memisc 0.99 published on CRAN
Blog posts
The long-term relation between turnout and electoral support for social democracts in Germany
At the 5th Annual General Conference of the European Political Science Association I had the opportunity to present a paper entitled "The Crisis of Social Democracy and the Political Demobilisation of the Working Class in Germany". In this paper I analyse the dual decline of turnout in Germany and of the support for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). I show that both changes are linked and concentrated in a core group of SPD supporters, the manual working class.
AK Wahlen paper on ticket-splitting in Germany
At the Session of the AK "Wahlen und politische Einstellungen (the German specialist group on election, electoral behaviour and political attitudes) I had the opportunity to present a paper on split-ticket voting in Germany. In this paper I find that there is more strategic voting in the direct candidate votes than in the list votes, but that most split-ticket voting appears to be non-strategic.
Data set on "Party Positions in Multiple Dimensions across Time and Space" available
Estimates (or more correctly: predictions) of parties' positions in multiple dimensions in different countries, spanning the decades from 1945 (1920 for the USA) to 2010 is now available here on my website.
Estimation techniques: Ordinary least squares and maximum likelihood
A chapter on estimation techniques has appeared in the edited volume Regression Analysis and Causal Inference, edited by Henning Best and Christof Wolf and published by Sage. A companion website is here.
EPSA paper: Inference for multilevel models when the number of clusters is small.
In a recent article published in AJPS it is claimed that Bayesian estimators have a superior performance in the estimation of the influence of group-level covariates, especially if the number of groups/clusters is small. In the paper presented at EPSA, we show that the problems addressed by Bayesian techniques can also be adequately addressed by a frequentist technique, restricted maximum likelihood, without the problems involved in Bayesian estimation, such as the computational cost and the need to select an appropriate prior.
A finite mixture approach to tactical voting
A paper entitled Separating Tactical from Sincere Voting: A Finite-Mixture Discrete-Choice Modelling Approach was presented at the Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association 2014 in Chicago, Ill. It presents a novel approach to uncover tactical voting from responses in electoral survey studies. The basic idea is that the distribution of observed voting decisions is a finite mixture of non-tactical (aka sincere) and tactical voting decisions, where tactical voting decisions are characterised by choosing - in stead of the full choice set - from a restricted consideration set. This restricted consideration set then contains only those alternatives (e.g. parties' candidates) that are considered viable by the voter in her respective constituency or voting district.