Someone asked me for the syntax/data required to replicate my old Electoral Studies piece on party identification in Germany 1977-2002. Its slightly preposterous title not withstanding, as of today it holds a proud 18th rank in Electoral Studies’ list of its current “Top 25 hottest articles” (bringing Web 2.0 and the sciences together was always bound to end up in disaster). So in the very unlikely event that you have been holding your breath for this, breath out: I finally got around to de-clutter my old files and uploaded the replication information to my dataverse:

Kai Arzheimer, 2010, “Replication data for: Dead Men Walking? Party Identity in Germany 1977-2002″, hdl:1902.1/15091 UNF:5:AkxnvIlPgabqb2zsZ39k1A==

A couple of months ago, 270 of my flock kindly took part in a survey on their student experience. Today, I finally came around to posting the results of said survey, which are of considerable (if localised) interest (in German).

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.

Who knows whom in a large group of learners?

Continue reading “Which of my students are most likely to gang up against me?” »

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 many political scientists read ‘percent’ and give absolute numbers

Right now, the RA is enjoying is well-deserved holiday. He’ll be back in four weeks time, and we hope to have a data set ready for distribution by June.

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.

Source: Long/Freese, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata

I use emacs/for all my textprocessing needs, and for the last four or five years, I have created all my slides with Till Tantaus excellent “beamer” class. At the moment, I’m teaching a 2nd year stats course (imagine doing this with PowerPoint – the horror! the horror!), so I sometimes use graphs from the assigned text like this one from Long&Freese that illustrates the latent variable/threshold interpretation of the binary logit model. The message should be fairly clear: depends on andfollows a standard logistic distribution around its conditional mean.

Continue reading “All singing, all dancing 3d function plots with beamer, pgfplots and animate.sty” »

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 the class. This is equivalent to Stata’s “wide” form. Stata’s reshape command will happily re-arrange the data to the “long” form, with one record for each arc. This is what Pajek requires.

Continue reading “How to get from Stata to Pajek” »

Here is a short presentation on the electorates of the Western European Extreme Right I gave last Thursday at the Collège Doctoral Européen de Strasbourg.

Continue reading “Strasbourg Conference Presentation on the Extreme Right” »

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

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” »