Does Immigration help or hurt the Front National in France?

In a recent article in the European Journal of Political Research, Kestilä and Söderlund claim (amongst other things) that in the French regional elections of 2004, turnout and district magnitude have significant negative effects on the extreme right vote whereas the effects of the number of party lists and unemployment are positive and significant. Most…

How Nancy Pelosi could become president

Today, the BBC has a rather amusing piece by Larry Sabato (Virginia) on the “The US election nightmare scenario”: an equal split of the “toss-up” state leads to deadlock in the Electoral College. Enter the unit rule, a constitutional provision which stipulates that the House will select the President in a vote where each state…

What Drives the Extreme Right Vote: Protest, Neo-Liberalism or Anti-Immigrant Sentiment?

Everyone just seems to know that the voters of the Extreme Right hate foreigners in general and immigrants in particular, but robust comparative evidence for the alleged xenophobia – Radical Right vote link is scarce. Moreover, many of the published analyses are based on somewhat outdated (i.e. 1990s) data, and alternative accounts of the extreme…

Student of radical Islam must not study al-Qaeda documents

Weird, sad but apparently true: at Nottingham University, a PhD student who works on islamic terrorism and an administrator were arrested (though released without charges) because they were in possession of an al-Qaeda manual downloaded from the internet. The twist: the manual was part of an MA dissertation and had been re-submitted as part of…

Presentation: Knowledge Networks in European Political Science

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="227"] Worldwide mutual citations in Political Science[/caption] Last Saturday, we presented our ongoing work on collaboration and citation networks in Political Science at the 4th UK Network conference held at the University of Greenwich. For this conference, we created a presentation on Knowledge Networks in European Political Science that summarises most of…

The emerging standard model of socio-physics

[caption id="attachment_46" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Ever tried to get something done around other social scientists?"][/caption] Good stuff: On orgtheory.net Kieran reports on a major breakthrough in the exciting and ever so slightly apocryphal sub-subfield of socio-physics. Beware of the Biggs-Hangeron. Technorati-Tags: fun, obscure, social science, political science