New (Free!) Software for Assessing Survey Bias

Worried about survey bias? We have updated our add-on (or ado) surveybias, which calculates our multinomial generalisation of the old Martin, Traugott, and Kennedy (2005) measure for survey bias. If you have any dichotomous or multinomial variable in your survey whose true distribution is known (e.g. from the census, electoral counts, or other official data),…

Stata Software for Assessing Survey Bias

BinaryApe / Foter / CC BYIn a recent paper, we derive various multinomial measures of bias in public opinion surveys (e.g. pre-election polls). Put differently, with our methodology, you may calculate a scalar measure of survey bias in multi-party elections. Thanks to Kit Baum over at Boston College, our Stata add-on surveybias.ado is now available…

Easy Google geocoding in Stata

For the un-initiated: Geocoding is the fine art of converting addresses into geographical coordinates (longitude and latitude). Thanks to Google and some other providers like OpenStreeMap, this is now a relatively painless process. But when one needs more than a few addresses geocoded, one does not rely on pointing-and-clicking. One needs an API, i.e. a software library that makes the service accessible through R, Python or some other programming language.
geocode is a user-written Stata command that gives access to Googles API from within Stata. It takes a variable containing address strings and returns two new variables containing the latitude/longitude information

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.