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Excerpt: 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,…

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

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Excerpt: 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….

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

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Excerpt: 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…

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