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,…
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…
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,…
“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…
Courtesy of Google’s book search, a large parts of my new book on the Extreme Right in Western Europe (in German) is now available online. I don’t know how they calculate which and how many pages one may view but I was able to read several consecutive pages of it. Plus you have the search…
In a recent article in the European Journal of Political Research, Kestilä and Söderlund claim (amongst other things) that in the French regional elections of 2004, turnout and district magnitude have significant negative effects on the extreme right vote whereas the effects of the number of party lists and unemployment are positive and significant. Most…
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…
[Slightly off topic] Having your own domain is obviously attractive, but when I moved to the UK two years ago, I left my main site with all my presentations, pre-prints and other goodies in a subdirectory of my old institution’s website where it had resided since about 1999. They have a decent server with loads…
Like many other people, I just hate PowerPoint. But I had no idea that this pet hate could be the result of a serious
(well) analysis of PP’s ideological flaws. Now I know.
Everyone just seems to know that the voters of the Extreme Right hate foreigners in general and immigrants in particular, but robust comparative evidence for the alleged xenophobia – Radical Right vote link is scarce. Moreover, many of the published analyses are based on somewhat outdated (i.e. 1990s) data, and alternative accounts of the extreme…