This blog has moved to http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/

After 12 months at wordpress.com, this blog has been integrated into my main site. Now, it lives at http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/

Dr Huber’s Sandwich shop

A friend send me this link to Huber’s Sandwich Emporium yesterday.

Sandwich Estimator?

Huber’s sandwiches is within walking distance of the University of Vienna, and we spent a dreamy 10 minutes imagining  how slightly anxious researchers that suffer from correlated disturbances shuffle into that shop and ask for the massive 18 centimetre sandwich estimator. If you think this is remotely funny, your life must be pretty sad.

Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002

Over the last 7 years or so, much of my work has focused on the question of why support for the Extreme Right is so unstable over time and so uneven across countries. In a recent paper on Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002, I estimate a model that aims at providing a more comprehensive and satisfactory answer to this research problem by employing a broader database and a more adequate modelling strategy, i.e. multi-level modelling. The main finding is that while immigration and unemployment rates are important, their interaction with other political factors is much more complex than suggested by previous research. Moreover, persistent country effects prevail even if a whole host of individual and contextual variables is controlled for. Replication data for this article is available from my dataverse.

The final version of the paper will appear in the April issue of the American Journal of Political Science, which is obviously great.

Technorati-Tags: Extreme Right, Radical Right, Populist Right, Western Europe, Unemployment, Immigration, Agenda Setting, Welfare State, Voting, Eurobarometer, Multi-level Analysis, MLA, 1980, 2002

Turnout, Lakatos, and Case Studies

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A few months ago, I published an article on inequality, institutions and turnout in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations that criticised an earlier piece in the same journal. The journal has granted the original author the right to a reply, which seems only fair. I was, however, slightly surprised that I would have the right to respond to that reply. Where does it stop? Anyway, a very short article with the fancy title ‘Lakatos reloaded‘ has been submitted and accepted and will appear in one of the next issues of the BJPIR.

Technorati-Tags: bjpir, turnout, lakatos, british journal of politics and international relations, institutions, welfare, state, tscs, case study

Political Science Peer-Review Survey: 836 respondents and counting

With about 100 new respondents, yet another brilliant week for the Political Science Peer-Review Survey draws to a close. While the snowball is still rolling, and while we cannot know for certain because the survey is anonymous after all, we might soon reach a point of saturation: I have received a number of very friendly replies from people who tell me that they have already heard about the survey once (or twice) from someone else. The Netherlands in particular seem to be a hotspot of peer-review survey related activities. You could guess that much from the distribution of our respondents. While the US dominate the field (as they should), Switzerland and the Netherlands come an amazing 5th and 6th, accurately reflecting the standing of these countries as Social Science strongholds.

Technorati-Tags: political science, peer review, survey, netherlands, respondents, journals, publications

The Alternative Italian Job: Disbanding the Army that Never Was

The Guardian had a wonderful short article last week. Apparently, Italy invented a 300,000 strong army in the 1950s as part of the great game that was the Cold War. And apparently they assumed that the first thing the Soviet spies would watch out for were neither tanks nor barrackes, but an active bureaucracy (something both the Russians and the Italians were familiar with), so they created tonnes and tonnes of fake files relating to this fantasy army. Today, these files clog the real army’s warehouses: since the imagined 3rd corps was disbanded in the 1970s, it cannot declassify its files. And while they are not declassified, they cannot be destroyed. Se non e vero, e molto ben trovato.

Technorati-Tags: italy, army, cold war, fantasia, borges

A good week for the peer-review survey

On Monday, the Political Science Peer-Review Survey had 506 respondents. Between Tuesday and Friday, we sent out 1,100 new invitations. Five days and many contacts with helpful colleagues later the number stands at 626. Feel free to join them.

Political Science Peer-Review Survey: 500+ respondents

The title says it all: yesterday, respondents 500-506 took the Political Science Peer-Review Survey, which is obviously great. A neat detail is that so far, more than 60 current or previous editors of political science journals have taken part in the survey. Tomorrow, we will resume or email campaign (aimed at those who have published in SSCI journals over the last eight years or so) to get even more people on board.
Technorati-Tags: political science, peer review, journals, survey, publications, research, ssci, social science citation index

Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties

Does religion make you a better or worse human being? More specifically, does Christian religiosity reduce or increase the likelihood of a radical/extreme right vote in a West European context? This is the question Liz and I are trying to address in our latest paper on “Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties“.

There are a number of reasons why good Christians could be more likely to vote for the Right than agnostics: American research starting in the 1940s has linked high levels of church attendance and a closed belief systems to support for rightism. More over, contemporary Radical Right parties try to frame the issue of immigration in terms of a struggle between Christian/Western values and Islam.

On the other hand, many of the most radical parties (e.g. the Austrian FPÖ) have anti-clerical roots. Moreover, the Churches give support and shelter to refugees/immigrants in many countries, and some pro-immigrant movements are inspired by Christian values. Finally, religious voters are often firmly tied to Christian-Democratic parties and will therefore not be available for the Radical Right.

We develop a theoretical model that incorporates these mechanisms and use Structural Equation Modelling to test this model in eight countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Norway. As it turns out, religious people do not differ from their more agnostic compatriots in terms of their attitudes towards immigrants. They are, however, less likely to vote for the radical right because they often identify with Christian Democratic/Conservative parties. The final version of the paper will appear in West European Politics.

Technorati-Tags: extreme right, radical right, western europe, religion, religiosity, islam, structural equation modelling, attitudes, immigration, immigrants

Update on the Political Science Peer Review Survey

On Monday, we started a new initiative to boost response to the Political Science Peer Review Survey. Thanks to some very industrious research students, we were able to identify about 21,000 individual authors who have published in Social Science Citation Index-covered Political Science Journals between 2000 and 2008. For about 8,000 of these, the SSCI lists their email addresses (that’s the EM field in the SSCI records), and so we started contacting them and asked them to participate in the survey. Obviously, some addresses are not longer valid because people have moved on to different places or have left academia altogether. Nonetheless, I was slightly surprised by the rather poor quality of the address data supplied by Thomson. In some cases, letters were missing whereas in other cases similar looking letters (e.g. ‘v’ and ‘y’) had been confused. This looks like either a weak OCR routine or an non-native and underpaid data typing slave has been used. Overall, we have contacted 962 people so far. About 200 of our messages have bounced, and we have 61 new responses to the survey (assuming that without the mailout, no one would have responded during these four days), which brings us to a new total of 238 responses