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.

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==

Statistics and Data links roundup for January through September 2010
Continue reading “Statistics and Data links roundup for January through September 2010” »

Statistics and Data links roundup for November 23rd through December 29th:

• The Data and Story Library – DASL (pronounced “dazzle”) is an online library of datafiles and stories that illustrate the use of basic statistics methods. We hope to provide data from a wide variety of topics so that statistics teachers can find real-world examples that will be interesting to their students. Use DASL’s powerful search engine to locate the story or datafile of interest.
• Drawing graphs using tikz/pgf & gnuplot | politicaldata.org -

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.

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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.
Continue reading “Weighting Survey Data: Not Necessarily a Brilliant Idea” »

The US might face unprecedented levels of turnout in tomorrow’s election, but historically, the non-voters are the biggest camp in American politics. One intriguing explanation for this well-known fact is that low turnout could be a consequence of the very high (by any standard) levels of income inequality: because voters lack experience with universalistic institutions, they are less likely to adopt norms and values that foster participation in elections. This is the gist of an article that appeared recently (by social science standards) in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. While the thesis is interesting enough, I did not find the evidence (design, operationalisation, statistical model) particularly convincing and consequentially embarked on a major replication exercise. As it turned out, there are indeed major problems with the original analysis, including a rather problematic application of the ever popular time-series cross-sectional approach (aka Beck&Katz). Last week, my own article on the (non-)relationship between inequality and turnout has finally appeared in the BJPIR. If you don’t have access to the journal, you can still download the preprint version (“Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something True?”) from my homepage. And if you in turn find this rather unconvincing, you can download the replication data for the various inequality/turnout models and do your own analysis. Enjoy.
Technorati-Tags: turnout, elections, inequality, tscs, beck and katz, time-series cross-sectional data, replication, data, usa, oecd, social, norms, download, bjpir, bootstrapping

By relying on scripts (do-files), Stata encourages you to work in a structured, efficient and reproducible way. This text-based approach is familiar and attractive to anyone who has ever used a unix shell and the standard utilities. Actually, unix-flavoured utilities can make your stata experience even better. One non-obvious candidate is make, which is usually used for programming projects that require some sort of compilation.

Consider the following scenario. You have two ascii files of raw data, micro.raw and macro.raw. You want to read in both files, correct some errors, convert them to stata’s .dta format, merge them, apply some recodes, do a lot of preliminary analyses, and finally produce a postscript file and a table for inclusion in LaTeX. Of course, you could write one large do-File that does the job. But then, changing a tiny detail of the final graph would require you to repeat the whole procedure, which is time-consuming (especially when you work with very large datasets). Moreover, you often want to perform some interactive checks at an intermediate stage. So breaking down the large job in a number of smaller jobs that are much easier to maintain and produce a set of intermediate files seems like a good idea.

Continue reading “How Stata and a Makefile can make your day” »