Welcome to Martin Elff's website!
About Me
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:
Selected publications
- Elff, Martin. 2020. Data Management with R: A Guide for Social Scientists. London: SAGE Publications. URL:
https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/data-management-in-r/book262942 - Elff, Martin and Sebstian Ziaja. 2018. "Method Factors in Democracy Indicators". Politics and Governance 6(1): 92-104. DOI: 10.17645/pag.v6i1.1235
- Elff, Martin. 2013. "A Dynamic State-Space Model of Coded Political Texts". Political Analysis 21(2): 217-232. DOI: 10.1093/pan/mps042
- Elff, Martin. 2009. "Social Divisions, Party Positions, and Electoral Behaviour". Electoral Studies 28(2): 297-308. DOI: 10.1016/j.electstud.2009.02.002
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".
Software
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
Recent posts
- 20 August 2023: Yet another operator to simplify data preparation with memisc
- 7 April 2023: An R equivalent to Stata's 'replace if' in memisc
- 4 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"
- 22 November 2019: New memisc release 0.99.20.1 improves compatibility with RStudio and "tidyverse"
- 23 March 2019: New memisc release 0.99.17.1 with new capabilities for data preparation
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
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).