnic Germans who were still living in Central and Eastern Europe. Sticking with the traditional concept of citizenship kept the door wide open for these people: like in the case of refugees from East Germany, there was no need to apply for citizenship, because they were already German. Moreover, German citizenship was not exactly in high demand after the war.

One unforeseen consequence of the citizenship law was, however, that children born in Germany by foreigners remained themselves foreigners. By the 1990s, Germany had a sizeable and growing population of several million second (and third) generation foreigners, but thanks to the phenomenal inertia of Germany’s political system and their political persuasions, the Kohl-led governments of the 1980s and 1990s made only token attempts to remedy this situation. The (then new) SPD/Green government, however, came up with some rather radical reform ideas soon after it was elected in 1998. Howard’s article tells the complex and heroic tale of these reforms and the immense political backlash they created. It’s highly recommend for anyone who wants to understand the intricacies of the political battle of citizenship and immigration.

Technorati Tags: change, citizenship, germany, immigration, law, political, social, immigration

Technorati Tags: change, citizenship, germany, immigration, law, political, social

Six weeks ago, I have reviewed Kam’s and Franzese’s Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis. This week, the topic of interaction effects pops up on the Social Science Statistics Blogs, with pointers to useful FAQs and other pages.
Technorati Tags: interaction effects, statistics, regression

Technorati Tags: interaction effects, regression, statistics

Over the last seven years our so, much of my research has focused on the voters of the Extreme Right in Western Europe. Last November, I submitted the final draft of a monograph on that topic to a well-established German publishing company, with view of getting the book out in late January. Then, a lot of things happened (or rather failed to happen). But, believe it or not, yesterday they sent me the contract, and now “Die Wähler der extremen Rechten 1980-2002″ is officially in print. I’ll keep you posted.

Social Bookmarks:

Technorati Tags: extreme right, western europe, voting, right, radical right

Technorati Tags: extreme right, radical right, right, voting, western europe

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article on how make and Makefiles can help you to organise your Stata projects. If you are working in a unix environnment, you’ll already have make installed. If you work under Windows, install GNU make – it’s free, and it can make your Stata day. Rather unsurprisingly, make is also extremely useful if you have large or medium-sized latex project (or if you want to include tables and/or graphs produced by Stata) in a latex document. For instance, this comes handy if you have eps-Figures and use pdflatex. pdflatex produces pdf files instead of dvi files. If you produces slides with, this can save you a lot of time because you don’t have to go through the latex – dvips – ps2pdf cycle. However, pdflatex cannot read eps files: you have to convert your eps files with pstoedit to the meta post format, then use meta post to convert them to mps (which can be read by pdflatex). With this Makefile snippet, everything happens automagically:


#New implicit rules for conversion of eps->mp->mps
#Change path if you have installed pstoedit in some other place
%.mp : %.eps
c:\pstoedit/pstoedit.exe -f mpost $*.eps $*.mp

%.mps: %.mp
mpost $*.mp
mv $*.1 $*.mps
rm $*.mp

#Now specify a target

presentation.pdf: presentation.tex mytab1.tex myfig.mps

#Optional: if you want to create dataset x.eps, run x.do
#Stata must be in your path
%.eps : %.do
\tab wstata -e do $<

Now type make presentation.pdf, and make will call Stata, pstoedit, metapost and pdflatex as required. If you need more figures, just write the do-file and add a dependency.

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Technorati Tags: make, latex, Makefile, Stata, political science, political, science, meta post, pstoedit, postscript, eps, pdf, pdflatex, beamer

Technorati Tags: beamer, eps, latex, make, Makefile, meta post, pdf, pdflatex, postscript, pstoedit, stata

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.

However, the charges against Voigt are just the latest political blow for the party and its current leadership. After 2006, there have been no more electoral successes. Moreover, the party is involved in dubious financial transactions. The party treasurer was taken into custody in February, and the party must repay huge amounts of money it had claimed under Germany’s state-sponsored party-funding scheme. Voigt stands for re-election as party leader in May, and there might well be a leadership contest.

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

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

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.

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

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[digg=http://digg.com/politics/Democratic_values_and_attitudes_in_Turkey]

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

Technorati Tags: economic voting political science

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Technorati Tags: economic, political, science, 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.

However, now running these jobs in the correct order (and determining whether a job needs to be re-run at all) becomes crucial. And this is where make can help you. A Makefile simply contains information on dependencies amongst your files as well as instructions for getting from A to B. Here is an example for the above scenario


#your comments here

#Define new implicit rule: if you want to create dataset x.dta, run x.do
%.dta : %.do
\tab wstata -e do $<

micro.dta : micro.raw micro.do

macro.dta: macro.raw macro.do

combined.dta: micro.dta macro.dta combined.do

final.dta: combined.dta final.do

finalmodel.ster: finalanalysis.do final.dta
\tab wstata -e do finalanalysis.do

tabandgraph: finalmodel.ster graphtab.do
\tab wstata -e do graphtab.do

The first two lines after the comment define a new rule: Whenever you ask make to make a datset, it will run Stata in batch-mode with a do-file of the same name as input. The next line specifies that micro.dta depends on the raw data (micro.raw) as well as on the code that transforms micro.raw into micro.dta. If either file changes, make knows that micro.dta has to be recreated, otherwise, it can be left alone. The same applies to macro.dta, combined.dta and final.dta. So if you type (at the command prompt) “make final.dta” will (re-create) combined.dta, micro.dta, and macro.dta if and only if this is necessary (i.e. if either the scripts or the raw data have changed. The same goes for your tables and graphs. If you change graphtab.do but none of the other files, only graphtab.do will be re-executed. If, on the other hand, you correct an error in macro.do or get a new release of micro.raw, all the intermediate datasets and the saved estimates will be re-created in the correct order before graphtab.do is re-executed.

Two fine points: a) instructions for making something start with a tabstop and b) -e (instead of /E) is required because MSDOS-like options confuse make. If your project is complex, makefiles can save your day. If you work in a *nix environment, make and its documentation is most probably installed on your system. In a Windows environment, you will have to install either Cygwin or MinGW to get make. The Wikipedia article is an excellent starting point for learning the syntax of makefiles.

Technorati Tags: stata, data, make political science

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Technorati Tags: data, make, Political Science, stata

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

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

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 recent review by Brambor, Clark and Golder (2006), however, suggests that even in top political science journals many interpretations of interaction effects are dubious if not plain wrong. The new book by Kam and Franzese has the potential to rectify this situation. Kam and Franzese start out from the proposition that in interactive models (like in a number of other models they discuss in passing), the effect of an interacted variable x does not equal its coefficient. Rather, one has to differentiate the model equation with respect to x (which requires a working knowledge in introductory calculus or a licence for Mathematica) or must calculate first differences (which is easy). The slim volume will appeal both to advanced students and applied researchers that want to get it right. It is organised around a number of running examples of recent real world political research and compares well with the older monographs in the QASS series (“the green Sage papers”) because “modern” issues such as multi-level models and standard errors for effects are addressed. The latter point is of particular importance because the very concise discussion in Kam and Franzese will save the reader the effort to skim through pages and pages of highly technical econometric treatises. While the mathematical apparatus may look a little daunting at first, it is actually very helpful. Moreover, it is accompanied by clear instructions on how to perform the necessary calculations in Stata.

• Order it from Amazon UK
• Order it from Amazon US
• Search and browse it on Google
• Find it in a library near you

Technorati Tags: political science, statistics, interaction, stata, quantitative methods

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[digg=http://digg.com/general_sciences/Review_Interaction_Effects_in_Regression_Kam_Franzese]

Technorati Tags: interaction, quantitative methods, stata, statistics

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

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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