Welcome to Martin Elff's website!

About Me

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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:

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Selected publications

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Selected working papers

  • 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".

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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
    • Survey methodology

Teaching subjects

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

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About this website

This site is built with Lume, a static website generator written in Typescript and running on Deno. Deno is a open-source runtime for Typescript, Javascript, and Webasm.

I used Sphinx until recently, but recently to Lume. While porting the website, I created a few plugins, in particular

  • a plugin that allows to integrate Bibtex files (used in my lists of publications and papters)
  • a plugin that allows to use citation-js for citations
  • a plugin that allows to read and format Jupyter Notebook files (i.e. files in ipynb format). I will make these plugins public if I find the time to make bring them in a state that is publishable (i.e. with code that conforms better to Typescript standards and is better documented).