A group of my students has programmed a short online questionnaire on democratic attitudes. Please do feel free to help them with their work by participating and sharing the link. The survey is short, fun and completely anonymous: http://www.politik.uni-mainz.de/survey/index.php?sid=95262&lang=en
Recently, I re-ran my scripts on a new data set that extends the old series all through the naughties. As you can see, party ID in Germany is not exactly alive and kicking, but the rate of decline has fallen considerably over the last decade.
Apparently, Libya has a Department for Anti-Corruption or, more precisely, the Ministry for Inspection and Popular Control. Sounds weird? Concepts such as National Liberation Army, Security Forces, Dear Leader(s), People’s Democracy and, last not least, Ministry of Truth spring readily to mind.
The German government’s spokesman now has his own twitter account (@regsprecher). The German government’s spokesman also has his own little twittergate, since he surprised his global audience yesterday by claiming that ‘Obama is responsible for thousands of innocent deaths’. What a difference a letter makes.
The polity project’s country code for Israel is …
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…
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…
I’ve just finished a review of Tim Spier’s new book on the electorates of the Western European populist right (Modernisierungsverlierer: Die Wählerschaft rechtspopulistischer Parteien in Westeuropa (in German))
One particularly annoying aspect of doing reviews for learned journals is that assignments tend to arrive in clusters. Six months ago, I found myself in a bit of a pickle, with loads and loads of requests arriving within a short time. And just five weeks ago, another volley of invitations to review hit my mailbox…
As predicted yesterday, the nuclear disaster in Japan is having a profound impact on something as trivial as three state election campaigns in Germany, more than 9000 kilometres away. Roughly 70 per cent of the population believe that an incident on the scale of the Japanese catastrophe could happen in Germany, too. The Federal Government…