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” »

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

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).

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)” »

Does religion make you a better or worse human being? More specifically, does Christian religiosity reduce or increase the likelihood of a radical/extreme right vote in a West European context? This is the question Liz and I are trying to address in our latest paper on “Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties“.

There are a number of reasons why good Christians could be more likely to vote for the Right than agnostics: American research starting in the 1940s has linked high levels of church attendance and a closed belief systems to support for rightism. More over, contemporary Radical Right parties try to frame the issue of immigration in terms of a struggle between Christian/Western values and Islam.

Continue reading “Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties” »

Last year, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations published an article which essentially argued that higher levels of welfare state spending create attitudes which are conducive to higher turnout. I was not convinced and so I wrote a comment/replication in which I demonstrate that there is no robust evidence for a universal, politically relevant relationship between
inequality/welfare state spending, and turnout (HTML). The journal has recently accepted the article for publication later in 2008, but for the time being, the manuscript is available here (PDF). I have also set up an archive with replication data for this paper.

Technorati Tags: turnout, voting, political science, inequality, welfare state, institutions, attitudes, inequality

Continue reading “Turnout, Institutions, Inequality, and the Welfare State” »