These days, a bonanza of political information is freely available on the internet. Sometimes this information comes in the guise of excel sheets, comma separated data or other formats which are more or less readily machine readable. But more often than not, information is presented as tables designed to be read by humans. This is…
After trying a lot of other programs, we have chosen Pajek for doing the analyses and producing those intriguing graphs of cliques and inner circles in Political Science. Pajek is free for non-commercial use and runs on Windows or (via wine) Linux. It is very fast, can (unlike many other programs) easily handle very large networks, produces decent graphs and does many standard analyses.
If you are interested in subnational politics, France is an interesting case for many reasons. On the one hand, the country is highly centralised and divided into 96 (European) Departements (administrative units) with equal legal rights (though Corsica is a bit of an exception to this). In fact, Departements were created after the revolution in…