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.

police

Pretty Perplexing Pirates Posters

The Pirates are running a rather cheap electoral campaign: No faces (models or not) but only drawings in their trademark orange/blue tones. Their stinginess even extends to the meaning of their slogans. I was a bit thrown off by “Borders are so 80”, then discovered the small “er”, so borders are so 1980s, apparently. Well,…

More Silly Election Posters

The local Liberal Democrats never fail to amaze me. Just when I thought it could not get any better, I found another gem for my ever growing collection. [caption id="attachment_13253" align="alignright" width="225"] Local Campaigns: The Hour of Amateurs[/caption] “Höhenflug” is the act of (figuratively) ascending to some higher plane (not an imminent danger here) but…