With the upcoming EP elections, I felt obliged to check out the profiler sites my colleagues have put on the internet. I started with Germany’s wahl-o-mat that has been around for a number of years. After evaluating 30 statements, the program decided that I should vote for the German Liberals, which was not such a…
I kid you not: yesterday the Daily Mail, not normally a promoter of civic education, published a Venn diagram outlining the overlap between the three main parties’ proposals for dealing with the parliamentary expenses mess. As diagrams go, this was not exactly brilliant. A lot of colour and space were wasted to illustrate the fact…
Here is the (almost) finalised program for the our section on the Radical Right in Perspective, organised under the auspices of the ECPR’s 5th General Conference (Potsdam, September 10-12), boasting about 50 papers.
I have left Britain’s Best Politics Department (™) for my alma mater, which (oddly enough) wants me back.
My article on Contextual Factors (unemployment, immigration, other parties) and the Extreme Right vote in Western Europe between 1980 and 2002 was yesterday published in the American Journal of Political Science (online). Obviously, I’m absolutely chuffed. The DOI (doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00369.x) does not work yet, but the link to Wiley Interscience does. Here is the full bibliographic…
As a light-hearted follow-up to my post on the growth of the database state in the UK, here is a link to boing-boings [caption id="" align="alignright" width="426" caption="Well done, junior!"][/caption] “remix the British Transport Police’s paranoid turn-in your neighbour posters” campaign. Most of the pictures sent in are really good, and many of them look…
No western democracy has more surveillance cameras per citizen than the UK, and few European countries are collecting data on their citizens on such an Orwellian scale. The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has assessed 46 major government databases, and the result is devastating. About a quarter is almost certainly unlawful.
MLwiN, multi-level modelling granddaddy, is now freely available for British academics thanks to the ESRC funded Lemma program.
Colleagues Andrea Römmele and Thorsten Faas have set up a new blog that will cover the many German elections of 2009 (seats in the federal parliament, several state parliaments, local councils as well as the presidency are all up for grabs) and asked me to contribute. How could I resist them? “Wahlen nach Zahlen” (voting…
Some answers given by students in written exams are so brilliant that you couldn’t make it up: Germany and Austria were not content with this and were still at war with each other