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.

Meanwhile, in Germany the NPD, arguably the most radical amongst the electorally viable right-wing parties in Germany has celebrated its merger with its old rival DVU. The DVU was founded in the early 1970s as a marketing device for right-wing books, journals and paraphernalia and became a party in the 1980s. For nearly 40 years, it was completely dominated by its founder Gerhard Frey, who finally stepped down in 2009, aged 76. While has successor planned for the merger that became effective from January 1, some regional leaders are less than happy and seem willing to either take the issue to the courts over some alleged irregularities, or to set up a new party of their own. Either way, it would seem that the German extreme right remains divided, as it has been since the 1980s.

Image via Wikipedia

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.

French Départements (from Wikipedia)

Say you need a dataset with the names and Insee numbers for all the French Départements. The (hopefully trustworthy) Wikipedia page has a neat table, complete with information on the Prefecture and many tiny coats of arms which are of absolutely no use at all. We could either key in the relevant data (doable, but a nuisance), or we could try to copy and paste the table into a word processor, hoping that we do not lose accents and other funny characters, and that WinWord or whatever we use converts the HTML table into something that we can edit to extract the information we really need.

Or you we could use outwit. One push of the button loads the page

Scraping a table with outwit

into a sub-window, a second push (data->tables) extracts the HTML tables on the page. Now, we can either mark the lines we are interested in by hand (often the quickest option) or use a filter to selfect them. One final click, and they are exported as a CSV file that can be read into R, OpenOffice, or Stata for post processing and analysis.

While I’m all in favour of scriptable and open-source tools like Perl, Python and R, outwit has a lot to go for it if all you need is a quick hack. Outwit also has functions to mass-download files (say PDFs) from a page and give the unique names. If the job is complex, there is even more functionality under the hood, and you can use the point-and-click interface to program you own scraper, though I would tend use a real programming language for these cases. At any rate, outwit is a useful and free tool for the lazy data analyst.

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

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

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