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
Category Article, My Stuff, Political Science|
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.
Continue reading “Rowntree Trust Report: Britain a Database State, and not even efficient at that” »
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
Category Politics|
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).
Continue reading “MLwiN 2.10: free for British Academics” »
Tags: british, download, mlwin, multi-level analysis, multi-level modelling, software, uk, uk universities, winbugs
Category Data and Methods|
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.
Tags: 2009, blog, campaign, elections, extreme right, extremism, federal diet, germany, presidency, right-wing, state elections, voting
Category Article, My Stuff, Political Science, Politics, Review|
Some answers given by students in written exams are so brilliant that you couldn’t make it up: Continue reading “Highlights from a European Politics Class Test” »
Tags: austria, cee, fun, germany, poland, stalinism
Category Political Science|
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).
Continue reading “David Spiegelhalter on Risk, Knife-Crime and the Probability of Being Killed in London” »
Tags: bugs, David Spiegelhalter, fun, london, murder rate, murders, poisson distribution, probability, radio 4, risk, statistics, uk, university of cambridge
Category Data and Methods|
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!
Tags: blog, transfer
Category My Stuff|
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.
Continue reading “Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002” »
Tags: 1980, 2002, Agenda Setting, Eurobarometer, extreme right, immigration, MLA, multi-level analysis, populist right, radical right, unemployment, voting, welfare state, western europe
Category Article, My Stuff, Political Science|
