Old Talks

Here are some older talks (going back to 2003) that I have saved from the old website. Mainz 2009 Politikverdrossenheit: Begrifflichkeit, Entwicklung, Ursachen, Lösungsansätze London 2008 Knowledge Networks in EuropeanPolitical Science Mainz 2007 Die Wahrnehmung des deutschen Parteiensystem durch die Bürger, 1997-2005 Was lehren uns Integrationstheorien über die EU? Was können Integrationstheoretiker von der EU…

Update on the Political Science Peer Review Survey

On Monday, we started a new initiative to boost response to the Political Science Peer Review Survey. Thanks to some very industrious research students, we were able to identify about 21,000 individual authors who have published in Social Science Citation Index-covered Political Science Journals between 2000 and 2008. For about 8,000 of these, the SSCI…

Department of Government (Politics) at Essex tops Research Assessment Exercise 2008

December 18 was the the day (or rather the night, as results were communicated at midnight) for UK academics: after years of preparation and second-guessing and months of waiting, the results of the 6th Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were published. Every five years or so, the UK higher education funding councils examine the research output…

Call for Papers: Perspectives on the Radical Right

Finally, the call for papers for the ECPR’s 5th conference (at Potsdam, September 10-12 2009) is out. Our section on the Radical Right will consist of the following nine panels: The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe The Internationalisation of the Radical Right Will Fascism return? On the Borderline Between Protest and Violence: Political…

Political Science Journal Monitor

While we are in the mood of surveying the peer-review process in political science, here is a quick link to the Political Science Journal Monitor. The site itself is blogspot blog converted into a makeshift forum, and activity is low. Nonetheless, this is an interesting an potentially relevant resource for many of us.Technorati-Tags: political science,…

Another War Story from the Blind Review Process

Almost exactly three years ago, a major political science journal asked me to review a manuscript. I recommended to reject the paper on the grounds that a) its scope was extremely limited and b) that it largely ignored the huge body of existing political science literature on its topic. The editors followed my suggestion (presumably,…

The Political Science Peer-Review Survey

If you edit, review or author manuscripts for political science journals, the peer-review process is at the centre of your professional life. Unfortunately, for most of us the process is largely a black box. While everyone has heard (or lived through) tales from the trenches, there is very little hard evidence on how the process…

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

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,…

Austrian Extreme Right Leader Jörg Haider dies in car crash

“Colourful” did not even begin to describe him. If Bill Clinton was America’s first rock&roll president, Jörg Haider, who died in a car crash early on Saturday morning, was Austria’s first pop politician. Apt for a future right-winger, Haider was born into a national-socialist family. A gifted public speaker, he was active in right-wing circles…