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The European Consortium for Political Science (ECPR), for all purposes and intents the European Political Science Association, has a tiny problem: at their last meeting, they faced “a shortage of candidates” for the Executive Committee. To their credit, they faced it head on and set up a blog to discuss  “Constitutional and Electoral in (of?) the ECPR”. So far, there is just the inaugural post but I’m sure there is more to come. Continue reading “ECPR sets up a blog” »

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These days, a bonanza of political information is freely available on the internet.  Sometimes this information comes in the guise of excel sheets, comma separated data or other formats which are more or less readily machine readable. But more often than not, information is presented as tables designed to be read by humans. This is where the gentle art of screen scraping, web scraping or spidering comes in. In the past, I have used kludgy Perl scripts to get electoral results at the district level off sites maintained by the French ministry of the interior or by universities (very interesting if you do not really speak/read French). A slightly more elegant approach might be to use R’s builtin Perl-like capabilities for doing the job, as demonstrated by Simon Jackman. Finally, Python is gaining ground in the political science community,  which has some very decent libraries for screen/web scraping – see this elaborate post on Drew Conway’s Zero Intelligence Agents blog. But, let’s face it: I am lazy. I want to spend time analysing the data, not scraping them. And so I was very pleased when I came across outwit, a massive plugin for the firefox browser (Linux, Mac and Windows versions available) that acts as a point-and-click scraper.

Continue reading “Web-scraping made easy: outwit” »

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” »

Next week, the European Parliament will celebrate its 7th direct election. However, this will be the culmination of 27 national campaigns. Here is a post on the lack of truly European content in the European I wrote for Andrea Römmele’s and Thorsten Faas’ “Wahlen nach Zahlen” blog (in German).

With the upcoming EP elections, I felt obliged to check out the profiler sites my colleagues have put on the internet. I started with Germany’s wahl-o-mat that has been around for a number of years. After evaluating 30 statements, the program decided that I should vote for the German Liberals, which was not such a big surprise. The Bavarian Christian Democrats and the New Left Party were the biggest distance away from my ideal point, not least because my preferences seem to be more pro-European than these parties.

Why I should vote for the LibDems (maybe)

Continue reading “Which party should I vote for in the European Elections?” »

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. Continue reading “The Radical Right in Perspective: Program (ECPR conference 2009)” »

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

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” »

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 right-wing extremism amongst German youngsters.

Some answers given by students in written exams are so brilliant that you couldn’t make it up: Continue reading “Highlights from a European Politics Class Test” »