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

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Excerpt: 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…

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

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

[/caption] 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 …

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

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. continue reading ECPR sets up a blog

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

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Excerpt:

[/caption] 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…

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