Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences

Under what conditions do countries go to war? What is the in?uence of the 2008–2009economiccrisisonthevoteshareofradicalright-wingpartiesinWestern Europe? What type of people are the most likely to protest and partake in demonstrations? How has the urban squatters’ movement developed in South Africa after apartheid? There is hardly any ?eld in the social sciences that asksasmanyresearchquestionsaspoliticalscience.Questionsscholarsareinterested in can be speci?c and reduced to one event (e.g., the development of the urban squatter’smovementinSouthAfricapost-apartheid)orgeneralandsystemicsuchas the occurrence of war and peace. Whether general or speci?c, what all empirical researchquestionshaveincommonisthenecessitytouseadequateresearchmethods to answer them. For example, to effectively evaluate the in?uence of the economic downturn in 2008–2009 on the radical right-wing success in the elections preceding the crisis, we need data on the radical right-wing vote before and after the crisis, a clearly de?ned operationalization of the crisis and data on confounding factors such as immigration, crime, and corruption. Through appropriate modeling techniques (i.e., multiple regression analysis on macro-level data), we can then assess the absolute and relative in?uence of the economic crisis on the radical right-wing vote share

Female cabinet picks: just one more way in which Trump is exceptional

Donald Trump’s cabinet is exceptional in many ways, not least because the share of women in the executive has fallen since the Obama era – even as recent decades have seen it grow all over the world. What effect does government ideology have on cabinet picks? The literature suggests left-wing governments tend to appoint more women. But new research by Daniel Stockemer and Aksel Sundström suggests the link is not straightforward. What in fact prompts women’s promotion is a change of government ideology. In this respect – as in so many others – the Trump administration is an outlier

Youth representation in the European Parliament: the limited effect of political party characteristics

Which party characteristics contribute to the representation of young legislators? We examine this question quantitatively, focusing on the European Parliament (EP), and gauge the influence of the age of the party leader, the age of the party, the size of its support, party ideology and party nomination procedures on the age of politicians, based on data of all members who have served in the EP. We find that none of these characteristics matter substantively in explaining young representatives' presence and discuss ways to further the field of research on youth representation

Evidence from Portugal shows that citizens in corrupt areas are more likely to vote in elections

Corruption is a persistent problem in several countries across Europe. Daniel Stockemer and Patricia Calca write that corruption can have two distinct effects: it can either result in citizen disengagement from the political process, or it can lead to increased voter participation as a mechanism for punishing political authorities at the ballot box. Using an analysis of local level data in Portuguese elections, they illustrate that the most corrupt areas in the country also had higher voter turnout rates, suggesting that in Portugal, corruption acts as an incentive to participate in elections

Youth's underrepresentation in the European Parliament: Insights from interviews with young Members of the European Parliament (MEPs)

Why do political parties elect so few young deputies? Given that the quantitative literature has at best only partially answered this question, we decided to conduct a qualitative investigation. Taking the European Parliament as a case for study, we examined this question through interview research with some of the young MEPs who served between 2014 and 2019. Our respondents, who answered various open-ended questions, suggest that the young are so few in number both because they lack contacts within the party and are seen as lacking experience. In addition, it appears that few parties have established pro-active measures to promote young candidates

Youth without Representation

Officeholders in contemporary parliaments and cabinets are more likely than not to be male, wealthy, middle-aged or older, and from the dominant ethnicity, whereas young adults have an insufficient presence in political office. Young adults—those aged 35 years or under—comprise a mere ten percent of all parliamentarians globally, and three percent of all cabinet members. Compared to their presence in the world’s population, this age group faces an underrepresentation of one to three in parliament and one to ten in cabinet. In this book, Stockemer and Sundström provide a holistic account of youths’ marginalization in legislatures, cabinets, and candidacies for office through a comparative lens. They argue that youths’ underrepresentation in political office constitutes a democratic deficit and provide ample evidence for why they think that youth must be present in politics at much higher rates. They further embed this book within what they label a vicious cycle of political alienation, which involves the declining political sophistication of the young, their waning electoral participation, and their insufficient of representation in office. Empirically, the authors combine a global focus with in-depth studies, discussing the country-level, party-level, and individual-level factors that bar young adults’ entry to positions of political power. This is the first comprehensive book on youth representation and it has relevance for those broadly interested in issues of representation, democracy, inequality, and comparative politics

The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Meta-Analysis of Structural Factors

In this meta-analysis, we summarize the results of 48 peer-reviewed articles on the radical right-wing vote in Western Europe. These results come from 48 peer-reviewed articles published from January 1990 until October 2017. We use the following inclusion criteria, the selected articles must focus on Western Europe, they must have the vote share of one or several radical right-wing parties as the dependent variable, and at least one structural variable as the independent variable. We find that more than 20 different structural variables have been tested. Most of them, like unemployment, reflect mitigate results in explaining the electoral support for radical right-wing parties. For others, like immigration, the statistical significance and direction of the relationship seem to be highly dependent on the type of proxies used. In fact, only a few variables, such as crime rates and the district magnitude seem to have a consistent effect on the vote share for radical right-wing parties

‘Birds of a feather’? Assessing the prevalence of anti-immigration attitudes among the far right electorate

This article focuses on the prevalence of anti-immigration attitudes among the far-right electorate. Drawing on the distinction between the predictive power of immigration concerns, and the question of how widespread these concerns are among the far-right voter pool, we proceed in two steps. First, we assess the extent to which anti-immigration attitudes are a necessary condition for voting far right; and second we examine whether far right voters with different levels of anti-immigration attitudes exhibit similar individual and attitudinal characteristics. Using data from the 8th wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) we find that, surprisingly, anti-immigration attitudes are not a necessary condition for voting for the far right as approximately one third of far-right voters have no concerns over immigration. We further show that far-right voters with different levels of immigration concerns have different profiles when it comes to other predictors of the far right-vote including ideological affinity, attachment to the EU and government satisfaction. Our contribution is significant as we suggest that there are different routes to voting for the far right by groups with different grievances, including non- immigration related