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. continue reading AJPS article on the Extreme Right published

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

continue reading Remixes of the paranoid suspect your neighbours posters

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

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: 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…

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

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Excerpt: 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…

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

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Excerpt: 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…

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

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: 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…

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

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt:

[/caption] 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…

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.

continue reading Dr Huber’s Sandwich shop

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

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: 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…

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