Kai Arzheimer » survey

Fails/Pierce: Almond, Lipset, Verba got it all wrong. Political Culture RIP?

kai — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:22:00 +0000

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Fails/Pierce 2010 article in Political Research Quarterly 2010 is easily the most interesting paper I have read during the last Academic Year (btw, here are my lecture notes). Ever since the 1950s, mainstream political science has claimed that mass attitudes on democracy matter for the stability of democracy, while the intellectual history of the concept is even older, going back at least to de Tocqueville. But, as Fails and Pierce point out, hardly anyone has ever bothered to test the alleged link between mass attitudes and the quality and stability of democracy. This is exactly what they set out to do, regressing levels of democratic attitudes compiled from dozens of surveys on previous and succeeding polity scores. As it turns out, levels of democratic attitudes do not explain much, while they seem to follow changes in the polity scores. If these results hold, the Political Culture paradigm would have to be thoroughly modified, to say the least: It’s the elites, stupid.

My students poured a lot of primarily methodological criticism on these findings (I can see my bad influence on them), and I’m not sure that the interpretation of the last (first-differences on first-differences regression) is conclusive. But nonetheless, this is fascinating stuff. I wonder if the big shots will have to say anything interesting about it, or whether they will just ignore the work of two annoying PhD students.

Online Survey on Democratic Attitudes

kai — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:08:56 +0000

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

Student survey results now online

kai — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:19:00 +0000

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).

Journos: Back to stats 101!

kai — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 20:33:55 +0000

The other day, a (rather clever) student told me that she has no real need for all these stats classes, because she will be a journalist. I told her that the world would be a better place if all journalists underwent compulsory numeracy classes. Here is the proof from my favourite newspaper. How long does it take you to spot the glitch?

Young people in the East Midlands were the most down-to-earth of those surveyed, expecting an annual salary of £33,468 by the time they reached their mid-thirties. However, even this figure is still around £4,000 higher than the average.
Two-thirds of respondents also thought they would own a house by the time they were 25. In reality, only 14% of homeowners are aged 25 or under.
With the rising cost of higher education hitting students hard, recent figures suggest young people will be left with more than £20,000 of debt by the end of their courses. But the poll shows today’s school children do not realise how out of pocket they will actually be: the average expected figure was just half the reality.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/mar/30/teenagers-expect-earnings-51000

Update on the Peer-Review Survey

kai — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:13:43 +0000

Sixteen months ago, we started the Political Science Peer-Review Survey. This week, the input form was shut down. That is about three quarters of a year later than expected, but then again, I underestimated the fallout of my move back to Germany. Moreover, until a few weeks ago there was still a tiny trickle of replies coming in. So far, we have found few major problems with the data. The RA has spotted two instances where the respondent somehow managed to save the data at various stages of the interview, thereby inflating the number of respondents. Moreover, it’s amazing how many political scientists read ‘percent’ and give absolute numbers

Right now, the RA is enjoying is well-deserved holiday. He’ll be back in four weeks time, and we hope to have a data set ready for distribution by June.

Weighting Survey Data: Not Necessarily a Brilliant Idea

kai — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:00:44 +0000

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.

Political Science Peer-Review Survey: 836 respondents and counting

kai — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:44:49 +0000

With about 100 new respondents, yet another brilliant week for the Political Science Peer-Review Survey draws to a close. While the snowball is still rolling, and while we cannot know for certain because the survey is anonymous after all, we might soon reach a point of saturation: I have received a number of very friendly replies from people who tell me that they have already heard about the survey once (or twice) from someone else. The Netherlands in particular seem to be a hotspot of peer-review survey related activities. You could guess that much from the distribution of our respondents. While the US dominate the field (as they should), Switzerland and the Netherlands come an amazing 5th and 6th, accurately reflecting the standing of these countries as Social Science strongholds.

Technorati-Tags: political science, peer review, survey, netherlands, respondents, journals, publications

A good week for the peer-review survey

kai — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 22:51:48 +0000

On Monday, the Political Science Peer-Review Survey had 506 respondents. Between Tuesday and Friday, we sent out 1,100 new invitations. Five days and many contacts with helpful colleagues later the number stands at 626. Feel free to join them.

Political Science Peer-Review Survey: 500+ respondents

kai — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:09:45 +0000

The title says it all: yesterday, respondents 500-506 took the Political Science Peer-Review Survey, which is obviously great. A neat detail is that so far, more than 60 current or previous editors of political science journals have taken part in the survey. Tomorrow, we will resume or email campaign (aimed at those who have published in SSCI journals over the last eight years or so) to get even more people on board.
Technorati-Tags: political science, peer review, journals, survey, publications, research, ssci, social science citation index

Update on the Political Science Peer Review Survey

kai — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:19:41 +0000

On Monday, we started a new initiative to boost response to the Political Science Peer Review Survey. Thanks to some very industrious research students, we were able to identify about 21,000 individual authors who have published in Social Science Citation Index-covered Political Science Journals between 2000 and 2008. For about 8,000 of these, the SSCI lists their email addresses (that’s the EM field in the SSCI records), and so we started contacting them and asked them to participate in the survey. Obviously, some addresses are not longer valid because people have moved on to different places or have left academia altogether. Nonetheless, I was slightly surprised by the rather poor quality of the address data supplied by Thomson. In some cases, letters were missing whereas in other cases similar looking letters (e.g. ‘v’ and ‘y’) had been confused. This looks like either a weak OCR routine or an non-native and underpaid data typing slave has been used. Overall, we have contacted 962 people so far. About 200 of our messages have bounced, and we have 61 new responses to the survey (assuming that without the mailout, no one would have responded during these four days), which brings us to a new total of 238 responses