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 im Spiegel 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).

Continue reading “Europa als Wertegemeinschaft? Ost und West im Spiegel des „Schwartz Value Inventory“” »

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Fails/Pierce 2010 article in Political Research Quarterly 2010 is easily the most interesting paper I have read during the last Academic Year (btw, here are my lecture notes). Ever since the 1950s, mainstream political science has claimed that mass attitudes on democracy matter for the stability of democracy, while the intellectual history of the concept is even older, going back at least to de Tocqueville. But, as Fails and Pierce point out, hardly anyone has ever bothered to test the alleged link between mass attitudes and the quality and stability of democracy. This is exactly what they set out to do, regressing levels of democratic attitudes compiled from dozens of surveys on previous  and succeeding polity scores. As it turns out, levels of democratic attitudes do not explain much, while they seem to follow changes in the polity scores. If these results hold, the Political Culture paradigm would have to be thoroughly modified, to say the least: It’s the elites, stupid.

Continue reading “Fails/Pierce: Almond, Lipset, Verba got it all wrong. Political Culture RIP?” »

Believe it or not: My institution will play host to the 2013 instalment of the ECPR’s highly successful Joint Sessions of Workshops conference series.

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.

Party Identification in Germany (% identifiers)

The polity project’s country code for Israel is … Continue reading “Random fun fact of the day” »

Seems that I am not the only one who is startled by Stata 11′s margins command, which does all sorts of amazing things. At a mere 50 pages (not counting the remarks on margins postestimation), the documentation is a little overwhelming, and there are just too many options. There are two separate issue that seem to confuse a lot of people (see this discussion on statalist on the then new margins command).

Marginal Effects at the Mean vs Average Marginal Effects

Continue reading “Me at the Margins: Average Marginal Effects, Marginal Effects at the Mean, and Stata’s margins command” »

Colleagues over at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham have started yet another political science blog. Its official name is “Ballots & Bullets”, but I find its URL nottspolitics.org rather more memorable. They started out only six weeks ago, but the range of topics and the number of articles is quite impressive. So go and see/read for yourself.

I’ve just finished a review of Tim Spier’s new book on the electorates of the Western European populist right for a yearbook. Since the yearbook is not due to appear before September, here’s the text for your edification (in German)

Continue reading “Review of Tim Spier’s “Modernisierungsverlierer”: Die Wählerschaft rechtspopulistischer Parteien in Westeuropa (in German)” »

Statistics and Data links roundup for December 2010 through March 2011:

• Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation, by Kenneth Train, Cambridge University Press, 2002 – Discrete Choice Geodatenzentrum – Hier erhalten Sie vielfältige Informationen über die Geobasisdaten der Bundesländer und des Bundes. Nutzen Sie unsere Dienste und interaktiven Karten für Bestellung, Download, Suche oder Verarbeitung von Geoinformationen.
• Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland – Statistik lokal – Statistik lokal 2010 ist eine von den Statistischen Ämtern des Bundes und der Länder gemeinsam herausgegebene Datenbank auf DVD, die Gemeindedaten für ganz Deutschland enthält. Mit Statistik lokal 2010 können Sie über 12 000 Städte und Gemeinden in ganz Deutschland anhand ausgewählter Ergebnisse aus allen wichtigen Bereichen der amtlichen Statistik mit derzeit rund 330 Merkmalsausprägungen analysieren und vergleichen. Die DVD enthält auch die Ergebnisse für alle Kreise (kreisfreie Städte und Landkreise), Regierungsbezirke/Statistische Regionen, Bundesländer und Deutschland.