I’m currently working on an analysis of the latest state election in Rhineland-Palatinate using aggregate data alone, i.e. electoral returns and structural information, which is available at the level of the state’s roughly 2300 municipalities. The state’s Green party (historically very weak) has roughly tripled their share of the vote since the last election in 2006, and I want to know were all these additional votes come from. And yes, I’m treading very careful around the very large potential ecological fallacy that lurks at the centre of my analysis, regressing Green gains on factors such as tax receipts and distance from next university town, but never claiming that the rich or the students or both turned to the Greens.

One common problem with this type of analysis is that not all municipalities are created equal. There is a surprisingly large number of flyspeck villages with only a few dozen voters on, whereas the state’s capital boasts more than 140,000 registered voters. Most places are somewhere in between. Having many small municipalities in the regression feels wrong for at least two reasons. First, small-scale changes of political preferences in tiny electorates will result in relatively large percentage changes. Second, the behaviour of a relatively large number of voters who happen to live in a small number of relatively large municipalities will be grossly underrepresented, i.e. the countryside will drive the results.

Continue reading “Robust Regression of Aggregate Data in Stata” »

Finally, the call for papers for the ECPR’s 5th conference (at Potsdam, September 10-12 2009) is out. Our section on the Radical Right will consist of the following nine panels:

• The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe
• The Internationalisation of the Radical Right
• Will Fascism return?
• On the Borderline Between Protest and Violence: Political Movements of the New Radical Right
• Consequences of the surge of anti-immigration parties
• The Radical Right in Western Europe
• Inside the Radical Right: An Internalist Perspective
• Party-based Euroscepticism in Western and Eastern Europe
• Neighbourhood Effects Revisited: the Visualisation of Immigrants and Radical Right-Wing Voting

Continue reading “Call for Papers: Perspectives on the Radical Right” »

Everyone just seems to know that the voters of the Extreme Right hate foreigners in general and immigrants in particular, but robust comparative evidence for the alleged xenophobia – Radical Right vote link is scarce. Moreover, many of the published analyses are based on somewhat outdated (i.e. 1990s) data, and alternative accounts of the extreme right vote (the “unpolitical” protest hypothesis and the hypothesis that the Far Right in Western Europe attracts people with “neo-liberal” economic preferences, championed by Betz and Kitschelt in the 1990s) do exist. Just a few days ago, a journal has accepted a paper by me in which I test these three competing hypotheses using (relatively) recent data from the European Social Survey and a little Structural Equation Modelling. As it turns out, protest and neo-liberalism have no statistically significant impact on the Extreme Right vote whatsoever. Anti-immigrant sentiment, however, plays a crucial role for the Extreme Right in all countries but Italy. Its effects are moderated by party identification and general ideological preferences. Moreover, the effect of immigrant sentiment is moderate by general ideological preferences and party identification. I conclude that comparative electoral research should focus on the circumstances under which immigration is politicised. Wasn’t it blindingly obvious?

Technorati-Tags: extreme right, radical right, populist right, far right, sem, structural equation modelling, western europe, italy, immigration, comparative politics, european social survey, voting, voters

It’s almost unbelievable: after some six months of communication problems with the publishers, my recent book on the extreme right vote in Western Europe since the 1980s is finally out and ready for you to order and read (qualification: if you read German). If you don’t read German, you might still be interested in a brief English summary of my findings on the Extreme Right vote, including various presentations and other goodies.