East Germans Killed the FDP

Even the Washington Post has woken up to the fact that 25 years after the uprising in the GDR, Germany stubbornly remains divided economically, politically, and socially. In the great scheme of things, this may matter less than you might think: In Western Europe alone, the UK, Spain, Belgium, or Switzerland – countries that have…

New Book Project: Handbook of Electoral Behaviour

Very happy: The folks at Sage have kindly signed a contract with Jocelyn Evans, Michael Lewis-Beck, and my own good self to edit a two-volume tome on Electoral Behaviour in their Handbook series. The final product will have some 50 chapters on all aspects of psephology and should come out in 2016. Cat-herding 50+ academics…

Analysing Facebook with R

I’ve recently discovered Rfacebook, which lets you access public information on Facebook from R. In terms of convenience, no package for R or Python that I have seen so far comes near. Get yourself a long-lived token, store it as a variable, and put all posts on a fanpage you are interested in into one…

One, two, three Excellent Online Surveys

[caption id="attachment_13291" align="alignright" width="225"] An Imperial Duck. Because.[/caption] My wonderful PhD students are running a series of short online surveys, two of them with a slightly unusual and rather intriguing format. If you read German, do them a favour and click on the link. You should be done in 10 minutes or less. And while…

How to Get a 100 per cent Response Rate

When I drove home from work a couple of days ago, I noticed a policeman flagging down precisely every tenth car in the other lane and directing the drivers towards a lay-by. He was in uniform, wearing hi-vis gear and his government-issued Walther, so non-compliance was clearly not an issue. The scene was completed by a large billboard, stating that this was no ordinary vehicle spot check but rather a road use survey. I badly want these guys on our team.

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