In 2023, I wrote 64 posts on this blog, which is more than I would have thought. Many of them are quite short: basically just a link to a newspaper article in which I’m quoted or a podcast that I liked. And most are only ever read by a few people.
Some, however, are popular, at least by my rather humble standards. These are the seven posts that were most read in 2023:
7 Is far right voting driven by unideological protest voting? NOOOOOOOOO, of course it’s not, as we have seen in various cases the world over. And in this post from August 2023, I show that the AfD’s recent surge in the polls has also very little to do with pure protest.
6 Are you a Stata holdout? Do you need standard errors for something unusual and potentially non-linear? Do you want to understand why nlcom is your friend and how it works? Look no further: I explained all this in this vintage post from 2013.
5 Is the AfD’s 2023 surge in the polls real? In June, this was more of an open question than it is today. And so I pooled the polls, took a long, hard look and said: yes, the AfD’s current rise in the polls is not just a blip.
4 Predictive margins plot have become quite popular, because they are really useful. In the early 2010s, they were less well known. In this golden oldie post, I try to make sense of them and explain what Stata’s magical margins command can do for you.
3 More than a decade ago, I put my extensive and still growing radical right bibliography online. And once per year, I write a lengthy post about what is new in the literature. The one on the 2023 update of the radical right bibliography was quite popular.
2 Almost exactly a year ago, I came up with a modest proposal: Let ChatGPT write the dreaded letters of recommendation. Because they are so formulaic, and because ChatGPT has seen so many of them, it works really well. Scary.
1 What’s the deal with the radical right Alternative for Germany and their neverending Lovefest with Russia? Look no further, just click on this most popular of my 2023 posts.
