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’m currently working on an analysis of the latest state election in Rhineland-Palatinate using aggregate data alone, i.e. electoral returns and structural information, which is available at the level of the state’s roughly 2300 municipalities. The state’s Green party (historically very weak) has roughly tripled their share of the vote since the last election in 2006, and I want to know were all these additional votes come from. And yes, I’m treading very careful around the very large potential ecological fallacy that lurks at the centre of my analysis, regressing Green gains on factors such as tax receipts and distance from next university town, but never claiming that the rich or the students or both turned to the Greens.
One common problem with this type of analysis is that not all municipalities are created equal. There is a surprisingly large number of flyspeck villages with only a few dozen voters on, whereas the state’s capital boasts more than 140,000 registered voters. Most places are somewhere in between. Having many small municipalities in the regression feels wrong for at least two reasons. First, small-scale changes of political preferences in tiny electorates will result in relatively large percentage changes. Second, the behaviour of a relatively large number of voters who happen to live in a small number of relatively large municipalities will be grossly underrepresented, i.e. the countryside will drive the results.
Continue reading “Robust Regression of Aggregate Data in Stata” »
Like a premature Christmas present, my author’s copy of “The Extreme Right in Europe” arrived before the weekend. It’s a hefty volume of almost 500 pages that comes with a equally hefty price tag of just under 80 Euros. As you can see from the table of contents (the PDF also contains the introduction and a large chunk from Gilles Ivaldi’s chapter), it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but I like the idea of bringing together contributions on Eastern and Western Europe and dealing with multiple facets of the right (parties, movements, voters, ‘culture’). While I’m particularly partial to the chapters by Ivaldi and de Lange, which are on matters close to my own research interests, Heß-Meining’s piece on Right-Wing Esotericism stands out for the sheer weirdness of its subject: Hitler’s hideout in the Arctic and Al Gore the Vampire, you name it. So if you’re looking for a last-minute Christmas present for this XR-head stoner uncle of yours … just kidding of course.
As an aside, it’s remarkable that this book was published in English. The volume as well as the conference on which it is based were sponsored by French and German institutions. A few years ago, that would have meant a bilingual conference and publication. Outside Luxembourg, what is the number of scholars working in the field who could have actively participated in the conference? And how much larger would have been the number of potential readers? Individually and collectively, French and German political science might still be too big to fail for the time being, but it’s good to see that we as a discipline chose relevance. Occasionally.
To celebrate this moment of pre-Christmas clarity, here’s the author’s version of my chapter Continue reading “Just out: Backes/Moreau (Eds) The Extreme Right in Europe” »
The liberal German weekly Zeit has commissioned a YouGov poll which demonstrates that Germans are more afraid of right-wing terrorists than of Islamist terrorists. The question read “What is, in your opinion, the biggest terrorist threat in Germany?” On offer were right-wingers (41 per cent), Islamists (36.6 per cent), left-wingers (5.6 per cent), other groups (3.8 per cent), or (my favourite) “no threat” (13 per cent). This is a pretty daft question anyway. Given the news coverage of the Neo-Nazi gang that has killed at least ten people more or less under the eyes of the authorities, and given that the authorities have so far managed to stop would-be terrorists in their tracks, the result is hardly surprising.
Continue reading “Are Germans More Afraid of Neo-Nazis Than of Islamists?” »
Unless you spent the last couple of days under a rock, you will have heard about the terrible series of (at least) ten neo-Nazi murders that has stunned Germany. In my view, three things are particularly remarkable about this crime.
First, the mainstream media including the public broadcasters and the left-liberal press refer to the series as ‘Dönermorde’, i.e. ‘Kebab Killings’, because most of the victims were small businessmen of Turkish origin. This is impious at any rate, and not exactly sensitive in the context of ethnically motivated violence.
Continue reading “Random thoughts on right-wing terrorism in Germany” »
My default for writing anything that is longer than a page is LaTeX (possibly via org-mode, if it is short and simple). In fact, the bond that ties me to the LaTeX/Emacs combo is so strong that I want to use it even for texts that are exactly one page long, i.e. conference posters.
CTAN lists a lot of packages and frameworks for posters, but I found most of them too heavy/compl
Continue reading “Quick and Fancy Conference Posters with beamer/beamerposter” »
Writing for encyclopaedias is by and large a thankless task. You get no recognition at all and have to summarise all you deem relevant about your field of expertise in 500 or 1000 words without any chance of contributing something new, being original or at least witty. But sometimes, it can be fun. I realised that when I was recruited to write the article on Fringe Parties for the all new CQ Encyclopedia of Political Science (prepared with the assistance of APSA). Now that is a subject that is close to my heart. Here’s the author’s version of the manuscript (PDF).
Continue reading “Mini publication: Fringe Parties” »
One feels almost (almost!) sorry for the Social Democratic left: They are squeezed between the more modern Greens/Libertarians on the one hand, and the Extreme Right on the other. The latter has been remarkably successful in poaching working class voters who are worried about immigration and don’t feel particularly attached to the unions or the parties of the left. In a relatively recent contribution (Bale et al. 2010), Tim Bale and colleagues take a closer look at this dilemma and identify three Social Democratic strategies for dealing with it.
While their work is largely qualitative, I’ve crunched the numbers and tried to shed some light on two related questions: Is the Extreme Right really subject to a process of proletarisation, and can the strategies outlined by Bale et al. work to win back working class voters.
The result is still somewhat work in progress – comments are highly appreciated.
Do you remember the book launch scene from the first Bridget Jones movie (I do – the shame, the shame), when she talks about “the greatest book of our time”? I was reminded of that scene when I recently attended a reception at the fringe of ECPR 2011 to mark the launch of the the all-new, IPSA-approved Encyclopedia of Political Science. The food was lousy, the audience was illustrious (well, by PolSci standards, perhaps), and the speeches just that tiny bit overenthusiastic (someone even mentioned Diderot). The only thing missing was the 45 pounds (referring to weight, not value, mind you!) tome itself, the mother of all political science encyclopedias. Apparently, transport was too expensive, and so we got the Vice President of Sage instead. An USB stick with an ebook copy for the attendants would have been nice, though.
What earned me the invitation was that I have written a tiny contribution to the book so many years ago that I had forgotten about it. So here, for your edification, are my two cents on radical attitudes.
After a lengthy hiatus, I’ve found the time to update my online bibliography on the Extreme (or Radical/Populist/Anti-Immigrant) Right in Western Europe. According to my latest count, it lists now 400 articles, books, chapters, and working papers, complete with doi- and/or http-links where available. Enjoy!
