Democratic values and attitudes in Turkey

Last year, the “Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie” published an article on the level of support for the European Union’s core principles (democracy, gender equality, religious freedom, rule of law) in Turkey. In essence, the author claimed that the level of support for these principles in Turkey is low because a) the level of…

How Stata and a Makefile can make your day

By relying on scripts (do-files), Stata encourages you to work in a structured, efficient and reproducible way. This text-based approach is familiar and attractive to anyone who has ever used a unix shell and the standard utilities. Actually, unix-flavoured utilities can make your stata experience even better. One non-obvious candidate is make, which is usually…

Resolved: French Departements, INSEE, ISO and NUTS-3 codes

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…

Review: Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis

Many hypothesis in the social sciences involve interaction: The effect of some variable x (say xenophobia) on some variable y (say support for the extreme right) is conditional on a third variable z (say ethnicity). Modelling interactive hypotheses looks straightforward on the surface: simply generate a third variable by multiplying x and z and plug…