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RE-DESIGN Posts

Government positions from party-level Manifesto data (with R)

Published by demetriodor on January 31, 2019

In empirical research in political science and public policy, we often need estimates of the political positions of governments (cabinets) and the salience of different issues for different governments (cabinets). Data on policy positions and issue salience is available, but typically at the level of political parties. One prominent source of data for issue salience and positions is the Manifesto Corpus, a database of the electoral manifestos of political parties. To ease the aggregation of government positions and salience from party-level Manifesto data, I developed a set of functions in R that accomplish just that, combining the Manifesto data with data on the duration and composition of governments from ParlGov. The see how the functions work, read this detailed tutorial. You can access all the functions at the dedicated GitHub repository. And you can contribute to this project by forking the code on GitHub. If you have questions or suggestions, get in touch. Enjoy!

Immigration and voting for the radical right in Andalusia

Published by demetriodor on December 11, 2018

I wrote a short text for the European Politics and Policy (EUROPP) blog on the link between immigration presence and voting for Vox, a relatively young radical right party, in the Spanish region of Andalusia.  Full text is here, see also this post from 2015 about a similar link with Euroscepticism in the UK. The most important graph is below. Here is an excerpt:  To sum up, the available empirical evidence suggests that the relative size of the non-Western foreign-born population at the municipal level is positively, and rather strongly, related to the share of votes cast for Vox, the first Spanish radical right party to get in parliament since the end of Franco’s regime. Immigration might be responsible to a considerable extent for the resurgence of the radical right in Andalusia.

The political geography of human development

Published by demetriodor on November 12, 2018

The research I did for the previous post on the inadequacy of the widely-used term ‘Global South’ led me to some surprising results about the political geography of development. Although the relationship between latitude and human development is not linear, distance from the equator turned out to have a rather strong, although far from deterministic and not necessarily causal, link with a country’s development level, as measured by its Human Development Index (HDI). Even more remarkably, once we include indicators (dummy variables) for islands and landlocked countries, and interactions between these and distance from the equator, we can account for more than 55% of the variance in HDI (2017). In other words, with three simple geographic variables and their interactions we can ‘explain’ more than half of the variation in the level of development of all countries in the world today. Wow! The plot below (pdf) shows these relationships.     In case you are wondering whether this results is driven by many small counties with tiny populations, it is not, When we run a weighted linear regression with population size as the weight, the adjusted R-squared of the model remains still (just above) 0.50. On a sidenote, including dummies for (former) communist countries and current European Union (EU) member states pushed the R-squared above 0.60. Communist regime or legacy is associated with significantly lower HDI, net of the geographic variables, and EU membership is associated with significantly higher HDI. The next question to consider is whether the relationship between…

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The ‘Global South’ is a terrible term. Don’t use it!

Published by demetriodor on November 6, 2018

The Rise of the ‘Global South’ The ‘Global South‘ and ‘Global North‘ are increasingly popular terms used to categorize the countries of the world. According to Wikipedia, the term ‘Global South’ originated in postcolonial studies, and was first used in 1969. The Google N-gram chart below shows the rise of the ‘Global South’ term from 1980 till 2008, but the rise is even more impressive afterwards. Nowadays, the Global South is used as a shortcut to anything from poor and less-developed to oppressed and powerless. Despite this vagueness, the term is prominent in serious academic publications, and it even features in the names of otherwise reputable institutions. But, its popularity notwithstanding, the ‘Global South’ is a terrible term. Here is why.   There is no Global South The Global South/Global North terms are inaccurate and misleading. First, they are descriptively inaccurate, even when they refer to general notions such as (economic) development. Second, they are homogenizing, obscuring important differences between countries supposedly part of the Global South and North groups. In this respect, these terms are no better than alternatives that they are trying to replace, such as ‘the West‘ or the ‘Third World‘. Third, the Global South/Global North terms imply a geographic determinism that is wrong and demotivational. Poor countries are not doomed to be poor, because they happen to be in the South, and their geographic position is not a verdict on their developmental prospects.   The Global South/Global North terms are inaccurate and misleading Let me show you just how…

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What’s a demockracy?

Published by demetriodor on December 5, 2017

– What’s a democracy? – Democracy means that people rule and the government respects the opinions of the citizens. – So the government should do what the people want? – In principle, yes, but… – Can a majority of the people decide to abolish the parliament? – No, the basic institutions of the state are usually set in the Constitution and constitutional rules are not to be changed like that. Everything that is in the constitution is off limits. – OK, I can see why. Can the people decide different groups deserve different pay for the same job? – No, even if this is not outlawed by the Constitution, there is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and fundamental human rights are not be changed by democratic majorities. – Makes sense. Can the people decide on gay marriage? That’s not in the Declaration. – Well, there are certain human rights that are not yet in constitutions and universal declaration, but we now recognize them as essential so they are also not subject to majorities. – OK, so in democracies the government does what the people want, but not when it comes to constitutional issues, recognized fundamental human rights, and other very important norms. – Yes. – So can the people decide to change the interest rate? – Oh, no! Not even politicians can do that. Monetary policy is delegated to independent central banks. – But people can decide on regulating tel… – Nope, regulation is basically all delegated to independent…

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Books on data visualization

Published by demetriodor on November 21, 2017

Here is a compilation of new and classic books on data visualization:   Scott Murray (2017) Interactive Data Visualization for the Web  Elijah Meeks (2017) D3.Js in Action: Data Visualization with JavaScript  Alberto Cairo (2016) The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication  Andy Kirk (2016) Data Visualization  David McCandless (2014) Knowledge is Beautiful    Edward Tufte (2006) Beautiful Evidence   Edward Tufte (2001) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information  Edward Tufte (1997) Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative  Edward Tufte (1990) Envisioning Information