In the past, I did a lot of multi-level modelling with MLwiN 2.02, which I quickly learned to loath. Back in the late 1990s, MLwiN was perhaps the first ML software that had a somewhat intuitive interface, i.e. it allowed one to build a model by pointing and clicking. Moreover, it printed updated estimates on the screen while cycling merrily through the parameter space. That was sort of cool, as it could take minutes to reach convergence, and without the updating, one would never have been sure that the program had not crashed yet. Which it did quite often, even for simple models.

Worse than the bugs was the lack of proper scriptability. Pointing and clicking  loses its appeal when you need to run the same model on 12 different datasets, or when you are looking at three variants of the same model and 10 recodes of the same variable. Throw in the desire semi-automatically re-compile the findings from these exercises into two nice tables for inclusion in again and again after finding yet another problem with a model, and you will agree that any  piece of software that is not scriptable is pretty useless for scientists.

Continue reading “Running MLwiN from within Stata” »

Just 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” »

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).

Fringe Parties

Continue reading “Mini publication: Fringe Parties” »

Life as an early 21st century comparativist is good: Skim through the English literature on country X, Y, and Z, get the dataset from some institution’s website, run the models on a superfast computer, and hey presto, you’re done. More often than not, one might be tempted to skip the literature bit completely and simply analyse a dataset on any group of countries, because this dataset has the variables required to run some fancy model that one always wanted to run.  The phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ springs to mind.

Therefore, analyses by people who read and speak the relevant languages and even live in the country they are writing about fill me with vicarious pride. While I was going back and forth between Angela’s Own Country and the Disgraced Republic Formerly Known as Hellas, two fine specimen have cropped up on the internet: My old chum Ben Stanley has a journal-length piece on the Polish parliamentary elections at the monkey cage, and Jacob Christensen of trailer park political scientist fame gives an equally detailed account of the situation in Denmark.

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.

Continue reading “Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties” »

I knew it had to be so: The NPD’s miniskirt campaign of 2011 represents the final step of a long journey that took them from outright condemnation of the garment in 1965 to a slightly overenthusiastic endorsement. Proof comes form John Nagle’s slightly obscure 1970 monograph on the party. Their position on haircuts  hasn’t evolved much, though.

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.

Continue reading “Radical Attitudes, Kafka’s Motorbike, and the Sage/IPSA Encyclopedia of Political Science” »

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!