Tag: usa

Unmarked police in the US, extremists in the German army, and the legacy of Fascism in Italian architecture: 3 links I liked

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Large parts of the GOP are nominally opposed to big government. But they have done nothing to stop the growth of ever more armed police forces – on the contrary. This long read about law enforcement in the US is worrying, but also quite fascinating from a political/administrative science point of view. Over the last…

Political Science’s Not Dead. Nor is forecasting

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With the vote mostly counted in the US, PS have posted a useful summary of the Political Science Forecasting Models for that infamous election. [contentcards url="http://www.politicalsciencenow.com/how-accurate-were-the-political-science-forecasts-of-the-2016-presidential-election/"] By and large, and in neat contrast to the current fad for self-flagellation, the augurs of the discipline have done well. Eight of the ten predictions that were published in…

In March 2016, Helmut Norpoth predicted a Trump victory

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Ballot - Vote

[contentcards url="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/primary-model-predicts-trump-victory/F374BCB3C2A291B21A8A39CD3ECD6BE3" target="_blank"] I’m not a huge fan of predictive Social Science. People are not the weather; they are bound to react to our predictions, which may become self-defeating or self-fulfilling in the process. Either scenario is unpleasant for obvious reasons. Predictive models are often subject to herd behaviour. They rarely rely on first principles,…

How many people die each year because of the “Second Amendment”? My estimate is 8000+

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Following Friday’s events, the attached image went viral. The figures (if correct) are certainly suggestive, but obviously, the population at risk varies widely between countries. What we need is the gun-related homicide rate for a sample of comparable countries. I headed over to the Brady Campaign, which had created the image, but could not easily…

Does inequality depress turnout (or what you shouldn't do with time-series cross-sectional data)?

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The US might face unprecedented levels of turnout in tomorrow’s election, but historically, the non-voters are the biggest camp in American politics. One intriguing explanation for this well-known fact is that low turnout could be a consequence of the very high (by any standard) levels of income inequality: because voters lack experience with universalistic institutions,…

How Nancy Pelosi could become president

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Today, the BBC has a rather amusing piece by Larry Sabato (Virginia) on the “The US election nightmare scenario”: an equal split of the “toss-up” state leads to deadlock in the Electoral College. Enter the unit rule, a constitutional provision which stipulates that the House will select the President in a vote where each state…

Library of Electoral Behaviour/Electoral Behavior

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Library of Electoral Behaviour/Electoral Behavior 2

As a subdiscipline, the study of electoral behavior (or “psephology”) begins with a handful of monographs that were published in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It’s amazing to see how concepts and ideas that were developed in Downs’ “Economic Theory of Democracy” or in the “American Voter” by Campbell et al. some 50 years ago inform our work to the present day. However, the study of electoral behaviour (or electoral behavior – the publisher keep changing the title just to confuse me) did obviously not end with these holy books. From the 1960s on, the discipline was increasingly defined by a number of ground breaking articles that were published in professional journals.

This collection gave us the opportunity to bring together 66 articles which – in our humble view – define the discipline, represent important new departures, or bring together the knowledge we have on a given subject. As a friend of mine wisely remarked, at $ 950 the collection might be slightly underpriced. Then again, if you teach a course on electoral behaviour or political sociology, or if just want to get an overview of electoral studies, getting much if not most of the important stuff in one four-volume-1640-pages book is really a bargain. Maybe you should invite your librarian for a coffee. Make it a large one.

What the Library of Electoral Behaviour gives you is a full introduction to the study of electoral behaviour plus:

Socio-Political Models

  1. Lipset, S. M. and S. Rokkan (eds.) (1967) [‘Introduction’] in Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, New York: The Free Press..

  2. Erikson, Robert, John H. Goldthorpe and Lucienne Portocarero (1979), ‘Intergenerational Class Mobility in Three Western European Societies. England, France and Sweden’, British Journal of Sociology 30: 415-441

  3. Alford, Robert R. (1962): A Suggested Index of the Association of Social Class and Voting, in: Public Opinion Quarterly 26, S. 417–425

  4. Lijphart, Arend: Religious vs. Linguistic vs. Class Voting: The “Crucial Experiment” of Comparing Belgium, Canada, South Africa, and Switzerland, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 73, No. 2. (Jun., 1979), pp. 442-458.

  5. Class Mobility and Political Preferences: Individual and Contextual Effects Nan Dirk De Graaf; Paul Nieuwbeerta; Anthony Heath The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 100, No. 4. (Jan., 1995), pp. 997-1027.

  6. The Developmental Theory of the Gender Gap: Women’s and Men’s Voting Behavior in Global Perspective Ronald Inglehart; Pippa Norris ‎. (Oct., 2000), pp. 441-463.

  7. Alan Zuckerman (1975) ‘Political Cleavage: a conceptual and theoretical analysis’, British Journal of Political Science, 5: 231-248.

  8. Key, V. O. “A Theory of Critical Elections.” The Journal of Politics 17, no. 1 (1955): 3-18

  9. Belknap, G., and A. Campbell. “Political Party Identification and Attitudes toward Foreign Policy.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1951): 601-23.

  10. Converse, P. (1966) ‘The concept of a normal vote’ in A. Campbell et al (eds.) Elections and the Political Order, New York, John Wiley.

  11. Jennings, M.K. and R. Niemi (1968) ‘The transmission of political values from parent to child’, American Political Science Review, 62: 169-84.

  12. Converse, Philip E. (1964), ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’, in: David E. Apter (ed). Ideology and Discontent, pp. 206-261, New York: Free Press

  13. Jackson, J. (1983). “The systematic beliefs of the mass public: estimating policy preferences with survey data” in Journal of Politics, vol. 45: 840-58.

  14. Markus, Gregory B., and Philip E. Converse. “A Dynamic Simultaneous Equation Model of Electoral Choice.” The American Political Science Review 73, no. 4 (1979): 1055-70.

  15. Fiorina, Morris P. “An Outline for a Model of Party Choice.” American Journal of Political Science 21, no. 3 (1977): 601-25.

  16. Bartels, Larry M. “Partisanship and Voting Behavior, 1952-1996.” American Journal of Political Science 44 (2000): 35-50.

Cognition and the Voter Calculus

  1. Hotelling, Harold (1929), ‘Stability in Competition’, The Economic Journal 39(153): 41-57.

  2. Riker, William H., and Peter C. Ordeshook. “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.” American Political Science Review 62 (1968): 25-42.

    3. Read more

Running the Numbers

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Via Simon Jackman’s blog: Chris Jordan found an intriguing way to visualise some very large, mostly scary national statistics, such as the as the number of plastic cups used on flights in the US every six hours (one million), or the number of cell phones retired every day (426,000). Amazing and aesthetically pleasing in a…