Category: Political Science

ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops 2013: Academic Programme

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The list of workshops that have been accepted for the 2013 Joints Sessions at the University of Mainz is now available on the new ECPR site. The call for papers should go out before August, with a deadline of November 1. In the meanwhile, we’re working on getting the local website up and running. Update:…

Fixed Effects Regression Models

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Fixed Effects Regression Models 1

While you were busy watching the mostly shambolic  performance that pass for the Euro 2012, I was unboxing my set of complementary “Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences” volumes (you know, the series of flimsy paperbacks whose sickly green sleeves conjure memories of psychiatric wards and man in lab coats). The latest addition to my…

French Legislative 1st Round Blog Round-Up

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Colleague Rainbow Murray is in Paris to do a little bit of observing. Her personal account of the count in one Parisian ward is quite intriguing. I had no idea that each candidate has to provides their own ballot paper. Not a very green thing, it would seem. Art Goldhammer puts Laurent Joffrin’s comment on Mélenchon’s failture/LePen’s success in perspective. ‘We all tend to overinterpret the results of elections’. Can’t argue with that. Meanwhile, Matt Goodwin ponders the question if Marine LePen’s ‘detoxified’ version of her father’s Front National is serving once more the blueprint for the (West) European Extreme Right, with Greece providing the counterpoint.And my own thoughts? Looking back, perhaps the most remarkable fact is how much our collective excitement has waned since the presidential election, although legislative elections really arereally important. Is this just because hundreds of multi-person races can simply not compete with the drama of the shoot-out between Sarkozy and Hollande, or just another piece of evidence of the internet’s detrimental effects on our attention spans?

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Political Geography piece on voter-candidate distance out as early view

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This is brilliant: an “in press/corrected proof” version of our article on the effect of distance between candidates and their prospective voters in England has just appeared on the ScienceDirect website (click on the DOI below). If you cannot get beyond the paywall, the authors’ version is still available here.

    Arzheimer, Kai and Jocelyn Evans. “Geolocation and voting: candidate-voter distance effects on party choice in the 2010 General Election in England.” Political Geography 31.5 (2012): 301–310. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.04.006
    [BibTeX] [Abstract] [Download PDF] [HTML] [DATA]

    The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants’ support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual’s support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters’ choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote-choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage.

    @Article{arzheimer-evans-2012,
author = {Arzheimer, Kai and Evans, Jocelyn},
title = {Geolocation and voting: candidate-voter distance effects on party choice in the 2010 General Election in England},
number = {5},
volume = {31},
abstract = {The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants' support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual's support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters' choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote-choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage.},
journal = {Political Geography},
year = 2012,
doi = {10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.04.006},
pages = {301--310},
keywords = {uk, gis},
html = {https://www.kai-arzheimer.com/paper/geolocation-voting-candidate-voter-distance-effects-party-choice-2010-general-election-england},
data = {https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PBCH00},
url = {https://www.kai-arzheimer.com/arzheimer-evans-geolocation-vote-england.pdf}
}

Free historical maps of Germany and Europe

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It is mildly embarrassing to come across a great resource that is hosted within one’s own institution by accident (read: google). Unwittingly googling one’s own publications is definitively worse, but that is not the point. Nonetheless, I was happy to stumble upon the Institute of European History’s digital map server when I needed to illustrate my point about territorial cleavages in Germany. The site has a slightly dusty look and uses gifs for previews, but the licence is more than generous and the coverage and quality are impressive. If you ever need a map of Hessen-Kassel’s administrative structures in 1821, look no further. The only thing that is missing (as far as I can tell) are shapefiles, but if you are serious about GIS applications, you can convert/georeference the postscript files. For lecture slides, the gifs should suffice anyway.

The Extreme Right Bibliography has a new home

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As some of you might have noticed, I have recently made some changes to my site. The idea was to simplify its administration and to streamline its design. Predictably, the only thing that really took off was the number of 404 errors. To quote the central theorem of policy analysis, all innovations make things worse,…

Mapping local deviations from regional voting patterns in Germany

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Mapping local deviations from regional voting patterns in Germany 3

Political Science is the magpie amongst the social sciences, which borrows heavily from other disciplines. These days, many political scientists are actually failed economists (even more failed economists are actually economists, however). I used to think of myself as a failed sociologist, but reading the proofs it dawned on me that I might actually aspire to become a failed geographer.

Easy Google geocoding in Stata

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For the un-initiated: Geocoding is the fine art of converting addresses into geographical coordinates (longitude and latitude). Thanks to Google and some other providers like OpenStreeMap, this is now a relatively painless process. But when one needs more than a few addresses geocoded, one does not rely on pointing-and-clicking. One needs an API, i.e. a software library that makes the service accessible through R, Python or some other programming language.
geocode is a user-written Stata command that gives access to Googles API from within Stata. It takes a variable containing address strings and returns two new variables containing the latitude/longitude information

Putting candidates in their place with R

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Counting the number of mainstream candidates living in a constituency is a point-in-polygon problem: each candidate is a co-ordinate enclosed by a constituency boundary. R function overlay from package sp carries out the relevant operation. Counting candidates and mapping their number is easy if you remember one thing: VECTORISATION