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

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

[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: Continue reading “How to move your site to a new domain without losing your backlinks (hopefully)” »

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.

Continue reading “Does Powerpoint equal Stalinism?” »