If you are interested in the distribution of value orientations within Europe (Western, Central, Eastern), and if you read German (I know that is a lot to ask for), the following chapter draft might be of interest (PDF). The final version will appear in Silke I. Keil/Jan W. van Deth (Eds.): Deutschlands Metamorphosen. Einheit und Differenzen in europäischer Perspektive. Nomos: Baden-Baden, 2011. And yes, I do realise that this provides a somewhat ironic corollary to my previous post on the potential futility of political culture research.
Europa als Wertegemeinschaft? Ost und West imSpiegel des „Schwartz Value Inventory“
1 Einleitung und Fragestellung
Werte bzw. Wertorientierungen gehören zu den zentralen Konzepten der vergleichenden Politikwissenschaft. Von Beginn der Umfrageforschung an wurden die Orientierungen gegenüber den zentralen Werten ihrer jeweiligen Gesellschaft immer wieder empirisch untersucht. Seit den 1970er Jahren wurde dabei zumeist auf die von Ronald Inglehart (u. a. 1971; 1989; 1997) entwickelten Konzepte und Instrumente zurückgegriffen, insbesondere auf die verkürzte Variante seiner Wertebatterie („Inglehart-Index“), die nicht nur in zahllosen nationalen, sondern auch in der Mehrzahl der großen internationalen Einstellungsstudien routinemäßig mitläuft (z. B. Eurobarometer, ISSP, EES, EVS, WVS).
A group of my students has programmed a short online questionnaire on democratic attitudes. Please do feel free to help them with their work by participating and sharing the link. The survey is short, fun and completely anonymous: http://www.politik.uni-mainz.de/survey/index.php?sid=95262&lang=en
Five years ago, I published a paper on the apparently inevitable decline of party identifications in Germany. The somewhat cutesy title of the piece is Dead Men Walking. It is based on the ‘Politbarometer’ series of monthly polls going back all the way to the late 1970s, and in my humble opinion, it is a rather neat application of the “analysing repeated surveys” approach. One of my main findings is that on average, the share of party identifiers declines at a rate of about 0.7 percentage points per year. Recently, I re-ran my scripts on a new data set that extends the old series all through the naughties. As you can see, party ID in Germany is not exactly alive and kicking, but the rate of decline has fallen considerably over the last decade. As one wise man once observed, the core problem with predictions is that they are about the future.
Sometimes, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Which, in my case, might be a little simulation of a random process involving an unordered categorical variable. In R, sampling from a multinomial distribution is trivial.
It’s amazing: Just 36 hours after the horrible earth quake in Japan, 60000 people are demonstrating in Swabia – against nuclear energy. While we do not know whether the Japanese plants are actually in meltdown, for the German liberal-conservative coalition, this is certainly the Most Credible Accident.
In the olden days, the world was simple. The average extreme right party was strictly socially conservative, to say the least. Abortion and homosexuality were considered sinful, mostly so because both practices deprived the fatherland of future soldiers and potential mothers of even more soldiers. So sex was supposed to be intramarital and had one purpose only: to procreate for the fatherland. Then came Pim Fortuyn and somewhat confused the message, but this was of little concern to members of the German NPD, who sometimes seem to live blissfully in a parallel universe where the 1930s never came to an end.
Recently, the good folks over at the Exzellenzcluster (that’s German new-speak, folks!) Trier invited me over for a talk on our “networks in political science” project (which is not dead, just moving very slowly). Since this is multimedia month, they captured my voice and re-synched it with the presentation. Spooky stuff: all silly jokes, every “errrr” and all my nasty comments on various colleagues near and far are now online forever. Makes you wonder about scientific, technical and social progress. But if you could not be at Trier on this evening, or just cannot get enough of my lovely voice, just click below.
You got to love public radio. Granted, any institution that has a guaranteed income from the tax/licence payer and is therefore effectively insulated from their customers demands is slightly suspicious, but nonetheless, the continued existence of programs that provide an hour-long space for political debate without any commercials (and next to nil music in between) is reason to rejoice. This week, the good folks over at Bavarian Broadcasting’s (radio is mostly federal in Germany) Political Dossier invited me for a friendly chat with a representative of “Mehr Demokratie“, an NGO campaigning for institutional reform in general and a (much more) extensive use of referenda in particular. The subject of our little conversation was the apparent contradiction between allegedly widespread political disaffection and a “new lust for politics” in Germany. I do not really believe in the latter, but the former was the subject of my PhD thesis, so I had a lot of fun for a whole hour. If you just can’t get enough of my lovely voice, you can listen to the show’s podcast (in German).
