The “Blue Books” have been around for more than 30 years. For each Bundestag election, there is a massive edited volume that deals with each and every aspect of this particular event.And for more than three decades, editors have urged authors and publishers to get on with their respective jobs. Inevitably, the massive tomes have always come out just in time for the next election.

In line with this great tradition, VS/Springer has published the most recent addition to the collection in early May. Our chapter looks (once more) into the differences between voters in the former Federal Republic and their eastern compatriots in the 2009 election. While these differences persist, we find that people in the West are also deviating from traditional patterns of voting behaviour. (In German)

Foter.com / Public domain

The post New Publication: The Left, East vs West, and the 2009 Election appeared first on kai arzheimer.

Hintergrundgespräch mit Zeit Online über die neuen antieuropäischen Protestparteien: Populismus: Mit allen Mitteln gegen das Establishment

Das volle Interview mit Zeit Online zu Anti-Euro Parteien: Protest alleine reicht nicht

The post Populismus: Mit allen Mitteln gegen das Establishment (ZEIT ONLINE) appeared first on kai arzheimer.

This is my last post on the 2013 Joint Sessions. Promise.

The post Video: Joint Sessions 2013 Rokkan Lecture and Prize Giving Ceremony (Mainz City Hall) appeared first on kai arzheimer.

These are the slides for my Oxford talk on competition between the Centre Left and the Extreme Right (aka Working Class Parties 2.0) for the working class vote in Western Europe. The presentation is based on

• Arzheimer, Kai. “Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties.” Sociology of the Extreme Right. Ed. Rydren, Jens. London, New York: Routledge, 2012. 75-90.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [Download PDF] [HTML]
  

  The propensity of workers to vote for the Extreme Right has risen significantly. This “proletarisation”" is the result of the interplay between a long-term dealignment process and increasing worries amongst the European working classes about the immigration of cheap labour. As a result, Western European Centre Left parties may find themselves squeezed between the New Right on the one hand and the New Left on the other. There is no obvious strategy for dealing with this dilemma. Staying put will not win working class defectors back. Toughening up immigration policies is unpalatable for many party members, does not seem to make Social Democrats more attractive for working class voters, and might eventually alienate other social groups.

  @InCollection{arzheimer-2012c,
    author = {Arzheimer, Kai},
    title = {Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties},
    booktitle = {Sociology of the Extreme Right},
    publisher = {Routledge},
    year = 2012,
    pages        = {75--90},
    editor = {Rydren, Jens},
    abstract = {The propensity of workers to vote for the Extreme Right has risen significantly. This "proletarisation"" is the result of the interplay between a long-term dealignment process and increasing worries amongst the European working classes about the immigration of cheap labour. As a result, Western European Centre Left parties may find themselves squeezed between the New Right on the one hand and the New Left on the other. There is no obvious strategy for dealing with this dilemma. Staying put will not win working class defectors back. Toughening up immigration policies is unpalatable for many party members, does not seem to make Social Democrats more attractive for working class voters, and might eventually alienate other social groups.},
    url          = {http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/working-class-parties-extreme-right.pdf},
    html          = {http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/extreme-right-working-class-centre-left-competition/},
    address = {London, New York}
  }

The full PDF for the presentation is here.

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Every remotely relevant reference I came across during the last 15 years or so resides in a single bibtex file. That is not a problem. The problem is that I’m moving into a shiny, new but somewhat smaller office, together with hundreds of copies of journal articles and hundreds of PDFs. Wouldn’t it be good to know which physical copies are effectively redundant (unreadable comments in the margins aside) and can therefore stay behind?

The trouble is that bibtex files have a rather flexible, human readable format. Each entry begins with the @ sign, followed by a type (book, article etc.), a reference name,  lots of key/value pairs (fields) in arbitrary order,  and even more curly braces.

grep @ full.bib|wc -l tells me that I have 2914 references in total. grep binder|wc -l (binder is a custom field that I use to keep track of the location of my copies) shows that I have printed out/copied 712 texts over the years, and grep file|wc -l indicates that there are 504 PDFs residing on my filesystem. But what is the magnitude of the intersection?

My first inclination was to look for a suitable Python parser/library. Pybtex looked good in principle but is underdocumented and had trouble reading full.bib, because that is encoded in Latin 1. So it was endless hours of amateurish coding and procrastination ahead. Then I remembered the “do one thing, and do it really well” mantra of old. Enter bibtool, which is a fast and reasonably stable bibtex file filter and pretty printer. Bibtool reads “resource files”, which are really just short scripts containing filtering/formatting directives. select = {binder ".+"} keeps those references whose “binder” field contains at least one character (.+ is a regular expression that matches any non-empty string). select = {file ".+"} selects all references for which I have a PDF. But bibtool applies a logical OR to these conditions while I’m interested in finding those references that meet both criteria.

The quick solution is to store each statement in a file of its own and apply bibtool twice, using a pipeline for extra efficiency: bibtool -r find-binder.rsc full.bib|bibtool -r find-pdf >intersection.bib does the trick and solves my problem in under a minute, without any coding.

As it turns out, there were just 65 references in both groups. Apparently, I stopped printing (or at least filing away) some time ago. Eventually, I binned two copies, but it is the principle that matters.

The post Filtering Bibtex Files with Bibtool appeared first on kai arzheimer.

“Ist dagegen das neue dafür”?

Short interview with detektor.fm radio on protest parties in Europe (in German).

The post Erfolg von Protestparteien (detektor.fm) appeared first on kai arzheimer.

Germany’s (very polite) answer to UKIP is “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD), a new party that wants to abolish the Euro. While this is certainly a novelty in German party politics, I don’t think it’s a game changer for the September election. Why? Read my guest post on the AfD over at the LSE’s excellent European Politics and Policy blog.

The post Why Germany’s Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland Party Does Not Matter (Yet) appeared first on kai arzheimer.

Interview mit HR Info zu den Aussichten neuer Parteien bei der Landtagswahl in Hessen im September 2013

The post AfD, LUPe und “Freiheit” – neuer Parteien bei der Landtagswahl in Hessen (HR Online) appeared first on kai arzheimer.

Thanks to colleague Kyriaki Nanou and the generosity of the Anglo-German Programme, I’m taking my paper on the election between the Centre Left and the Extreme Right for the working class vote to Academic Wonderland (TM). Needless to say that I’m looking forward to this in the extreme (pun intended, but I largely failed?). Click here to read the full paper on “Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between the Centre Left and the Extreme Right in Western Europe“.

Academic DisneyDiliff / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

The post Workers, the Centre Left and the Extreme Right appeared first on kai arzheimer.

Today is clearly a day for statistical songs (are there any other days?), so here are some links to get you started.

To kick of the stat song roundup, here are some … interesting insights into the culture that is biostatics, complete with some remarkably dreadful audio material.

Obviously, you tube has a whole channel devoted to statistical songs, featuring, inter alia, Michael Greenacre, of Correspondence Analysis fame. To the true connoisseur,  it might appear a bit overproduced, but this little gem on Single Value Decomposition is very neat.

For the Structural Equation Modelling buffs, nothing compares to Alan Reifman’s annual reprise of  “SEM – the Musical”.

But for the purists, there is only one thing, something that I have watched with awe (and slowly building shock) growing beyond all expectations. The conspiracy against Frequentism have their very own book of Bayesian praise, complete with  LaTex  source, now compromising 40-odd songs including some “previously lost classic songs”, including “Bayesians in the night” (two versions, actually).

The post Statistical Songs Roundup appeared first on kai arzheimer.