Harald’s and my article on citation and collaboration networks in German and British Political Science has finally appeared in print and online, which is obviously great. Here is the abstract:

Citations and co-publications are one important indicator of scientific communication and collaboration. By studying patterns of citation and co-publication in four major European Political Science journals (BJPS, PS, PVS and ÖZP), we demonstrate that compared to the conduits of communication in the natural sciences, these networks are rather sparse. British Political Science, however, is clearly less fragmented than its German speaking counterpart.

continue reading Article on Networks in Political Science Published

Technorati Tags: bibliometrics, knowledge networks, PVS, sna

Just back from the ECPR conference at Potsdam, which was great fun for various reasons. Here is my conference presentation on the dynamics of radical right support and mainstream party political change in France (PDF).

Technorati Tags: dynamics, ecpr, extreme right, france, issues, potsdam, radical right, salience

Believe or not: in Germany, it is illegal to publish results from exit polls before the polling stations close (at 6pm – we’re German) on polling day. Last Sunday, state elections were held in three Länder, and someone leaked alleged results on twitter while the stations were still open. The political class was outraged and suggested just about anything from banning exit polls to suing twitter, which inspired me to rant against these draconic and silly proposals over at Andrea’s and Thorsten’s Wahlen nach Zahlen blog (in German). continue reading Twitter and Exit Polls in Germany

Technorati Tags: ban, election day, exit polls, germany, twitter

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

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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

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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

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Excerpt: Does religion make you a better or worse human being? More specifically, does Christian religiosity reduce or increase the likelihood of a radical/extreme right vote in a West European context? This is the question Liz and I are trying to address in our latest paper on “Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties”. There are a number of reasons why good Christians could be more likely to vote for the Right than agnostics: American research starting in the 1940s has linked high levels of church attendance and a closed belief systems to support for rightism. More over, contemporary…

Technorati Tags: attitudes, extreme right, immigrants, immigration, Islam, radical right, religion, religiosity, structural equation modelling, western europe

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Excerpt: The US might face unprecedented levels of turnout in tomorrow’s election, but historically, the non-voters are the biggest camp in American politics. One intriguing explanation for this well-known fact is that low turnout could be a consequence of the very high (by any standard) levels of income inequality: because voters lack experience with universalistic institutions, they are less likely to adopt norms and values that foster participation in elections. This is the gist of an article that appeared recently (by social science standards) in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. While the thesis is interesting enough, I did…

Technorati Tags: beck and katz, bjpir, bootstrapping, data, download, elections, inequality, norms, oecd, replication, social, time-series cross-sectional data, tscs, turnout, USA

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Excerpt: 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…

Technorati Tags: 2004, departements, district magnitude, extreme right, far right, france, front national, immigration, opportunity structures, populist right, radical right, regional elections, subnational, unemployment, voting

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Excerpt: Everyone just seems to know that the voters of the Extreme Right hate foreigners in general and immigrants in particular, but robust comparative evidence for the alleged xenophobia – Radical Right vote link is scarce. Moreover, many of the published analyses are based on somewhat outdated (i.e. 1990s) data, and alternative accounts of the extreme right vote (the “unpolitical” protest hypothesis and the hypothesis that the Far Right in Western Europe attracts people with “neo-liberal” economic preferences, championed by Betz and Kitschelt in the 1990s) do exist. Just a few days ago, a journal has accepted a paper by me…

Technorati Tags: comparative politics, european social survey, extreme right, far right, immigration, italy, populist right, radical right, sem, structural equation modelling, voters, voting, western europe

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Excerpt: In a recent post, I have commented on a (now scrapped) law from the 1930s that made it technically illegal for “foreign” PhDs to use their titles in Germany. A superficially similar case concerns the German citizenship law that was first enacted in 1913 (the Empire happily existed without a concept of federal citizenship for more than four decades) and remained in force with minor amendments until 2000. At the core of this law was the idea that one cannot become German. Rather, one is German by virtue of the bloodline, i.e. by having German forefathers (the original sexist bias…

Technorati Tags: change, citizenship, germany, immigration, law, political, social

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Excerpt: Last year, the “Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie” published an article on the level of support for the European Union’s core principles (democracy, gender equality, religious freedom, rule of law) in Turkey. In essence, the author claimed that the level of support for these principles in Turkey is low because a) the level of economic development is low while b) the number of Muslims is very high. Thanks to the very efficient PR office at the university of Cologne, these findings made their way into the mainstream media in Germany (including the English service of the Deutsche Welle) and…

Technorati Tags: democracy, european union, Islam, multi-level analysis, Muslims, sociology, stata, turkey

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Excerpt: Last year, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations published an article which essentially argued that higher levels of welfare state spending create attitudes which are conducive to higher turnout. I was not convinced and so I wrote a comment/replication in which I demonstrate that there is no robust evidence for a universal, politically relevant relationship between inequality/welfare state spending, and turnout (HTML). The journal has recently accepted the article for publication later in 2008, but for the time being, the manuscript is available here (PDF). I have also set up an archive with replication data for this paper. Technorati Tags:…

Technorati Tags: attitudes, inequality, institutions, Political Science, replication, turnout, voting, welfare state