Martin Elff

An article entitled “Method Factors in Democracy Indicators” just has appeared in Politics and Governance. It analyses the degree to which democracy indicators are influenced by the orginisation that created them. It shows that the origin of indicators in particular affects the detection of change in regimes.

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A handbook chapter on “Ideology and Electoral Choice” has appeared in The Routledge Handbook of Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion.

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The Sage Handbook of Electoral Behaviour, contains a contribution of the role of relgion in shaping electoral behaviour, authored by Sigrid Roßteutscher and me is now available from Sage Publications.

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German Politics just published an article with the title “Social Cleavages and Electoral Behaviour in Long-Term Perspective: Alignment without Mobilisation?” as part of a special issue of the German Bundestag election of 2013.

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A new version 0.4 of package mclogit has been published on CRAN, which adds a few new features to the previously published version.

One highlight of the new release is improved support for multinomial baseline logit models, i.e. models for categorical dependent variables with unordered categories (a.k.a. nominal-level dependent variables) with help of the function mblogit().

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A chapter entitled “Parteiwahl und Nichtwahl: Zur Rolle sozialer Konfliktlinien” has appeared in Wahlen und Wähler: Analysen aus Anlass der Bundestagswahl von 2013 (ed. by Harald Schoen and Bernhard Wessels) and is now available from Springer.

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A new version 0.99 of package memisc has been published on CRAN, which adds a few new features to the previously published version.

One highlight of the new release is the support for output into HTML. Since contemporary word processors can read HTML, it is now much easier to get nicely formatted mtable output in “Word” or “LibreOffice”. Another highlight is the ability to create complex tables by putting together other tables.

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At the 5^th 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.

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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. Currently there is only the German version (which I hope be able to translate soon for an international conference) “Strategisches Wählen und Stimmen-Splitting in gemischten Wahlsystemen: Der Finite-Mixture Ansatz am Beispiel der deutschen Bundestagswahlen von 2009 und 2013”. 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.

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In Berlin, at the Manifesto Project User Conference I presented a paper entitled “Challenges in Tracking Parties’ Positions in Multi-dimensional Policy Spaces by Manifesto Project data: A Dynamic Idealpoint Model and its Extensions”. In this paper I discuss way of reconstructing political positions from coded political texts based on an idealpoint model (introduced in a publication of mine in Political Analysis) as well as some extension of this model that address some challenges, such as different acuity of political aims.

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Version 0.97 of package memisc has been released to CRAN.

NEW FEATURES

• spss.system.file and spss.portable.file gain a tolower= argument that defaults to TRUE, which allows to change annoying all-upper-case variable names to lower case
• New generic function Iconv() that allows to change the character enconding of variable descriptions and value labels. It has methods for “data.set”, “importer”, “item”, “annotation”, and “value.label” objects.

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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.

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