Analysis of Voting Figures in the 2009 Iranian Presidential Election

Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews have published a preliminary analysis of the recent election in Iran. The paper (though it is based on official stats) suggests that the election was indeed rigged to a considerable degree. Here is the complete analysis of the Iranian Presidential Election 2009. p.s. Just…

Expenses, the Mail, and a diagram

I kid you not: yesterday the Daily Mail, not normally a promoter of civic education, published a Venn diagram outlining the overlap between the three main parties’ proposals for dealing with the parliamentary expenses mess. As diagrams go, this was not exactly brilliant. A lot of colour and space were wasted to illustrate the fact…

Presentation: Knowledge Networks in European Political Science

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="227"] Worldwide mutual citations in Political Science[/caption] Last Saturday, we presented our ongoing work on collaboration and citation networks in Political Science at the 4th UK Network conference held at the University of Greenwich. For this conference, we created a presentation on Knowledge Networks in European Political Science that summarises most of…

Software for Social Network Analysis: Pajek and Friends

After trying a lot of other programs, we have chosen Pajek for doing the analyses and producing those intriguing graphs of cliques and inner circles in Political Science. Pajek is 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.