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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: 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

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Excerpt: Image by Claude-Olivier Marti via Flickr 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. And here is the Summary Clear socio-demographic profile: young, male, working/lower middle class Clear attitudinal profile: Not necessarily fully paid-up extremists But dissatisfied with politics and suspicious of immigrants and elites Little support for disintegration thesis Personality traits and additional…

Technorati Tags: electorates, extreme right, presentation, right wing extremism, sociology, strasbourg, western europe

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

Just back from the ECPR conference at Potsdam, which was great fun for various reasons. Here is my conference presentation on the dynamics of radical right support and mainstream party political change in France (PDF).

Technorati Tags: dynamics, ecpr, extreme right, france, issues, potsdam, radical right, salience

Believe or not: in Germany, it is illegal to publish results from exit polls before the polling stations close (at 6pm – we’re German) on polling day. Last Sunday, state elections were held in three Länder, and someone leaked alleged results on twitter while the stations were still open. The political class was outraged and suggested just about anything from banning exit polls to suing twitter, which inspired me to rant against these draconic and silly proposals over at Andrea’s and Thorsten’s Wahlen nach Zahlen blog (in German). continue reading Twitter and Exit Polls in Germany

Technorati Tags: ban, election day, exit polls, germany, twitter

West European Politics has finally published our paper on ‘Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties‘.  Hooray! And here is the link to the authors’ version.

Technorati Tags: extreme right, radical right, religion, religiosity, voting, western europe

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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

My ‘Lakatos Reloaded’ rejoinder has just been published by the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (vol. 11 (2009): 526-528. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2009.00372.x). continue reading Lakatos reloaded paper in print and online

Technorati Tags: british journal of politics and international relations, lakatos, rejoinder, time-series cross-sectional data, tscs, turnout

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Excerpt: Image via Wikipedia Here is the (almost) finalised program for the our section on the Radical Right in Perspective, organised under the auspices of the ECPR’s 5th General Conference (Potsdam, September 10-12), boasting about 50 papers. Post-Soviet Russian Nationalism: Ideology, Context, Comparison The ‘New Political Novel’ by Right-Wing Writers in Post-Soviet Russia Ethnic Conflict and Radical Right in Estonia: An Explosive Mixture? How far is Moscow Weimar? Similarities and Dissimilarities between Inter-War Germany and Post-Soviet Russia From Communist Totalitarianism to Right-wing Radicalism: The Dynamics of the Crimean Peripheral Politics and Its Impact on the Ukrainian State Moderating/Mediating the Extreme: The Accommodation of Xenophobic Nationalist…

Technorati Tags: attitudes, conference, eastern europe, ecpr, extreme right, extremism, far right, populism, populist right, radical right, research, right-wing, western europe

I have left Britain’s Best Politics Department (™) for my alma mater, which (oddly enough) wants me back.

Technorati Tags: essex mainz politics

My article on Contextual Factors (unemployment, immigration, other parties) and the Extreme Right vote in Western Europe between 1980 and 2002 was yesterday published in the American Journal of Political Science (online). Obviously, I’m absolutely chuffed. The DOI (doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00369.x) does not work yet, but the link to Wiley Interscience does. Here is the full bibliographic information. Multilevel replication data and scripts for Stata and MLWin are available via my dataverse. continue reading AJPS article on the Extreme Right published

Technorati Tags: 1980, 2002, Agenda Setting, american, contextual factors, Eurobarometer, extreme right, immigration, journal, MLA, multi-level analysis, Political Science, populist right, radical right, unemployment, voting, welfare state, western europe

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Excerpt: Colleagues Andrea Römmele and Thorsten Faas have set up a new blog that will cover the many German elections of 2009 (seats in the federal parliament, several state parliaments, local councils as well as the presidency are all up for grabs) and asked me to contribute. How could I resist them? “Wahlen nach Zahlen” (voting by numbers) is not yet public, but since it is already indexed by Google et al., why not spill the beans? There are already four posts (in German), and the list of (potential) contributors looks pretty good. And here is my inaugural post on…

Technorati Tags: 2009, blog, campaign, elections, extreme right, extremism, federal diet, germany, presidency, right-wing, state elections, voting

Twelve months ago, I started a blog at wordpress.com.  Half a year ago, I started re-publising its content here. Last week I decided that this was getting too tedious, installed my own copy of wordpress and transferred my stuff here. Onwards and upwards!

Technorati Tags: blog, transfer

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Excerpt: Over the last 7 years or so, much of my work has focused on the question of why support for the Extreme Right is so unstable over time and so uneven across countries. In a recent paper on Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002, I estimate a model that aims at providing a more comprehensive and satisfactory answer to this research problem by employing a broader database and a more adequate modelling strategy, i.e. multi-level modelling. The main finding is that while immigration and unemployment rates are important, their interaction with other political factors is…

Technorati Tags: 1980, 2002, Agenda Setting, Eurobarometer, extreme right, immigration, MLA, multi-level analysis, populist right, radical right, unemployment, voting, welfare state, western europe

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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

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Excerpt: Does religion make you a better or worse human being? More specifically, does Christian religiosity reduce or increase the likelihood of a radical/extreme right vote in a West European context? This is the question Liz and I are trying to address in our latest paper on “Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties”. There are a number of reasons why good Christians could be more likely to vote for the Right than agnostics: American research starting in the 1940s has linked high levels of church attendance and a closed belief systems to support for rightism. More over, contemporary…

Technorati Tags: attitudes, extreme right, immigrants, immigration, Islam, radical right, religion, religiosity, structural equation modelling, western europe

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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: Finally, the call for papers for the ECPR’s 5th conference (at Potsdam, September 10-12 2009) is out. Our section on the Radical Right will consist of the following nine panels: The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe The Internationalisation of the Radical Right Will Fascism return? On the Borderline Between Protest and Violence: Political Movements of the New Radical Right Consequences of the surge of anti-immigration parties The Radical Right in Western Europe Inside the Radical Right: An Internalist Perspective Party-based Euroscepticism in Western and Eastern Europe Neighbourhood Effects Revisited: the Visualisation of Immigrants and Radical Right-Wing Voting Each panel can have up to five paper givers, so the…

Technorati Tags: cee, central europe, conference, eastern europe, ecpr, extreme right, parties, populist right, potsdam, radical right, right, voters, western europe

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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: The US might face unprecedented levels of turnout in tomorrow’s election, but historically, the non-voters are the biggest camp in American politics. One intriguing explanation for this well-known fact is that low turnout could be a consequence of the very high (by any standard) levels of income inequality: because voters lack experience with universalistic institutions, they are less likely to adopt norms and values that foster participation in elections. This is the gist of an article that appeared recently (by social science standards) in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. While the thesis is interesting enough, I did…

Technorati Tags: beck and katz, bjpir, bootstrapping, data, download, elections, inequality, norms, oecd, replication, social, time-series cross-sectional data, tscs, turnout, USA

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Excerpt: Courtesy of Google’s book search, a large parts of my new book on the Extreme Right in Western Europe (in German) is now available online. I don’t know how they calculate which and how many pages one may view but I was able to read several consecutive pages of it. Plus you have the search function which comes in handy if you know exactly what you are looking for e.g. because you want to verify a quote. And if Google fails you, you can always try amazon which has its own online version of “Die Wähler der Extremen Rechten 1980-2002″….

Technorati Tags: extreme, extreme rechte, extreme right, Political Science, rechtsextremismus, right, voting, wahlverhalten, western europe, westeuropa

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Excerpt: In a recent article in the European Journal of Political Research, Kestilä and Söderlund claim (amongst other things) that in the French regional elections of 2004, turnout and district magnitude have significant negative effects on the extreme right vote whereas the effects of the number of party lists and unemployment are positive and significant. Most interestingly, immigration (which is usually a very good predictor for the radical right vote) had no effect on the success of the Front National. More generally, they argue that a subnational approach can control for a wider range of factors and provide more reliable results…

Technorati Tags: 2004, departements, district magnitude, extreme right, far right, france, front national, immigration, opportunity structures, populist right, radical right, regional elections, subnational, unemployment, voting

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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

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Excerpt: Everyone just seems to know that the voters of the Extreme Right hate foreigners in general and immigrants in particular, but robust comparative evidence for the alleged xenophobia – Radical Right vote link is scarce. Moreover, many of the published analyses are based on somewhat outdated (i.e. 1990s) data, and alternative accounts of the extreme right vote (the “unpolitical” protest hypothesis and the hypothesis that the Far Right in Western Europe attracts people with “neo-liberal” economic preferences, championed by Betz and Kitschelt in the 1990s) do exist. Just a few days ago, a journal has accepted a paper by me…

Technorati Tags: comparative politics, european social survey, extreme right, far right, immigration, italy, populist right, radical right, sem, structural equation modelling, voters, voting, western europe

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Excerpt:

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

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Excerpt: As a subdiscipline, the study of electoral behavior (or “psephology”) begins with a handful of monographs that were published in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It’s amazing to see how concepts and ideas that were developed in Downs’ “Economic Theory of Democracy” or in the “American Voter” by Campbell et al. some 50 years ago inform our work to the present day. However, the study of electoral behaviour (or electoral behavior – the publisher keep changing the title just to confuse me) did obviously not end with these holy books. From the 1960s on, the discipline was increasingly defined…

Technorati Tags: election, elections, electoral behaviour, electoral studies, library, Political Science, scholarship, sociology, theory, US, voting

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

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Excerpt: Over the last 25 years, the study of the extreme / radical / populist right has blossomed as a sub-discipline of both party and electoral research. As well as becoming the focus of significant case-specific and comparative work in stable democracies, the end of communism and the integration of the New Democracies in Central and Eastern Europe into the European Union has further spurred interest in these parties and their voters. Equally, additional subdisciplinary literatures including political communication, political economy, public opinion and political theory now constitute a core part of the corpus of work on these organizations. In a bid to bring together state-of-the-art research from these approaches, Liz…

Technorati Tags: extreme, extreme right, populist, populist right, radical, radical right, right

It’s almost unbelievable: after some six months of communication problems with the publishers, my recent book on the extreme right vote in Western Europe since the 1980s is finally out and ready for you to order and read (qualification: if you read German). If you don’t read German, you might still be interested in a brief English summary of my findings on the Extreme Right vote, including various presentations and other goodies.

Technorati Tags: europe, extreme, extreme right, populist, radical, right, vote, voters, voting, western

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Excerpt: Over the last seven years our so, much of my research has focused on the voters of the Extreme Right in Western Europe. Last November, I submitted the final draft of a monograph on that topic to a well-established German publishing company, with view of getting the book out in late January. Then, a lot of things happened (or rather failed to happen). But, believe it or not, yesterday they sent me the contract, and now “Die Wähler der extremen Rechten 1980-2002″ is officially in print. I’ll keep you posted. Social Bookmarks: Technorati Tags: extreme right, western europe, voting, right, radical…

Technorati Tags: extreme right, radical right, right, voting, western europe

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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: Udo Voigt, the leader of the NPD, has been charged with inciting racial hatred. During the 2006 World Cup, the party published a pamphlet that questioned the right of non-white players in the squad to represent Germany in the tournament. The NPD is the oldest amongst the three relevant extreme right parties in Germany. Founded in the early 1960s, the party was successful in a number of Land elections but could not overcome the 5 per cent threshold in the General election of 1969. For more than three decades, the party that once had tens of thousands of members and…

Technorati Tags: extreme right, germany, NPD, political, racial hatred, right wing extremism, science

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Excerpt: Last year, the “Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie” published an article on the level of support for the European Union’s core principles (democracy, gender equality, religious freedom, rule of law) in Turkey. In essence, the author claimed that the level of support for these principles in Turkey is low because a) the level of economic development is low while b) the number of Muslims is very high. Thanks to the very efficient PR office at the university of Cologne, these findings made their way into the mainstream media in Germany (including the English service of the Deutsche Welle) and…

Technorati Tags: democracy, european union, Islam, multi-level analysis, Muslims, sociology, stata, turkey

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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

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Excerpt: Last year, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations published an article which essentially argued that higher levels of welfare state spending create attitudes which are conducive to higher turnout. I was not convinced and so I wrote a comment/replication in which I demonstrate that there is no robust evidence for a universal, politically relevant relationship between inequality/welfare state spending, and turnout (HTML). The journal has recently accepted the article for publication later in 2008, but for the time being, the manuscript is available here (PDF). I have also set up an archive with replication data for this paper. Technorati Tags:…

Technorati Tags: attitudes, inequality, institutions, Political Science, replication, turnout, voting, welfare state