Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties

One feels almost sorry for the Social Democratic left: They are squeezed between the more modern Greens/Libertarians on the one hand, and the Extreme Right on the other. Here’s the preprint of a chapter I’m preparing on that topic.

Radical Attitudes, Kafka’s Motorbike, and the Sage/IPSA Encyclopedia of Political Science

Do you remember the book launch scene from the first Bridget Jones movie (I do – the shame, the shame), when she talks about “the greatest book of our time”? I was reminded of that scene when I recently attended a reception at the fringe of ECPR 2011 to mark the launch of the the all-new,…

Extreme Right Bibliography Updated

After a lengthy hiatus, I’ve found the time to update my online bibliography on the Extreme (or Radical/Populist/Anti-Immigrant) Right in Western Europe. According to my latest count, it lists now 400 articles, books, chapters, and working papers, complete with doi- and/or http-links where available. Enjoy!

Fails/Pierce: Almond, Lipset, Verba got it all wrong. Political Culture RIP?

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption] Fails/Pierce 2010 article in Political Research Quarterly 2010 is easily the most interesting paper I have read during the last Academic Year (btw, here are my lecture notes). Ever since the 1950s, mainstream political science has claimed that mass attitudes on democracy matter for the stability of democracy,…

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…