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

Our project on social (citation and collaboration) networks in British and German political science involves networks with hundreds and thousands of nodes (scientists and articles). At the moment, our data come from the Social Science Citation Index (part of the ISI web of knowledge), and we use a bundle of rather eclectic (erratic?) scripts written in Perl to convert the ISI records into something that programs like Pajek or Stata can read. Some canned solutions (Wos2pajek, network workbench, bibexcel) are available for free, but I was not aware of them when I started this project, did not manage to install them properly, or was not happy with the results. Perl is the Swiss Army Chainsaw (TM) for data pre-processing, incredibly powerful (my scripts are typically less than 50 lines, and I am not an efficient programmer), and every time I want to do something in a slightly different way (i.e. I spot a bug), all I have to do is to change a few lines in the scripts.
After trying a lot of other programs available on the internet, we have chosen Pajek for doing the analyses and producing those intriguing graphs of cliques and inner circles in Political Science. Pajek is closed source but free for non-commercial use and runs on Windows or (via wine) Linux. It is very fast, can (unlike many other programs) easily handle very large networks, produces decent graphs and does many standard analyses. Its user interface may be slightly less than straightforward but I got used to it rather quickly, and it even has basic scripting capacities.

The Missing Manual

Continue reading “Software for Social Network Analysis: Pajek and Friends” »

In a recent post, I have commented on a (now scrapped) law from the 1930s that made it technically illegal for “foreign” PhDs to use their titles in Germany. A superficially similar case concerns the German citizenship law that was first enacted in 1913 (the Empire happily existed without a concept of federal citizenship for more than four decades) and remained in force with minor amendments until 2000. At the core of this law was the idea that one cannot become German. Rather, one is German by virtue of the bloodline, i.e. by having German forefathers (the original sexist bias of the law was ameliorated in the 1970s). This is the infamous ius sanguinis. However, while the PhD regulations were half-forgotten and rarely enforced (though they provided an income for dubious lawyers), the continuity of the citizenship law after the war was clearly the result of political intent and was even enshrined in article 116 of the constitution.

While the ius sanguinis is archaic, the West German elites had two good reasons for not modernising the law. First, given that Bonn did not accept East Germany’s claim to sovereignty, meddling with the concept of citizenship was obviously dodgy. Second, West Germany considered itself a safe haven for millions of ethnic Germans who were still living in Central and Eastern Europe. Sticking with the traditional concept of citizenship kept the door wide open for these people: like in the case of refugees from East Germany, there was no need to apply for citizenship, because they were already German. Moreover, German citizenship was not exactly in high demand after the war.

Continue reading “German Citizenship Law Revisited: Howard’s “Causes and Consequences of Germany’s New Citizenship Law”” »