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Author: demetriodor

Diffusion of smoking bans in Europe

Published by demetriodor on April 23, 2012

My paper on the diffusion of smoking bans in Europe has been accepted in Public Administration. It probably won’t be published until next year so here is a link to the pre-print and a graph of two of the important results of the paper: the probability of enactment of a more comprehensive (full) smoking ban increases with lower levels of tobacco producton and with rising levels of public support for smoking restrictions:   And the abstract: Policy Making Beyond Political Ideology: The Adoption of Smoking Bans in Europe Policy making is embedded in politics, but an increasing number of issues, like obesity, tobacco control, or road safety, do not map well on the major dimensions of political conflict. This article analyzes the enactment of restrictions on smoking in bars and restaurants in 29 European countries – a conflictual issue which does not fit easily traditional party ideologies. Indeed, the comparative empirical analyses demonstrate that government ideological positions are not associated with the strictness and the timing of adoption of the smoking bans. On the other hand, economic factors like the scale of tobacco production in a country, smoking prevalence in society and public support for tough anti-smoking policy are all significantly related to the time it takes for a country to adopt smoking bans, and to the comprehensiveness and enforcement of these restrictions. In addition, horizontal policy diffusion is strongly implicated in the pattern of policy adoptions.  

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Published by demetriodor on April 13, 2012

Racial spillover Racists hate dogs but they hate the dogs of black presidents even more Exercise primes the brain for addiction No excuse to avoid the gym though Fracking linked to earthquakes Disturbing Baboons can learn to recognize more than 300 English words Approaching the average student’s vocabulary size Book Igloo by Miler Lagos [via Colossal]  

New tool for discourse network analysis

Published by demetriodor on April 11, 2012

EJPR has just published an article introducing a new tool for ‘discourse network analysis’. Using the tool, you can measure and visualize political discourses and the networks of actors affiliated to each discourse. One can study the actor congruence networks (based on the number of statements actors share), concept congruence networks (based on whether statements are used by an actor in the same way) and trace the evolution of both over time. Here is a graph taken from the paper which illustrates the actor congruence networks for the issue of software patents in the EU (click to enlarge): The discourse networks analysis tool is free and available from the website of Philip Leifeld, one of the co-authors of the article. I can’t wait to get my hands on the program and try it out for myself. The tool promises to be an interesting alternative to evolutionary factor analysis – another new method for studying policy frames and discourses that I recently discussed – with the added benefit of being able to present actors and frames in an integrated analysis.   Here is the abstract of the EJPR article (there are more resources at this website): In 2005, the European Parliament rejected the directive ‘on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions’, which had been drafted and supported by the European Commission, the Council and well-organised industrial interests, with an overwhelming majority. In this unusual case, a coalition of opponents of software patents prevailed over a strong industry-led coalition. In this article, an explanation is developed based on political…

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Models in Political Science

Published by demetriodor on April 9, 2012

Inside Higher Ed has a good interview with David Primo and Kevin Clarke on their new book A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representations.  The book and the interview criticize the hypothetico-deductive tradition in social science: The actual research was prompted by a student who asked, “Why test deductive models?” The essence of a deductive model is that if the assumptions of the model are true, then the conclusions must be true. If the assumptions are false, then the conclusions may be true or false, and the logical connection to the model is broken. The point is that social scientists work with assumptions that are known to be false. Thus, whether a model’s conclusions are true or not has nothing to do with the model itself, and “testing” cannot tell us anything that we did not already know. My thoughts exactly. Unfortunately, I don’t see the new book  changing the practice of political science research (Primo and Clarke are also pessimistic about the short term impact of the book).

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Published by demetriodor on April 5, 2012

How much money do university professors around the world get The Netherlands is doing OK which should make me happy Sperm do calculus And so should you Common-pool resources management in Hawai Would love to go for a field study A discussion of political science efforts to predict US presidential elections Could be better Beautiful maps at maps.stamen.com

How (not) to give an academic talk?

Published by demetriodor on April 4, 2012

Some great advice by Cosma Shalizi. These are just the footnotes: * Some branches of the humanities and the social sciences have the horrible custom of reading an academic paper out loud, apparently on the theory that this way none of the details get glossed over. The only useful advice which can be given about this is “Don’t!”…  ** … big tables of numbers (e.g., regression coefficients) are pointless; and here “big” means “larger than 2×2”. The entire post is highly recommended.