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Excerpt:

[/caption] 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…

Technorati Tags: departements, france, outwit, perl, python, R, scraping, screen, web scraper

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Excerpt: In a recent article in the European Journal of Political Research, Kestilä and Söderlund claim (amongst other things) that in the French regional elections of 2004, turnout and district magnitude have significant negative effects on the extreme right vote whereas the effects of the number of party lists and unemployment are positive and significant. Most interestingly, immigration (which is usually a very good predictor for the radical right vote) had no effect on the success of the Front National. More generally, they argue that a subnational approach can control for a wider range of factors and provide more reliable results…

Technorati Tags: 2004, departements, district magnitude, extreme right, far right, france, front national, immigration, opportunity structures, populist right, radical right, regional elections, subnational, unemployment, voting

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Excerpt: If you are interested in subnational politics, France is an interesting case for many reasons. On the one hand, the country is highly centralised and divided into 96 (European) Departements (administrative units) with equal legal rights (though Corsica is a bit of an exception to this). In fact, Departements were created after the revolution in an attempt to replace the provinces of the Ancien Regime with something rational and neat. On the other hand, the Departements are vastly different in terms of their size, population, economic, political and social structure, which gives you a lot of variance that can be…

Technorati Tags: departements, france, geocodes, perl, stata, subnational