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"Political science Comparative method."
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How populist attitudes scales fail to capture support for populists in power
Populist attitudes are generally measured in surveys through three necessary and non-compensatory elements of populism, namely anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manicheanism. Using Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 5 (2016–2020) data for 30 countries, we evaluate whether this approach explains voting for populist parties across countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas. We show that the existing scales of populist attitudes effectively explain voting for populists in countries where populist leaders and parties are in opposition but fail to explain voting for populist parties in countries where they are in power . We argue that current approaches assume “the elite” to mean “politicians”, thus failing to capture attitudes towards “non-political elites” often targeted by populists in office—in particular, journalists, academics/experts, bureaucrats, and corporate business leaders. The results reveal limits to the usefulness of existing survey batteries in cross-national studies of populism and emphasize the need to develop approaches that are more generalizable across political and national contexts.
Journal Article
Comparative Politics and the Synthetic Control Method
In recent years, a widespread consensus has emerged about the necessity of establishing bridges between quantitative and qualitative approaches to empirical research in political science. In this article, we discuss the use of the synthetic control method as a way to bridge the quantitative/qualitative divide in comparative politics. The synthetic control method provides a systematic way to choose comparison units in comparative case studies. This systematization opens the door to precise quantitative inference in small-sample comparative studies, without precluding the application of qualitative approaches. Borrowing the expression from Sidney Tarrow, the synthetic control method allows researchers to put \"qualitative flesh on quantitative bones.\" We illustrate the main ideas behind the synthetic control method by estimating the economic impact of the 1990 German reunification on West Germany.
Journal Article
How Many Countries for Multilevel Modeling? A Comparison of Frequentist and Bayesian Approaches
Researchers in comparative research increasingly use multilevel models to test effects of country-level factors on individual behavior and preferences. However, the asymptotic justification of widely employed estimation strategies presumes large samples and applications in comparative politics routinely involve only a small number of countries. Thus, researchers and reviewers often wonder if these models are applicable at all. In other words, how many countries do we need for multilevel modeling? I present results from a large-scale Monte Carlo experiment comparing the performance of multilevel models when few countries are available. I find that maximum likelihood estimates and confidence intervals can be severely biased, especially in models including cross-level interactions. In contrast, the Bayesian approach proves to be far more robust and yields considerably more conservative tests.
Journal Article
PRE-COLONIAL ETHNIC INSTITUTIONS AND CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT
We investigate the role of deeply rooted pre-colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries. We combine information on the spatial distribution of ethnicities before colonization with regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite images of light density at night. We document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic political centralization and regional development. This pattern is not driven by differences in local geographic features or by other observable ethnic-specific cultural and economic variables. The strong positive association between pre-colonial political complexity and contemporary development also holds within pairs of adjacent ethnic homelands with different legacies of pre-colonial political institutions.
Journal Article
No Longer Lost in Translation: Evidence that Google Translate Works for Comparative Bag-of-Words Text Applications
Automated text analysis allows researchers to analyze large quantities of text. Yet, comparative researchers are presented with a big challenge: across countries people speak different languages. To address this issue, some analysts have suggested using Google Translate to convert all texts into English before starting the analysis (Lucas et al. 2015). But in doing so, do we get lost in translation? This paper evaluates the usefulness of machine translation for bag-of-words models—such as topic models. We use the europarl dataset and compare term-document matrices (TDMs) as well as topic model results from gold standard translated text and machine-translated text. We evaluate results at both the document and the corpus level. We first find TDMs for both text corpora to be highly similar, with minor differences across languages. What is more, we find considerable overlap in the set of features generated from human-translated and machine-translated texts. With regard to LDA topic models, we find topical prevalence and topical content to be highly similar with again only small differences across languages. We conclude that Google Translate is a useful tool for comparative researchers when using bag-of-words text models.
Journal Article
Gender disparities in high-quality research revealed by Nature Index journals
The present study aims to elucidate the state of gender equality in high-quality research by analyzing the representation of female authorships in the last decade (from 2008 to 2016).
Based on the Gendermetrics platform, 293,557 research articles from 54 journals listed in the Nature Index were considered covering the categories Life Science, Multidisciplinary, Earth & Environmental and Chemistry. The core method was the combined analysis of the proportion of female authorships and the female-to-male odds ratio for first, co- and last authorships. The distribution of prestigious authorships was measured by the Prestige Index.
29.8% of all authorships and 33.1% of the first, 31.8% of the co- and 18.1% of the last authorships were held by women. The corresponding female-to-male odds ratio is 1.19 (CI: 1.18-1.20) for first, 1.35 (CI: 1.34-1.36) for co- and 0.47 (CI: 0.46-0.48) for last authorships. Women are underrepresented at prestigious authorships compared to men (Prestige Index = -0.42). The underrepresentation accentuates in highly competitive articles attracting the highest citation rates, namely, articles with many authors and articles that were published in highest-impact journals. More specifically, a large negative correlation between the 5-Year-Impact-Factor of a journal and the female representation at prestigious authorships was revealed (r(52) = -.63, P < .001). Women publish fewer articles compared to men (39.0% female authors are responsible for 29.8% of all authorships) and are underrepresented at productivity levels of more than 2 articles per author. Articles with female key authors are less frequently cited than articles with male key authors. The gender-specific differences in citation rates increase the more authors contribute to an article. Distinct differences at the journal, journal category, continent and country level were revealed. The prognosis for the next decades forecast a very slow harmonization of authorships odds between the two genders.
Journal Article
Evaluating voter perceptions of political party similarity: A mixed-method study of party positions in Taiwan
This study examines voter perceptions of political party similarity using data from a validated online survey conducted in Taiwan. It primarily collects qualitative data through open-ended questions, complemented by Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and feature matching techniques. The findings reveal that party competition in Taiwan is multidimensional, extending beyond traditional blue-green and unification-independence divides. Notably, local Taiwanese issues and social concerns have become increasingly prominent among emerging third parties. Feature matching results show that 22.53% of respondents clearly distinguish the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), while 11.42% identify the New Power Party (NPP), differentiating it from the pan-green camp as part of the emerging third force. Taiwan’s unique political context, shaped by democratization, cross-strait tensions, and the rise of influential third parties, provides valuable insights for comparative politics. The study offers an analytical framework for understanding party system evolution in emerging democracies and deepens our grasp of how identity politics and diverse political engagement transform political competition. This framework enables scholars to systematically capture complex voter perceptions in multi-party systems and facilitates comparative analysis across political environments marked by identity-based polarization and increasing party plurality.
Journal Article
Electoral Engineering
From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ?electoral engineering?. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. The study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contracting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define electoral incentives facing parties, politicians and citizens. By changing these rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior.
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