The polity project’s country code for Israel is …
Mainz to host 2013 Joint Sessions of Workshops
Believe it or not: My institution will play host to the 2013 instalment of the ECPR’s highly successful Joint Sessions of Workshops conference series.
Online Survey on Democratic Attitudes
A group of my students has programmed a short online questionnaire on democratic attitudes. Please do feel free to help them with their work by participating and sharing the link. The survey is short, fun and completely anonymous: http://www.politik.uni-mainz.de/survey/index.php?sid=95262&lang=en
Party ID in Germany: Dead Men Walking …. (Almost) Tall!
Recently, I re-ran my scripts on a new data set that extends the old series all through the naughties. As you can see, party ID in Germany is not exactly alive and kicking, but the rate of decline has fallen considerably over the last decade.
Random fun fact of the day: Libyan Ministries
Apparently, Libya has a Department for Anti-Corruption or, more precisely, the Ministry for Inspection and Popular Control. Sounds weird? Concepts such as National Liberation Army, Security Forces, Dear Leader(s), People’s Democracy and, last not least, Ministry of Truth spring readily to mind.
German government: Obama responsible for thousands of deaths
The German government’s spokesman now has his own twitter account (@regsprecher). The German government’s spokesman also has his own little twittergate, since he surprised his global audience yesterday by claiming that ‘Obama is responsible for thousands of innocent deaths’. What a difference a letter makes.
Sampling from a Multinomial Distribution in Stata
Sometimes, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Which, in my case, might be a little simulation of a random process involving an unordered categorical variable. In R, sampling from a multinomial distribution is trivial. rmultinom(1,1000,c(.1,.7,.2,.1)) gives me a vector of random numbers from a multinomial distribution with outcomes 1, 2, 3, and…
New Political Science Blog
Colleagues over at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham have started yet another political science blog. Its official name is “Ballots & Bullets”, but I find its URL nottspolitics.org rather more memorable. They started out only six weeks ago, but the range of topics and the number of articles…
Review of Tim Spier’s "Modernisierungsverlierer": Die Wählerschaft rechtspopulistischer Parteien in Westeuropa (in German)
I’ve just finished a review of Tim Spier’s new book on the electorates of the Western European populist right (Modernisierungsverlierer: Die Wählerschaft rechtspopulistischer Parteien in Westeuropa (in German))
Submitting your manuscript to yet another journal is bad for my mental health
One particularly annoying aspect of doing reviews for learned journals is that assignments tend to arrive in clusters. Six months ago, I found myself in a bit of a pickle, with loads and loads of requests arriving within a short time. And just five weeks ago, another volley of invitations to review hit my mailbox…