What’s the difference between BNP/UKIP voters?

 Political Science, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Mar 122012
 

Colleagues/friends Matt Goodwin and Jocelyn Evans have created quite a stir with their report on the attitudes of BNP and UKIP supporters/voters. Obviously, UKIP is not happy at all about being lumped together with what remains of Nick Griffin’s party. Being introduced as a ‘polite alternative’ to the BNP (albeit with a rhetorical question mark) does not help, either. Today, Matt responds to their critics over at the Guardian’s ever more popular Comment is free section.

Whether UKIP likes it or not, this is fascinating stuff (for us aficionados). That their respondents predominantly young, male, undereducated and deeply worried about Muslims/immigrants hardly comes as a surprise. But there are some real innovations in this paper.

  • First, the N is huge (you need yougov or a very solid skull to interview ~2000 right-wingers). The sheer number of interviews makes it possible to differentiate between members, identifiers, supporters, and voters, something that is not normally possible.
  • Second, comparing BNP and UKIP supporters on the basis of a large sample makes a lot of substantive sense, whether UKIP likes it or not.
  • Third, Goodwin/Evans cleverly included items tapping into attitudes towards politically motivated violence in their survey. This allows them to connect existing research on voters with the sparse literature on militant activists.

MLwiN 2.10: free for British Academics

 Uncategorized  2 Responses »
Mar 212009
 

MLwiN is one of the granddaddies of multi-level modelling software (the other being HLM).  Essentially, it is a 1990s-ish looking and sometimes quirky GUI wrapped around  an old DOS program (MLn). The one feature that set MLwiN apart in the late 1990s is point-and-click interface that allows you to build the equations for a multi-level in a stepwise fashion. The underlying command language is still slightly confusing and less than well documented, and some of the modern features (such as modelling categorical dependent variables) are implemented as external macros, which does not need to concern you unless something goes horribly wrong, which happens occassionally.

That said, MLwiN is reasonably fast, does now incorporate modern MCMC estimators, has an interface with WINBUGS and can be convinced to do most things you would possibly want to do with it.  I bought version 1.10 ca. 1998, received free upgrades to 2.02 and good support well until 2004/2005 or so.  These days, Stata, R and MPlus can all estimate multi-level models, but working with MLwiN may still be worthwhile for you (by the way, you can download the free stata2mlwin addon from UCLA academic technology to export your variables from Stata to MLwiN).

Rather amazingly, MLwiN is now freely available for anyone working in UK universities: just enter your details including your ac.uk-email, and few days later, they will send you a download link.