Banning Germany’s NPD – Not a Very Bright Idea

The NPD is Germany’s oldest surviving Extreme Right party. It has been around for about five decades. After merging with its long-time rival German People’s Union (DVU, the ruling mentioned in the post was finally squashed), it is also a serious contender for the coveted title of Germany’s daftest party (see exhibit number one). While…

Data: How many people are shot dead or otherwise killed in OECD countries?

As a follow-up to my recent post on the relationship between gun ownership and gun homicide in OECD countries, I have rolled my dataset (compiled from information published by gunpolicy.org) and my analysis script into a neat Stata package. If you want to recreate the tables and graphs, or otherwise want to play with the…

Joint Sessions 2013: Confirm your participation and book your hotel NOW

Was your paper proposal successful? Congrats from our end, we’re looking forward to having you with us! If you haven’t done so, can you please confirm your participation with your workshop directors? We need exact numbers (exact numbers, this is Germany, after all) as soon as possible so that we can plan ahead. We would…

How many people die each year because of the “Second Amendment”? My estimate is 8000+

Following Friday’s events, the attached image went viral. The figures (if correct) are certainly suggestive, but obviously, the population at risk varies widely between countries. What we need is the gun-related homicide rate for a sample of comparable countries. I headed over to the Brady Campaign, which had created the image, but could not easily…

More Local Information

From the Great Pyramid to Berlin’s shambolic airport experience, public building projects have a tendency towards overspending, confusion, and delay. Rather unsurprisingly, the new Social Science building in Mainz is no exception, and so we will in all likelihood hold the 41st Joint Sessions not in this shiny new temple of knowledge but rather in…

Party Identification in Germany: A Journey

I’ve just published a chapter on party identification’s continuing relevance for electoral choice in Germany (in German). I like the piece well enough, and it is full of nice graphs, but its intellectual history (if I may say so) is more than a little bit convoluted. It began its life some twelve years ago or…

Nine Circles of (Social) Scientific Hell

A friend sent me the link to this very short article in Perspectives on Psychological Science that use precious journal space to highlight a lot of rather disturbing parallels between (social) science and Dante’s Inferno in creative ways. It would seem that we are all sinners, which, on second thought, is hardly news. For once,…