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Excerpt: I’m teaching a lecture course on Political Sociology at the moment, and because everyone is so excited about social capital and social network analysis these days, I decided to run a little online experiment with and on my students. The audience is large (at the beginning of this term, about 220 students had registered for this lecture series) and quite diverse, with some students still in their first year, others in their second, third or fourth and even a bunch of veterans who have spent most of their adult lives in university education. [caption id=”attachment_406″ align=”alignright” width=”150″ caption=”Who knows whom in…

Technorati Tags: limesurvey, networkx, pajek, political sociology, python, sna, social capital, social network analysis, social networks, stata, survey data

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Excerpt: The other day, a (rather clever) student told me that she has no real need for all these stats classes, because she will be a journalist. I told her that the world would be a better place if all journalists underwent compulsory numeracy classes. Here is the proof from my favourite newspaper. How long does it take you to spot the glitch? Young people in the East Midlands were the most down-to-earth of those surveyed, expecting an annual salary of £33,468 by the time they reached their mid-thirties. However, even this figure is still around £4,000 higher than…

Technorati Tags: fun, guardian, income, numeracy, property, stats, survey, teenagers

This is a true gem of interdisciplinary research: A recent article in the British Medical Journal demonstrates that the crisis may have toppled major banks and halved the value of your assets, but did not stop these silly little buggers from happily swallowing coins at a constant rate.

Technorati Tags: fun, obscure social science, science

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Excerpt: Sixteen months ago, we started the Political Science Peer-Review Survey. This week, the input form was shut down. That is about three quarters of a year later than expected, but then again, I underestimated the fallout of my move back to Germany. Moreover, until a few weeks ago there was still a tiny trickle of replies coming in. So far, we have found few major problems with the data. The RA has spotted two instances where the respondent somehow managed to save the data at various stages of the interview, thereby inflating the number of respondents. Moreover, it’s amazing how…

Technorati Tags: peer-review, survey

Over the last two decades I have accumulated thousands of references that have travelled with me all the way from bibtex-mode through Endnote, Citavi and some more obscure packages until we finally came full circle and ended up in bibtex-mode again. To my mild surprise, my use of (some) keywords has been fairly consistent so that it was relatively easy (using make, bibtool and bibtex2html) to create a 380+ entries strong online bibliography on the Extreme Right in Western Europe. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: bibliography, bibtex, extreme right, make, online, western europe

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Excerpt:

Technorati Tags: 3d, animation, beamer, latex, logistic, pdf, pgf, pgfplots, plot, standard, stats, teaching, tikz

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Excerpt: I’m teaching an introductory SNA class this year. Following a time-honoured tradition, I conducted a small network survey at the beginning of the class using Limesurvey. Getting the data from Limesurvey to Stata via CSV was easy enough. Here is the data set. But how does one get the data from Stata to Pajek for analysis? Actually, it’s quite easy. First, we need to change the layout of the data. In the data set, there is one record for each of the 13 respondent. Each record has 13 variables, one for each (potential) arc connecting the respondent to other students in…

Technorati Tags: ascii, listtex, pajek, reshape, sna, stata

Statistics and Data links roundup for November 23rd through December 29th:

• The Data and Story Library – DASL (pronounced “dazzle”) is an online library of datafiles and stories that illustrate the use of basic statistics methods. We hope to provide data from a wide variety of topics so that statistics teachers can find real-world examples that will be interesting to their students. Use DASL’s powerful search engine to locate the story or datafile of interest.
• Drawing graphs using tikz/pgf & gnuplot | politicaldata.org -

Technorati Tags: data, datasets, education, imputation, methods, quantitative, R, sna, statistics, stats, teaching, tutorial

Statistics and Data links roundup for November 14th through November 23rd:

• SNAP: Network datasets -
• Network data -
• CASOS Tools: Network Analysis Data | CASOS – Network Analysis Data Casos & INSA
• NodeXL Teaching – CASCI – datasets incl. senate
• Statistics and Data links roundup -

It’s surprisingly difficult to find suitable datasets for a sna workshop that are relevant for political scientists.

Technorati Tags: data, education, imputation, methods, quantitative, R, sna, statistics, teaching, tutorial

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Excerpt: Image via Wikipedia Kai Arzheimer: Vorlesung Statistik II – Welcome | Teaching with Data (QSSDL) – TeachingWithData.org (TwD) is a repository of tools and educational materials designed to improve quantitative literacy skills in social science courses. Built especially for faculty teaching post-secondary courses in such areas as demography, economics, geography, political science, social psychology, and sociology, the materials include stand-alone learning activities, tools, and pedagogy services.The goal is to make it easier for faculty to bring real social science data into courses across the curriculum ranging from introductory classes to senior seminars. Social Science Statistics Blog: The changing nature of…

Technorati Tags: data, education, imputation, methods, quantitative, R, statistics, teaching

Replication data for our recent article on knowledge networks in Political Science are available from my dataverse

Technorati Tags: bibliometrics, knowledge networks, PVS, sna

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

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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

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

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Excerpt:

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

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Excerpt: With the upcoming EP elections, I felt obliged to check out the profiler sites my colleagues have put on the internet. I started with Germany’s wahl-o-mat that has been around for a number of years. After evaluating 30 statements, the program decided that I should vote for the German Liberals, which was not such a big surprise. The Bavarian Christian Democrats and the New Left Party were the biggest distance away from my ideal point, not least because my preferences seem to be more pro-European than these parties.

Technorati Tags: dimensional graph, election, elections, EP, EU, europe, european integration, european union, fun, german liberals, parliament, political personality, profiler, tories, UKIP, wahl o mat

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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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Technorati Tags: bugs, David Spiegelhalter, fun, london, murder rate, murders, poisson distribution, probability, radio 4, risk, statistics, uk, university of cambridge

A friend send me this link to Huber’s Sandwich Emporium yesterday.

Sandwich Estimator?

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

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Excerpt: Image via Wikipedia A few months ago, I published an article on inequality, institutions and turnout in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations that criticised an earlier piece in the same journal. The journal has granted the original author the right to a reply, which seems only fair. I was, however, slightly surprised that I would have the right to respond to that reply. Where does it stop? Anyway, a very short article with the fancy title ‘Lakatos reloaded’ has been submitted and accepted and will appear in one of the next issues of the BJPIR. Technorati-Tags: bjpir, turnout, lakatos,…

Technorati Tags: bjpir, british journal of politics and international relations, case study, institutions, lakatos, state, tscs, turnout, welfare

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Excerpt: With about 100 new respondents, yet another brilliant week for the Political Science Peer-Review Survey draws to a close. While the snowball is still rolling, and while we cannot know for certain because the survey is anonymous after all, we might soon reach a point of saturation: I have received a number of very friendly replies from people who tell me that they have already heard about the survey once (or twice) from someone else. The Netherlands in particular seem to be a hotspot of peer-review survey related activities. You could guess that much from the distribution of our respondents….

Technorati Tags: journals, netherlands, peer-review, Political Science, publications, respondents, survey

On Monday, the Political Science Peer-Review Survey had 506 respondents. Between Tuesday and Friday, we sent out 1,100 new invitations. Five days and many contacts with helpful colleagues later the number stands at 626. Feel free to join them.

Technorati Tags: journals, peer-review, Political Science, survey, update

The title says it all: yesterday, respondents 500-506 took the Political Science Peer-Review Survey, which is obviously great. A neat detail is that so far, more than 60 current or previous editors of political science journals have taken part in the survey. Tomorrow, we will resume or email campaign (aimed at those who have published in SSCI journals over the last eight years or so) to get even more people on board.
Technorati-Tags: political science, peer review, journals, survey, publications, research, ssci, social science citation index

Technorati Tags: journals, peer-review, Political Science, publications, research, social science citation index, ssci, survey

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: On Monday, we started a new initiative to boost response to the Political Science Peer Review Survey. Thanks to some very industrious research students, we were able to identify about 21,000 individual authors who have published in Social Science Citation Index-covered Political Science Journals between 2000 and 2008. For about 8,000 of these, the SSCI lists their email addresses (that’s the EM field in the SSCI records), and so we started contacting them and asked them to participate in the survey. Obviously, some addresses are not longer valid because people have moved on to different places or have left academia…

Technorati Tags: journals, peer-review, Political Science, publication, survey

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Excerpt: Almost exactly three years ago, a major political science journal asked me to review a manuscript. I recommended to reject the paper on the grounds that a) its scope was extremely limited and b) that it largely ignored the huge body of existing political science literature on its topic. The editors followed my suggestion (presumably, the other reviewers did not like the piece either). A couple of days ago, an obscure national journal sent me the very same (though slightly updated and upgraded) manuscript review. Is this sad or funny? How often did they authors have to downgrade their ambitions…

Technorati Tags: journals, peer-review, peer_review, political, political_science, publication, science, survey

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Excerpt: If you edit, review or author manuscripts for political science journals, the peer-review process is at the centre of your professional life. Unfortunately, for most of us the process is largely a black box. While everyone has heard (or lived through) tales from the trenches, there is very little hard evidence on how the process actually works. This is why a number of colleagues and I started the peer-review survey project that aims at collecting information on the experience of authors, reviewers and editors of political science journals. If you are an active political scientist, this survey is for you: we…

Technorati Tags: articles, journals, manuscripts, peer, peer-review, peer_review, political, Political Science, quality, results, Review, science, survey

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Excerpt: [Slightly off topic] Having your own domain is obviously attractive, but when I moved to the UK two years ago, I left my main site with all my presentations, pre-prints and other goodies in a subdirectory of my old institution’s website where it had resided since about 1999. They have a decent server with loads of space that is regularly backupped, and they don’t charge me a penny. But more importantly, over the years I have accumulated a whopping 160 MB worth of files (about 6000 of them), and people (and Google) know where to find my stuff….

Technorati Tags: 301, backlinks, domain, google, Political Science, redirect, science, site, technology

Why Stalin would have loved PowerPoint

Technorati Tags: fun, ideology, Political Science, powerpoint, presentation, stalinism

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Technorati Tags: analysis, bibliometrics, citation, networks, pajek, pdf, Political Science, presentation, sna

Ever tried to get something done around other social scientists?

Good stuff: On orgtheory.net Kieran reports on a major breakthrough in the exciting and ever so slightly apocryphal sub-subfield of socio-physics. Beware of the Biggs-Hangeron.

continue reading The emerging standard model of socio-physics

Technorati Tags: fun, obscure, social science

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Excerpt: Our project on social (citation and collaboration) networks in British and German political science involves networks with hundreds and thousands of nodes (scientists and articles). At the moment, our data come from the Social Science Citation Index (part of the ISI web of knowledge), and we use a bundle of rather eclectic (erratic?) scripts written in Perl to convert the ISI records into something that programs like Pajek or Stata can read. Some canned solutions (Wos2pajek, network workbench, bibexcel) are available for free, but I was not aware of them when I started this project, did not manage to install…

Technorati Tags: analysis, bibliometrics, citation, network, networks, perl, Political Science, R, science, sna, social, social networks, software, stata

More preliminary findings on Social Networks in Political Science: from our analysis of collaboration patterns in the British Journal of Political Science (BJPS) and Political Studies (PS), we conclude that co-publication is much more widespread and intense than in Germany (not a huge surprise). Yet, at least on the basis of these two journals, collaboration networks in British political science look rather fragile when compared to the sciences. Obviously, further research is needed. continue reading Social Networks in British Political Science

Technorati Tags: analysis, citation, methods, networks, Political Science, publication, research, social networks

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Excerpt: Like most social scientists I am a little bit obsessed with social networks. I’m also interested in the sociology of knowledge, which is a little more original. So some time ago, a colleague and I embarked on a project called “Networks in Political Science”, which rather unsurprisingly tries to apply network analysis to publications in Political Science. Our basic idea is that everyone seems to take subfields, theoretical schools and even citation circles for granted, but unlike in some other disciplines, little empirical work has been done so far. More specifically, we want to identify highly cited articles that form…

Technorati Tags: analysis, citation, methods, networks, Political Science, publication, research, social networks

Six weeks ago, I have reviewed Kam’s and Franzese’s Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis. This week, the topic of interaction effects pops up on the Social Science Statistics Blogs, with pointers to useful FAQs and other pages.
Technorati Tags: interaction effects, statistics, regression

Technorati Tags: interaction effects, regression, statistics

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Excerpt: A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article on how make and Makefiles can help you to organise your Stata projects. If you are working in a unix environnment, you’ll already have make installed. If you work under Windows, install GNU make – it’s free, and it can make your Stata day. Rather unsurprisingly, make is also extremely useful if you have large or medium-sized latex project (or if you want to include tables and/or graphs produced by Stata) in a latex document. For instance, this comes handy if you have eps-Figures and use pdflatex. pdflatex produces pdf files…

Technorati Tags: beamer, eps, latex, make, Makefile, meta post, pdf, pdflatex, postscript, pstoedit, stata

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Excerpt: By relying on scripts (do-files), Stata encourages you to work in a structured, efficient and reproducible way. This text-based approach is familiar and attractive to anyone who has ever used a unix shell and the standard utilities. Actually, unix-flavoured utilities can make your stata experience even better. One non-obvious candidate is make, which is usually used for programming projects that require some sort of compilation. Consider the following scenario. You have two ascii files of raw data, micro.raw and macro.raw. You want to read in both files, correct some errors, convert them to stata’s .dta format, merge them, apply some recodes,…

Technorati Tags: data, make, Political Science, stata

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Excerpt: If you are interested in subnational politics, France is an interesting case for many reasons. On the one hand, the country is highly centralised and divided into 96 (European) Departements (administrative units) with equal legal rights (though Corsica is a bit of an exception to this). In fact, Departements were created after the revolution in an attempt to replace the provinces of the Ancien Regime with something rational and neat. On the other hand, the Departements are vastly different in terms of their size, population, economic, political and social structure, which gives you a lot of variance that can be…

Technorati Tags: departements, france, geocodes, perl, stata, subnational