Category: Uncategorized

Article on Networks in Political Science Published

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Harald’s and my article on citation and collaboration networks in German and British Political Science has finally appeared in print and online, which is obviously great. Here is the abstract: Citations and co-publications are one important indicator of scientific communication and collaboration. By studying patterns of citation and co-publication in four major European Political Science…

Twitter and Exit Polls in Germany

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Believe or not: in Germany, it is illegal to publish results from exit polls before the polling stations close (at 6pm – we’re German) on polling day. Last Sunday, state elections were held in three Länder, and someone leaked alleged results on twitter while the stations were still open. The political class was outraged and…

Weighting Survey Data: Not Necessarily a Brilliant Idea

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Should one weight their survey data? Is it worth the effort? The short answer must be ‘maybe’ or ‘it depends’. A slightly longer and much more useful answer was given by Leslie Kish in his enormously helpful paper ‘Weighting: Why, when and how’. Today (well, actually I submitted the final manuscript 2.5 years ago -…

Is salience a cause or a consequence of radical right electoral support?

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In my pet model, the salience of issues such as immigration or national identiy in the manifestos of established parties [caption id="attachment_303" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Random shock to salience - support cannot be bothered to react"][/caption] makes a vote for the extreme right/radical right much more likely. There is, however, a potential problem with this argument:…

ECPR sets up a blog

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The European Consortium for Political Science (ECPR), for all purposes and intents the European Political Science Association, has a tiny problem: at their last meeting, they faced “a shortage of candidates” for the Executive Committee. To their credit, they faced it head on and set up a blog to discuss  “Constitutional and Electoral in (of?)…

Web-scraping made easy: outwit

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These days, a bonanza of political information is freely available on the internet.  Sometimes this information comes in the guise of excel sheets, comma separated data or other formats which are more or less readily machine readable. But more often than not, information is presented as tables designed to be read by humans. This is…