Category: Political Science

Germany: The Wall in the Head, twenty years after unification

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Today is Oscar Gabriel’s retirement/leaving do. Unfortunately, I could not make it to the party, but I wrote a chapter for the super-secret Festschrift that should by now be in his hands. The chapter (in German) deals with an old favourite of his (and mine): cultural-attitudinal differences between East and West Germany (or rather between…

Joint Sessions 2013: Local Information Update

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Have you already submitted your paper for the Joint Sessions 2013 at Mainz? We have updated the pages that provide local information on transport, accommodation, and the City of Mainz. There is even a neat GoogleMap (also accessible from your mobile) showing the conference hotels, airports and relevant railway stations. We will add further information…

ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops 2013: Academic Programme

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The list of workshops that have been accepted for the 2013 Joints Sessions at the University of Mainz is now available on the new ECPR site. The call for papers should go out before August, with a deadline of November 1. In the meanwhile, we’re working on getting the local website up and running. Update:…

Fixed Effects Regression Models

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Fixed Effects Regression Models 1

While you were busy watching the mostly shambolic  performance that pass for the Euro 2012, I was unboxing my set of complementary “Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences” volumes (you know, the series of flimsy paperbacks whose sickly green sleeves conjure memories of psychiatric wards and man in lab coats). The latest addition to my…

French Legislative 1st Round Blog Round-Up

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Colleague Rainbow Murray is in Paris to do a little bit of observing. Her personal account of the count in one Parisian ward is quite intriguing. I had no idea that each candidate has to provides their own ballot paper. Not a very green thing, it would seem. Art Goldhammer puts Laurent Joffrin’s comment on Mélenchon’s failture/LePen’s success in perspective. ‘We all tend to overinterpret the results of elections’. Can’t argue with that. Meanwhile, Matt Goodwin ponders the question if Marine LePen’s ‘detoxified’ version of her father’s Front National is serving once more the blueprint for the (West) European Extreme Right, with Greece providing the counterpoint.And my own thoughts? Looking back, perhaps the most remarkable fact is how much our collective excitement has waned since the presidential election, although legislative elections really arereally important. Is this just because hundreds of multi-person races can simply not compete with the drama of the shoot-out between Sarkozy and Hollande, or just another piece of evidence of the internet’s detrimental effects on our attention spans?

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Political Geography piece on voter-candidate distance out as early view

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This is brilliant: an “in press/corrected proof” version of our article on the effect of distance between candidates and their prospective voters in England has just appeared on the ScienceDirect website (click on the DOI below). If you cannot get beyond the paywall, the authors’ version is still available here.

    Arzheimer, Kai and Jocelyn Evans. “Geolocation and voting: candidate-voter distance effects on party choice in the 2010 General Election in England.” Political Geography 31.5 (2012): 301–310. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.04.006
    [BibTeX] [Abstract] [Download PDF] [HTML] [DATA]

    The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants’ support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual’s support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters’ choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote-choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage.

    @Article{arzheimer-evans-2012,
author = {Arzheimer, Kai and Evans, Jocelyn},
title = {Geolocation and voting: candidate-voter distance effects on party choice in the 2010 General Election in England},
number = {5},
volume = {31},
abstract = {The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants' support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual's support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters' choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote-choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage.},
journal = {Political Geography},
year = 2012,
doi = {10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.04.006},
pages = {301--310},
keywords = {uk, gis},
html = {https://www.kai-arzheimer.com/paper/geolocation-voting-candidate-voter-distance-effects-party-choice-2010-general-election-england},
data = {https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PBCH00},
url = {https://www.kai-arzheimer.com/arzheimer-evans-geolocation-vote-england.pdf}
}