Finally: New book on the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002

It’s almost unbelievable: after some six months of communication problems with the publishers, my recent book on the extreme right vote in Western Europe since the 1980s is finally out and ready for you to order and read (qualification: if you read German). If you don’t read German, you might still be interested in a…

German Citizenship Law Revisited: Howard’s "Causes and Consequences of Germany’s New Citizenship Law"

In a recent post, I have commented on a (now scrapped) law from the 1930s that made it technically illegal for “foreign” PhDs to use their titles in Germany. A superficially similar case concerns the German citizenship law that was first enacted in 1913 (the Empire happily existed without a concept of federal citizenship for…

FAQ on Interaction

Six weeks ago, I have reviewed Kam’s and Franzese’s Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis. This week, the topic of interaction effects pops up on the Social Science Statistics Blogs, with pointers to useful FAQs and other pages.Technorati Tags: interaction effects, statistics, regression

Germany: Extreme right party leader charged with inciting racial hatred

Udo Voigt, the leader of the NPD, has been charged with inciting racial hatred. During the 2006 World Cup, the party published a pamphlet that questioned the right of non-white players in the squad to represent Germany in the tournament. The NPD is the oldest amongst the three relevant extreme right parties in Germany. Founded…

Democratic values and attitudes in Turkey

Last year, the “Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie” published an article on the level of support for the European Union’s core principles (democracy, gender equality, religious freedom, rule of law) in Turkey. In essence, the author claimed that the level of support for these principles in Turkey is low because a) the level of…

A fresh look at economic voting

The basic assumptions of the theory of economic voting are very simple: voters care about unemployment, inflation, and growth voters blame the government for adverse economic conditions voters use the ballot to punish the government. Unfortunately, the impact of this effect is not constant over time and across countries, which is slightly embarrassing. In their…