Without doubt, late December is exactly the right time for reflection and (re-)assessment. Looking back on the last months, I had too many conference dinners, not nearly enough conference beers/chats, and definitively too many conference papers to read. Amongst these, the prize for the most original political science graph (along with the price for the most pointless use of too-cute images) goes to the unnamed creator of the pastiche on the right, which I have not made up and which probably just goes to show that concepts of the good are relative. Or something along these lines. As an aside, I am sure that somewhere in the world there is a culture for which The Fluffy Bunny is evil incarnate.

Competing Concepts of the Good

Statistics and Data links roundup for November 14th through November 23rd:

• SNAP: Network datasets -
• Network data -
• CASOS Tools: Network Analysis Data | CASOS – Network Analysis Data Casos & INSA
• NodeXL Teaching – CASCI – datasets incl. senate
• Statistics and Data links roundup -

It’s surprisingly difficult to find suitable datasets for a sna workshop that are relevant for political scientists.

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” »

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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.

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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).

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.

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 maybe class or region) as controls in your regression, weighting will make next to no difference but might mess with your standard errors.
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In my pet model, the salience of issues such as immigration or national identiy in the manifestos of established parties

Random shock to salience - support cannot be bothered to react

makes a vote for the extreme right/radical right much more likely. There is, however, a potential problem with this argument: if radical right support is stable in the medium term, and if other parties react to past successes for the radical right by modifying their manifestos, this relationship might be spurious. In my paper for the ECPR conference at Potsdam, I use a time-series model  to address this problem: I estimate a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) of radical right support and issue salience in France (while controlling for immigration and unemployment). As it turns out, salience is independent of previous radical right success. This finding provides some support for my original argument, though the analysis  preliminary and restricted to France (at the moment). Continue reading “Is salience a cause or a consequence of radical right electoral support?” »