Guttenberg-Gate: When Politics and Science Collide

The story has now been picked up by just about every news outlet on the planet: A German law professor was supposed to review a monograph on European constitutional law for a learned journal. He soon discovered that various pages were not properly referenced, to says the least. The twist: This monograph is based on…

The Political Science Peer-Review Survey

If you edit, review or author manuscripts for political science journals, the peer-review process is at the centre of your professional life. Unfortunately, for most of us the process is largely a black box. While everyone has heard (or lived through) tales from the trenches, there is very little hard evidence on how the process…

Student of radical Islam must not study al-Qaeda documents

Weird, sad but apparently true: at Nottingham University, a PhD student who works on islamic terrorism and an administrator were arrested (though released without charges) because they were in possession of an al-Qaeda manual downloaded from the internet. The twist: the manual was part of an MA dissertation and had been re-submitted as part of…

Software for Social Network Analysis: Pajek and Friends

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.

Germany: Extreme right party leader charged with inciting racial hatred

Udo Voigt, the leader of the NPD, has been charged with inciting racial hatred. During the 2006 World Cup, the party published a pamphlet that questioned the right of non-white players in the squad to represent Germany in the tournament. The NPD is the oldest amongst the three relevant extreme right parties in Germany. Founded…

A fresh look at economic voting

The basic assumptions of the theory of economic voting are very simple: voters care about unemployment, inflation, and growth voters blame the government for adverse economic conditions voters use the ballot to punish the government. Unfortunately, the impact of this effect is not constant over time and across countries, which is slightly embarrassing. In their…