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.

Why I should vote for the LibDems (maybe)

Continue reading “Which party should I vote for in the European Elections?” »

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 wrong, which happens occassionally.

That said, MLwiN is reasonably fast, does now incorporate modern MCMC estimators, has an interface with WINBUGS and can be convinced to do most things you would possibly want to do with it.  I bought version 1.10 ca. 1998, received free upgrades to 2.02 and good support well until 2004/2005 or so.  These days, Stata, R and MPlus can all estimate multi-level models, but working with MLwiN may still be worthwhile for you (by the way, you can download the free stata2mlwin addon from UCLA academic technology to export your variables from Stata to MLwiN).

Continue reading “MLwiN 2.10: free for British Academics” »

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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 the murder rate, illustrating the idea of clustered risks in passing. He even convinced the anchor that stats is actually fun, even if you look at 170 murders per year in a population of just 7 million Londoners. I was duly impressed (you can listen here to the interview with Spiegelhalter). In fact, I was so impressed that I googled him once I reached the office and came across his website understandinguncertainty.org, which has full coverage of the London murder mystery (that is solved by modelling a Poisson distribution of the incidents).

Continue reading “David Spiegelhalter on Risk, Knife-Crime and the Probability of Being Killed in London” »

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

Sandwich Estimator?

Continue reading “Dr Huber’s Sandwich shop” »

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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.

Continue reading “Turnout, Lakatos, and Case Studies” »

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. While the US dominate the field (as they should), Switzerland and the Netherlands come an amazing 5th and 6th, accurately reflecting the standing of these countries as Social Science strongholds.

Technorati-Tags: political science, peer review, survey, netherlands, respondents, journals, publications

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.

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

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 altogether. Nonetheless, I was slightly surprised by the rather poor quality of the address data supplied by Thomson. In some cases, letters were missing whereas in other cases similar looking letters (e.g. ‘v’ and ‘y’) had been confused. This looks like either a weak OCR routine or an non-native and underpaid data typing slave has been used. Overall, we have contacted 962 people so far. About 200 of our messages have bounced, and we have 61 new responses to the survey (assuming that without the mailout, no one would have responded during these four days), which brings us to a new total of 238 responses

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 for finding a decent outlet in the process? And how common is this?

Thanks to the all new, all shiny political science peer-review survey, there is at least an answer to the last question: about 30 per cent of our respondents say that they would submit a rejected manuscript to a less prestigious journal. But what really strikes me is the proportion of reviewers who have reviewed (and rejected?) the same manuscript for at least two different journals: 29 per cent. This squares nicely with my personal experience (sometimes I seem to hit the same wall twice or more) and points to the fact that political science is a small world. Too small perhaps.

Continue reading “Another War Story from the Blind Review Process” »