Review: David Art, Inside the Radical Right (CUP 2011)
My long-overdue review of David Art’s latest book (Inside the Radical Right) for West European Politics.
Ministerpräsident = Präsident + Kanzler
Den Luxus getrennter Ämter – Kanzler + Präsident – leisten sich die Bundesländer nicht. Aber das bedeutet nicht, dass es die Aufgaben und die Rolle eines Staatsoberhaupts auf Länderebene nicht gibt. Der Ministerpräsident übernimmt sie – beide. Damit müsste also jeder Ministerpräsident wissen, “wie Präsident geht”, denn es ist ein ureigener Teil seines Jobs. schreibt…
Robust Regression of Aggregate Data in Stata
I’m currently working on an analysis of the latest state election in Rhineland-Palatinate using aggregate data alone, i.e. electoral returns and structural information, which is available at the level of the state’s roughly 2300 municipalities. The state’s Green party (historically very weak) has roughly tripled their share of the vote since the last election in…
Just out: Backes/Moreau (Eds) The Extreme Right in Europe
Like a premature Christmas present, my author’s copy of “The Extreme Right in Europe” arrived before the weekend. It’s a hefty volume of almost 500 pages that comes with a equally hefty price tag of just under 80 Euros. As you can see from the table of contents (the PDF also contains the introduction and…
Are Germans More Afraid of Neo-Nazis Than of Islamists?
Who is afraid of whom? The liberal German weekly Zeit has commissioned a YouGov poll which demonstrates that Germans are more afraid of right-wing terrorists than of Islamist terrorists. The question read “What is, in your opinion, the biggest terrorist threat in Germany?” On offer were right-wingers (41 per cent), Islamists (36.6 per cent), left-wingers…
Random thoughts on right-wing terrorism in Germany
Unless you spent the last couple of days under a rock, you will have heard about the terrible series of (at least) ten neo-Nazi murders that has stunned Germany. In my view, three things are particularly remarkable about this crime. First, the mainstream media including the public broadcasters and the left-liberal press refer to the…
Quick and Fancy Conference Posters with beamer/beamerposter
My default for writing anything that is longer than a page is LaTeX (possibly via org-mode, if it is short and simple). In fact, the bond that ties me to the LaTeX/Emacs combo is so strong that I want to use it even for texts that are exactly one page long, i.e. conference posters. CTAN…
Mini publication: Fringe Parties
Writing for encyclopaedias is by and large a thankless task. You get no recognition at all and have to summarise all you deem relevant about your field of expertise in 500 or 1000 words without any chance of contributing something new, being original or at least witty. But sometimes, it can be fun. I realised…
Election Roundup: Poland and Denmark by Stanley and Christensen
Life as an early 21st century comparativist is good: Skim through the English literature on country X, Y, and Z, get the dataset from some institution’s website, run the models on a superfast computer, and hey presto, you’re done. More often than not, one might be tempted to skip the literature bit completely and simply…
Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties
One feels almost sorry for the Social Democratic left: They are squeezed between the more modern Greens/Libertarians on the one hand, and the Extreme Right on the other. Here’s the preprint of a chapter I’m preparing on that topic.