The polity project’s country code for Israel is …
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…
Agenda Set, Japanese Style II
As predicted yesterday, the nuclear disaster in Japan is having a profound impact on something as trivial as three state election campaigns in Germany, more than 9000 kilometres away. Roughly 70 per cent of the population believe that an incident on the scale of the Japanese catastrophe could happen in Germany, too. The Federal Government…
Agenda Setting, Japanese Style
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption] It’s amazing: Just 36 hours after the horrible earth quake in Japan, 60000 people are demonstrating in Swabia – against nuclear energy. While we do not know whether the Japanese plants are actually in meltdown, for the German liberal-conservative coalition, this is certainly the Most Credible Accident. One…
Miniskirts and Genocide: Inside the Topsy-Turvy World of NPD Propaganda
In the olden days, the world was simple. The average extreme right party was strictly socially conservative, to say the least. Abortion and homosexuality were considered sinful, mostly so because both practices deprived the fatherland of future soldiers and potential mothers of even more soldiers. So sex was supposed to be intramarital and had one…
Guttenberg-Gate: When Politics and Science Collide
The story has now been picked up by just about every news outlet on the planet: A German law professor was supposed to review a monograph on European constitutional law for a learned journal. He soon discovered that various pages were not properly referenced, to says the least. The twist: This monograph is based on…
DVU/NPD merger successfully challenged in court
The recent DVU/NPD merger has been successfully challenged in court