I don’t often support the VVD, the Dutch liberal-conservative party, but now I think its leader, Mark Rutte, needs a little bit support. He recently made the claim that perhaps holocaust denial should not be punishable by law. When it encourages violent in a particular case, it should be, for that specific reason, but when it is a more general claim, it should not be, because of our right to freedom of expression. I couldn’t agree more! If we allow only specific versions of history, and disallow other ones by law, we are way too close to a government writing of history similar to that in the fictional world of 1984 by George Orwell.
Right now, national clown Geert Wilders is becoming the hero of freedom of speech, because he likes to say politically incorrect things about immigrants, Muslims and the “Islamisation” of the Netherlands. We should be very careful to make a very clear distinction between freedom of speech and just being wrong. I.e. we should agree with Wilders that such things can, indeed, be said, publicly. And then we should go on and make clear why he is wrong or why his approach will only worsen the situation. But that discussion is for another day.
To be sure: I do think the holocaust happened and that it should be one of the most important lessons to be learned from history about what humans are capable of doing to each other.
May 29th, 2009
Because I have not been searching for this blog post about three times, I’ll just keep a link here. Here’s a cool online test to see where you stand in the European elections, the EU Profiler (think “Stemwijzer” for Europe). Source: Monkey Cage.
May 12th, 2009
Especially once you live abroad, it is always nice to read a really positive article about your own country. This article describes the Netherlands through the eyes of an American expat. He describes how the “socialist” state functions and why it is working so well, but he also, albeit briefly, discusses the downsides. I completely agree with both sides of his story, although he could have been more balanced by emphasizing the downsides a bit more, as they are not inconsequential.
May 6th, 2009
June 12, 2008, the Irish voted “no” in the referendum on the Department of Foreign Affairs commissioned a survey by polling company Millward Brown IMS. The polling organisation produced a report with bivariate analyses, but it was deemed useful to develop more complex multivariate analyses of the data. Last Monday a report of which I am a co-author was published:
Richard Sinnott, Johan A. Elkink, Kevin O’Rourke, James McBride, Attitudes and behaviour in the referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon, report prepared for the Department of Foreign Affairs, 6 March 2009.
March 14th, 2009
Remember the exciting primaries and presidential campaign in the US? Months of battle and debate between Clinton and Obama and Obama and McCain? So here’s our EU equivalent. Sometimes politics can be so disappointing …
January 21st, 2009
Being a good political scientist traveling to Indonesia, the second day after my arrival I dutifully bought a book on Indonesian politics. Because during the past few months I have been working on analysing the voting behaviour in the Lisbon referendum in Ireland my mind is set on electoral studies a bit more again - something I had not seriously worked on since leaving Leiden - so I bought Indonesian Electoral Behaviour: a statistical perspective by Ananta Aris, Evi N. Arifin & Leo Suryadinata. Now you should know that in this particular bookstore, most books are wrapped, so I had no way of looking inside the book. It looked like a thick book (480 pp), it was slightly pricey (well, just slightly), so, hey, it must be good, right? The disappointment that followed lead to this post …
In the first place, the authors appear to have a somewhat limited knowledge of statistics. They make remarks like “It should be noted that the Indonesian population, aged 20 and above, was 119 million in 1999. However, Liddle and Mujani’s study was based on a small sample of 2,500 individuals, and the regression analysis was based on an even smaller number of 1,100 individuals.” (p. 5) 1000 respondents is not at all that small - depending on how many different subgroups you are studying - and more importantly, the population size of Indonesia has absolutely nothing to do with this! The sample size is important for drawing statistical inferences, not the population size - a widely known fact.
I now read well over half the book, and all I have seen so far is raw data. And not even about elections - it is the independent variables that are extensively discussed. And nothing about measurement, or reliability, or quality, or relevance for the problem at hand - no, a pure and simple description of the actual data. In region X so many people live in cities, while, remarkably, in region Y only so many people live in cities. *yawn* And then the include the data - almost the entire data appears to be described in the text itself, but lets put the tables as well. Pages and pages and pages of data. The book is 480 pages, but I bet only about 80 contain actual substantive text - probably much less than that. The rest is data, pure data.
And as I said, they are entirely without critique or analytical perspective. For example, they happily describe how the Jakarta region has this unusually high level of education (ch. 3) - for Indonesian standards, that is - without mentioning at all that perhaps educated people are more likely to move to the capital than to stay in the village. Perhaps the reason for the distribution is irrelevant when explaining voting behaviour (although, I doubt it), but if you go through the hassle of explicitly describing every single data point, why not demonstrate that you actually thought about it a bit more than just reading the table itself? Or statements like: “This finding implies that the distribution of per capita income is heavier toward the districts with low per capita income” (p. 219) - surely is it not a finding to discover that income has a skewed distribution? Everybody knows that!
The political analysis is of a similar level. First for two chapters the vote distribution of the various parties is discussed - or rather, presented. There is absolutely no analysis. And then the final chapters contain regression analysis of all these results, explaining the number of votes by the number of Muslims, Javanese, poor, educated, etc. It absolutely ignores the effect of population size - in other words, if there are two districts, each with the same proportion of Muslims and the same proportion of votes for a party, but with different population sizes, their regression picks this up as a clear correlation. Perhaps because all the independent variables have this effect, so the variation in the population size should be captured by the multicollinearity between the variables, this issue is not too serious, but it still seems very odd not to study proportions instead of raw numbers.
When they split their sample to study Java separately from the other regions, they ask why it would be that the effect of the percentage of Javanese or Muslims is so much weaker than in the other regions. But surely, with an area where about 95+% of the population is Muslim, you would not expect much effect of the variation in numbers on the vote? While in the non-Java regions, the variation is much higher, so also more potential for an effect. They also make very easy comparisons of coefficients across models, despite the fact that the population sizes differ, the set of control variables differ (they dropped insignificant variables from the regression - bad habit as such), and the variance in the independent and dependent variables differ. I.e. utterly inappropriate comparisons.
When you write a book using solely aggregate statistics, such as this one, the very first concern would be the problem of ecological fallacy - drawing conclusions about individuals on the basis of aggregate data. In this book they are perfectly happy to claim that Muslims clearly voted this, or that for some party the number of Muslims was very important, but the number of non-Muslims is irrelevant (well, that’s not an example of ecological fallacy, but absolutely no idea what that is based on!), or that the Javanese in the Outer Islands clearly voted for …
On a more positive note, I should state that the data they have is actually quite interesting. And interesting to analyse statistically, as well. Their critique on using a survey of individuals is not reasonable, and such a survey would provide a lot of leverage that this data cannot provide, but the advantage of the aggregate data is that you properly cover the entire country, which with survey analysis is doubtful. But such statistical analysis should be more careful with the conclusions drawn - i.e. avoid the ecological fallacy - and it should also take population size and spatial autocorrelation into account. It would also help if not all independent variables were reduced to dummy variables - why is “ethnicity” only about “Javanese” and “religion” only about “Muslim”?
But I think the worst offense of the book is the title: this is not a statistical analysis of voting behaviour in Indonesia, as it suggests, but rather a data book cataloging a set of variables in Indonesia’s provinces and districts.
December 24th, 2008
And now that I’m blogging anyway, what is really frustrating me for quite a while already is the totally conservative direction the Netherlands has taken lately. Now they are “Dimming Amsterdam’s ‘red light’ district“, as the Economist puts it, because of the crime related to the sex industry. I will be the first to admit that the crimes related to this are horrendous and something needs to be done. But surely bringing it to the underground is the absoluut worse you can do? The New Zealand approach mentioned in the same article seems so much more sensible, and has always been the argument behind the liberal Dutch policies as well. So what suddenly changed?
And I kinda like this reputation of the Netherlands being a free-for-all with regards to drugs and sex. It should be that way!
December 8th, 2008
A majority of the Amsterdam city council would like to remove the label ‘allochtoon’, which means foreign-born, and replace it with ‘Turkish Amsterdammer’ or ‘Moroccon Amsterdammer’ *). The idea is to get rid of the negative connotation that ‘allochtoon’ now has in Dutch politics and society. But this seems such a dangerous suggestion! ‘Allochtoon’ might have a very specific, negative connotation, and you are not immediately thinking of the American professor who is now living in the Netherlands, but at least it is very straightforward to interpret - simply anyone not born from Dutch citizens (or is it on Dutch soil? 
). By labeling them according to their minority group affiliation, you open up a whole can of worms. What about people with parents from different groups? What about second and third generation? Are we going to keep them under a separate label indefinitely? I always liked the fact that you cannot reasonably call any second or third generation member an ‘allochtoon’.
Further on the motivation, the article states: “The party (PvdA) claims the word (’allochtoon’) to be outdated and argues for a more specific denotation of specific groups of people.” **) Such remarks make me happy I sent in my unsubscription as a member of the PvdA last week. We should not try to get more policies based on specific groups but rather focus on individual rights, room for individual development and enforcement of the law. It is bad enough to be talking about ‘allochtonen’ so much, but at least you can say immigrants do have specific concerns and interests, but lets not divide the entire population in specific subgroups.
*) I know “Amsterdammer” is not really correct English, but I don’t know how else to convey the Dutch similarly spelled word for a resident of Amsterdam.
**) “De partij stelde het woord achterhaald te vinden en pleitte voor een specifiekere aanduiding van bepaalde groepen personen.”
December 8th, 2008
For years now I have been writing and rewriting and rewriting my little vocab / jaevocab / yasvt application, which is a really simple vocabulary trainer. It is still super simple and without any nice features - I just rewrote it so often to have a toy to learn new languages and because I was every time unhappy again when learning new vocabulary. I’m quite happy with the latest version, though, although I have plenty of ideas for improvements.
Now it is also my first real open source project, because I wanted to see what setting up such a project is like. Because I’m generally quite a big fan of Google tools, I decided to use Google Code to host the source code. While stumbling around there I also noticed a nice simple introduction to some easy Linux tools and they have a nice search engine for computer science courses.
December 7th, 2008