Welcome to Martin Elff’s website!¶
My name is Martin Elff, I am a political scientist with research interests in political behaviour, political sociology, comparative politics, and the methodology of political and social sciences. Besides teaching, research, academic governance, I also wrote some software, mostly in R.
Since 2015 I am a professor of political sociology at Zeppelin University (Friedrichshafen, Germany).
You can also find me here:
- @melff.bsky.social
- @martin_elff@science.social
- @elff@fosstodon.org
- Github: http://github.com/melff
- ORCID:
0000-0001-9032-9739
- Web of Science: J-1604-2019
Elff, Martin, Jan Paul Heisig, Merlin Schaeffer, and Susumu Shikano. 2021. “Multilevel Analysis with Few Clusters: Improving Likelihood-based Methods to Provide Unbiased Estimates and Accurate Inference”. British Journal of Political Science 51(1): 412-426.
Elff, Martin. 2020. Data Management with R: A Guide for Social Scientists. London: SAGE Publications.
Elff, Martin and Sebstian Ziaja. 2018. “Method Factors in Democracy Indicators”. Politics and Governance 6(1): 92-104.
Elff, Martin. 2013. “A Dynamic State-Space Model of Coded Political Texts”. Political Analysis 21(2): 217-232.
Elff, Martin. 2009. “Social Divisions, Party Positions, and Electoral Behaviour”. Electoral Studies 28(2): 297-308.
Elff, Martin. 2023. “Models for multicategorical responses - Testing the hypothesis of constant probability”.
Dassonneville, Ruth, Martin Elff, and Kamil Marcinkiewicz. 2022. “The Transformation of Religious Cleavages in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis”.
Elff, Martin. 2022. “Much Ado About Not Very Much? Clarifying the Confusion about Models for Categorical Dependent Variables”.
Elff, Martin. 2021. “Valence or Position? Both! A Unified Conception of Party Competition and Its Implication for the Model-Based Reconstruction of Parties’ Political Profiles from Their Manifestos”.
Rajski, Hannah and Martin Elff. 2021. “Political Context and the Formation of Party Identification in the United States”.
Elff, Martin. 2019. “Consideration Sets and Finite Mixtures: A New Approach to the Analysis of Strategic Voting”.
There are a few software packages I wrote for helping me in my research, creating this website, or which I just wrote for fun and out of curiosity (however I have only little time for this).
On this website you find information about the following R packages in particular:
- R package “memisc”: Tools for Managing Survey Data and Creating Tables of Estimates and Data Summaries
- R package “mclogit”: Multinomial Logit Models, with or without Random Effects or Overdispersion
- R package “munfold”: Multidimensional Metric Unfolding
- R package “RKernel”: Yet another R Kernel for Jupyter
- mpred: Generic Predictive Margins
- manifestos: Spatial Modelling of Party Manifestos (and other political texts)
- iimm: Improved Inference for Multilevel Models with Few Clusters
- EMfit: An Infrastructure for Latent Variable Model Fitting using EM Algorithms
Research interests
My are research interests in the following areas:
-
Political behaviour, in particular electoral behaviour and its relation with social structure. More specifically:
- class voting
- religious voting
- long term change
- the influence of parties’ (changing) positions
- with a focus on Germany
- with a focus on (Western) Europe
- Reconstructing the political positions of parties
-
Quantitative methods of the social sciences
- Multilevel modelling
- Modelling of qualitative/categorical dependent variables
- Cross-level inference
Throughout my career I taught a couple of subjects, including
-
Political sociology and political behaviour
- Introduction to political sociology
- Attitude formation and public opinion
- Electoral behaviour
-
Comparative politics
- German politics
- West European politics
- Parties and party systems
-
Socials science research methods
- Research design and methods (at various levels)
- Data analysis (at various levels)
- Data analysis and graphics with R
- Mathematical tools for social scientists
- 20 August 2023 - Yet another operator to simplify data preparation with memisc
- 07 April 2023 - An R equivalent to Stata’s ‘replace if’ in memisc
- 04 February 2023 - RKernel: Yet another R kernel for Jupyter
- 25 November 2020 - New Book: Data Management in R
- 10 August 2020 - A “normalizing” re-alignment of voting behaviour in East Germany?
- 13 May 2020 - Now available as open access article: “Multilevel Analysis with Few Clusters”
About this website
This site is built with Sphinx, a generator for documentation and static websites, using a custom-made theme that involves ideas from the insipid theme. The website builds on flat files in restructured text format and in some instances on Jupyter notebooks.
Because it is built with Sphinx, there is a bit of Python programming involved in this website. In particular I wrote a few Python modules that extend Sphinx for the purposes of this website, e.g.
- attaching files to webpages
- creating bibliographies and linking publication details from BibTeX files
- improving the navigation of the site
- providing an infrastructure for blog posts (with much inspiration from ABlog)
