May 192013
This is my last post on the 2013 Joint Sessions. Promise.
May 192013
These are the slides for my Oxford talk on competition between the Centre Left and the Extreme Right (aka Working Class Parties 2.0) for the working class vote in Western Europe. The presentation is based on
- Arzheimer, Kai. “Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties.” Sociology of the Extreme Right. Ed. Rydren, Jens. London, New York: Routledge, 2012. 75-90.
[BibTeX] [Abstract] [Download PDF] [HTML]
The propensity of workers to vote for the Extreme Right has risen significantly. This “proletarisation” is the result of the interplay between a long-term dealignment process and increasing worries amongst the European working classes about the immigration of cheap labour. As a result, Western European Centre Left parties may find themselves squeezed between the New Right on the one hand and the New Left on the other. There is no obvious strategy for dealing with this dilemma. Staying put will not win working class defectors back. Toughening up immigration policies is unpalatable for many party members, does not seem to make Social Democrats more attractive for working class voters, and might eventually alienate other social groups.
@InCollection{arzheimer-2012c, author = {Arzheimer, Kai}, title = {Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties}, booktitle = {Sociology of the Extreme Right}, publisher = {Routledge}, year = 2012, pages = {75--90}, editor = {Rydren, Jens}, abstract = {The propensity of workers to vote for the Extreme Right has risen significantly. This “proletarisation” is the result of the interplay between a long-term dealignment process and increasing worries amongst the European working classes about the immigration of cheap labour. As a result, Western European Centre Left parties may find themselves squeezed between the New Right on the one hand and the New Left on the other. There is no obvious strategy for dealing with this dilemma. Staying put will not win working class defectors back. Toughening up immigration policies is unpalatable for many party members, does not seem to make Social Democrats more attractive for working class voters, and might eventually alienate other social groups.}, url = {http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/working-class-parties-extreme-right.pdf}, html = {http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/extreme-right-working-class-centre-left-competition/}, address = {London, New York} }
May 142013
Every remotely relevant reference I came across during the last 15 years or so resides in a single bibtex file. That is not a problem. The problem is that I’m moving into a shiny, new but somewhat smaller office, together with hundreds of copies of journal articles and hundreds of PDFs. Wouldn’t it be good to know which physical copies are effectively redundant (unreadable comments in the margins aside) and can therefore stay behind?
The trouble is that bibtex files have a rather flexible, human readable format. Each entry begins with the @ sign, followed by a type (book, article etc.), a reference name, lots of key/value pairs (fields) in arbitrary order, and even more curly braces.
grep @ full.bib|wc -l tells me that I have 2914 references in total. grep binder|wc -l (binder is a custom field that I use to keep track of the location of my copies) shows that I have printed out/copied 712 texts over the years, and grep file|wc -l indicates that there are 504 PDFs residing on my filesystem. But what is the magnitude of the intersection?
My first inclination was to look for a suitable Python parser/library. Pybtex looked good in principle but is underdocumented and had trouble reading full.bib, because that is encoded in Latin 1. So it was endless hours of amateurish coding and procrastination ahead. Then I remembered the “do one thing, and do it really well” mantra of old. Enter bibtool, which is a fast and reasonably stable bibtex file filter and pretty printer. Bibtool reads “resource files”, which are really just short scripts containing filtering/formatting directives. select = {binder ".+"} keeps those references whose “binder” field contains at least one character (.+ is a regular expression that matches any non-empty string). select = {file ".+"} selects all references for which I have a PDF. But bibtool applies a logical OR to these conditions while I’m interested in finding those references that meet both criteria.
The quick solution is to store each statement in a file of its own and apply bibtool twice, using a pipeline for extra efficiency: bibtool -r find-binder.rsc full.bib|bibtool -r find-pdf >intersection.bib does the trick and solves my problem in under a minute, without any coding.
As it turns out, there were just 65 references in both groups. Apparently, I stopped printing (or at least filing away) some time ago. Eventually, I binned two copies, but it is the principle that matters.
May 092013
Germany’s (very polite) answer to UKIP is “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD), a new party that wants to abolish the Euro. While this is certainly a novelty in German party politics, I don’t think it’s a game changer for the September election. Why? Read my guest post on the AfD over at the LSE’s excellent European Politics and Policy blog.
Apr 282013
Thanks to colleague Kyriaki Nanou and the generosity of the Anglo-German Programme, I’m taking my paper on the election between the Centre Left and the Extreme Right for the working class vote to Academic Wonderland (TM). Needless to say that I’m looking forward to this in the extreme (pun intended, but I largely failed?). Click here to read the full paper on “Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between the Centre Left and the Extreme Right in Western Europe“.
