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” »
Tags: fringe parties, parties
Category My Stuff, Political Science, Uncategorized|
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.
Tags: denmark, elections, poland
Category Political Science, Politics, Uncategorized|
If this post’s title does make any sense to you, chances are that you are one of us anoraks who had a brilliant weekend of extreme right spotting. In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen stepped down as leader of the Front National, just under 40 years after he founded the party. He is succeeded by his youngest daughter, who is portrayed as a moderniser (hey, she’s twice divorced) and a moderate (by FN standards). While this story might conjure the image of Prince Charles, Marine’s rise through the Front’s ranks was quick, largely unexpected and a major source of aggravation for Bruno Gollnisch, the controversial academic who became the party’s number two after the old number two, Bruno Mégret, left the party to found the MNR in 1999. If Gollnisch (who was soundly beaten by LePen the younger in the leadership contest) aims to repeat that stunt remains to be seen. I’m sure there is a silly story about men named Bruno who turn out to be the real Princes Charles here (both spent a lot of time eyeing the leadership and are in their early 60s now ), but more importantly, Marine is going to change le Front, though her father might be tempted to meddle. These right-wingers know a thing or two about family values.
Continue reading “Marine anointed, DVU and NPD merged” »
Tags: dvu, extreme right, fn, france, front national, germany, NPD
Category Politics, Uncategorized|
Someone asked me for the syntax/data required to replicate my old Electoral Studies piece on party identification in Germany 1977-2002. Its slightly preposterous title not withstanding, as of today it holds a proud 18th rank in Electoral Studies’ list of its current “Top 25 hottest articles” (bringing Web 2.0 and the sciences together was always bound to end up in disaster). So in the very unlikely event that you have been holding your breath for this, breath out: I finally got around to de-clutter my old files and uploaded the replication information to my dataverse:
Kai Arzheimer, 2010, “Replication data for: Dead Men Walking? Party Identity in Germany 1977-2002″, hdl:1902.1/15091 UNF:5:AkxnvIlPgabqb2zsZ39k1A==
Tags: data, dataverse, germany, party-identification
Category Data and Methods, My Stuff, Political Science, Uncategorized|
A couple of months ago, 270 of my flock kindly took part in a survey on their student experience. Today, I finally came around to posting the results of said survey, which are of considerable (if localised) interest (in German).
Tags: attitudes, limesurvey, survey
Category My Stuff, Political Science, Uncategorized|
