Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (i.e. the spooks) begins to build dossiers on 3 sitting MPs for the AfD. All of them are prominent members of the most radical faction within the party (in German) In a landmark ruling, Germany’s highest court declares ban on assisted suicide unconstitutional. Judges say right to…
Back in the mist of time, when I should have been was working on my PhD, I found a blue book on the shelf that a previous occupant of the office had left there. As I learned later, it was The Blue Book that introduced the S language, the predecessor of R. I got sidetracked…
More on the AfD’s donation scandal(s): media report that the ultimate source of the illicit donations to Alice Weidel is a German billionaire dynasty. The family also donated to the Swiss SVP. You will not be surprised to hear that they have pan-European global interests, moved to Switzerland, became dual nationals, and divide their time…
It is a warm but grey and gloomy weekend in Germany, so here are three links I enjoyed: In case you were wondering whether Trump is a) evil, b) senile or c) a master strategist: here is a piece arguing that c) is unlikely, though a) and b) could easily be true at the same…
Terminology matters for science. If people use different words for the same thing, or even worse, the same word for different things, scientific communication turns into a dialogue of the deaf. European Radical Right Studies are a field where this is potentially a big problem: we use labels like “New”, “Populist”, “Radical”, “Extreme” or even…
Topic modelling does not work well for (my) research paper abstracts The Radical Right Research Robot is a fun side project whose life began exactly one year ago. The Robot exists to promote the very large body of knowledge on Radical Right parties and their voters that social scientists have accumulated over decades. At its…
Reprise: The co-citation network in European Radical Right studies In the last post, I tried to reconstruct the co-citation network in European Radical Right studies and ended up with this neat graph. [caption id="attachment_28138" align="alignnone" width="907"] Co-citations within top 20 titles in Extreme / Radical Right studies[/caption] The titles are arranged in groups, with the…
Research question For a long time, people working in the field of European Radical Right Studies could not even agree on a common name for the thing that they were researching. Should it be the Extreme Right, the Radical Right, or what? Utterly unimpressed by this fact, I argue in a in-press contribution that this…
This is me, about once per year, when I bemoan my lack of R-coolness whilst simultaneously enjoying my Stata-efficiency.
From the Monkey Cage: Italy just voted for two very different kinds of populism The botrnot package for the R language: Which world leaders are actually bots? (Use your own judgment) Science community blogs: recognising value and measuring reach Germany being Germany (or Bavaria?): German minister under fire for no women in leadership team 11…