Subscribe in a readerJust finished my long-overdue review of David Art‘s latest book on Radical Right for West European Politics. I wonder how he survived those 140 interviews physically and mentally intact.
I’ve just finished a review of Tim Spier’s new book on the electorates of the Western European populist right for a yearbook. Since the yearbook is not due to appear before September, here’s the text for your edification (in German)
Courtesy of Google’s book search, a large parts of my new book on the Extreme Right in Western Europe (in German) is now available online. I don’t know how they calculate which and how many pages one may view but I was able to read several consecutive pages of it. Plus you have the search function which comes in handy if you know exactly what you are looking for e.g. because you want to verify a quote. And if Google fails you, you can always try amazon which has its own online version of “Die Wähler der Extremen Rechten 1980-2002″. Nice.
Technorati-Tags: extreme right, extreme, right, political science, western europe, voting, extreme rechte, rechtsextremismus, wahlverhalten, westeuropa
As a subdiscipline, the study of electoral behavior (or “psephology”) begins with a handful of monographs that were published in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It’s amazing to see how concepts and ideas that were developed in Downs’ “Economic Theory of Democracy” or in the “American Voter” by Campbell et al. some 50 years ago inform our work to the present day. However, the study of electoral behaviour (or electoral behavior – the publisher keep changing the title just to confuse me) did obviously not end with these holy books. From the 1960s on, the discipline was increasingly defined by a number of ground breaking articles that were published in professional journals.
This collection gave us the opportunity to bring together 66 articles which – in our humble view – define the discipline, represent important new departures, or bring together the knowledge we have on a given subject. As a friend of mine wisely remarked, at $ 950 the collection might be slightly underpriced. Then again, if you teach a course on electoral behaviour or political sociology, or if just want to get an overview of electoral studies, getting much if not most of the important stuff in one four-volume-1640-pages book is really a bargain. Maybe you should invite your librarian for a coffee. Make it a large one.
What the Library of Electoral Behaviour gives you is a full introduction to the study of electoral behaviour plus:
Lipset, S. M. and S. Rokkan (eds.) (1967) [‘Introduction’] in Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, New York: The Free Press..
Erikson, Robert, John H. Goldthorpe and Lucienne Portocarero (1979), ‘Intergenerational Class Mobility in Three Western European Societies. England, France and Sweden’, British Journal of Sociology 30: 415-441
Alford, Robert R. (1962): A Suggested Index of the Association of Social Class and Voting, in: Public Opinion Quarterly 26, S. 417–425
Lijphart, Arend: Religious vs. Linguistic vs. Class Voting: The “Crucial Experiment” of Comparing Belgium, Canada, South Africa, and Switzerland, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 73, No. 2. (Jun., 1979), pp. 442-458.
Class Mobility and Political Preferences: Individual and Contextual Effects Nan Dirk De Graaf; Paul Nieuwbeerta; Anthony Heath The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 100, No. 4. (Jan., 1995), pp. 997-1027.
The Developmental Theory of the Gender Gap: Women’s and Men’s Voting Behavior in Global Perspective Ronald Inglehart; Pippa Norris . (Oct., 2000), pp. 441-463.
Alan Zuckerman (1975) ‘Political Cleavage: a conceptual and theoretical analysis’, British Journal of Political Science, 5: 231-248.
Key, V. O. “A Theory of Critical Elections.” The Journal of Politics 17, no. 1 (1955): 3-18
Belknap, G., and A. Campbell. “Political Party Identification and Attitudes toward Foreign Policy.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1951): 601-23.
Converse, P. (1966) ‘The concept of a normal vote’ in A. Campbell et al (eds.) Elections and the Political Order, New York, John Wiley.
Jennings, M.K. and R. Niemi (1968) ‘The transmission of political values from parent to child’, American Political Science Review, 62: 169-84.
Converse, Philip E. (1964), ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’, in: David E. Apter (ed). Ideology and Discontent, pp. 206-261, New York: Free Press
Jackson, J. (1983). “The systematic beliefs of the mass public: estimating policy preferences with survey data” in Journal of Politics, vol. 45: 840-58.
Markus, Gregory B., and Philip E. Converse. “A Dynamic Simultaneous Equation Model of Electoral Choice.” The American Political Science Review 73, no. 4 (1979): 1055-70.
Fiorina, Morris P. “An Outline for a Model of Party Choice.” American Journal of Political Science 21, no. 3 (1977): 601-25.
Bartels, Larry M. “Partisanship and Voting Behavior, 1952-1996.” American Journal of Political Science 44 (2000): 35-50.
Hotelling, Harold (1929), ‘Stability in Competition’, The Economic Journal 39(153): 41-57.
Riker, William H., and Peter C. Ordeshook. “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.” American Political Science Review 62 (1968): 25-42.
Continue reading “Library of Electoral Behaviour/Electoral Behavior” »
It’s almost unbelievable: after some six months of communication problems with the publishers, my recent book on the extreme right vote in Western Europe since the 1980s is finally out and ready for you to order and read (qualification: if you read German). If you don’t read German, you might still be interested in a brief English summary of my findings on the Extreme Right vote, including various presentations and other goodies.
Over the last seven years our so, much of my research has focused on the voters of the Extreme Right in Western Europe. Last November, I submitted the final draft of a monograph on that topic to a well-established German publishing company, with view of getting the book out in late January. Then, a lot of things happened (or rather failed to happen). But, believe it or not, yesterday they sent me the contract, and now “Die Wähler der extremen Rechten 1980-2002″ is officially in print. I’ll keep you posted.
Continue reading “New Extreme Right Book out – soon?” »
The basic assumptions of the theory of economic voting are very simple:
Unfortunately, the impact of this effect is not constant over time and across countries, which is slightly embarrassing. In their recent book, van der Brug et al. do not claim that they have solved this puzzle, but they maintain that they have taken the discussion one step further. According to them, previous research has looked at the wrong variable, i.e. (dichotomous or multinomial) vote intentions. This is hardly surprising. For the last decade or so, these authors and their associates have campaigned for an alternative measure, namely the subjective probability to vote for each single party. However, their measure (which has been implemented in the European Election Studies) is not uncontroversial. First, analysts must account for the clustering of these ratings (while we might look at 4,000 or 6,000 ratings, we still have only 1,000 truly independent cases, i.e. persons). Second, if a respondent does not rate a party, is that a missing value or a zero probability? Third, comparisons across political systems (especially comparisons of two-/multiparty systems) are at least as dodgy as comparisons of the traditional variable. And finally, while counting votes/vote intentions obviously discards valuable information about the individual calculus that leads to this decision, subjective probabilities are closer to party sympathies than to real thing. Nonetheless, an interesting read.
Continue reading “A fresh look at economic voting” »
Many hypothesis in the social sciences involve interaction: The effect of some variable x (say xenophobia) on some variable y (say support for the extreme right) is conditional on a third variable z (say ethnicity). Modelling interactive hypotheses looks straightforward on the surface: simply generate a third variable by multiplying x and z and plug all three in your regression. In Stata, this process can be automated by means of the built-in command xi or by desmat, which is available from SSC.
Click on the citations to get bibliographic data.
Continue reading “Review: Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis” »
